pic dump 6: my belt andyesterday's (6/24) walk to Olympia

First, two shots of the holes I've punched into my belt:





I punched another hole into the belt (not pictured) just two nights ago. The thing fits now, but it's tight enough to make my hips even more chunkily feminine than they were.

What follows now is yesterday's walk.









When you move past the 'brary and tennis court into the woods leading to the residence halls, you see the Ent:





The following picture depicts one of the most gratifying things about this region: people here understand how to build and use roundabouts. In DC, which was designed by a Frenchman (which means the citizens and later city designers really ought to know better), we have no clue how to handle roundabouts (ronds-points in French; don't ask me why they don't say points ronds).



Roundabouts, when done correctly, have only two explicit and easy-to-remember traffic rules: (1) traffic always circulates counterclockwise, so you always turn right to enter the roundabout, circulate leftward, and exit rightward; and (2) the cars inside the roundabout have the right of way. Simple. And much easier to manage than four-way stop intersections (though I've noticed many of those around these parts as well).

Below, you see I've found the Batmobile (or the San Francisco version of it, judging by the frilly crap hanging from the rear view mirror):



Below: Taco Bell and Pizza Hut caught having sex with each other! Here's a picture of their illicit union:



We have such fast food fusions in the DC-Metro area, but they're usually confined to college campuses.

Brother Luke, who's familiar with the east coast, had mentioned Long John Silver's, but that produced blank stares. Mention a chain called Skipper's, though...



Boundaries:



Barely twenty yards later:



I was surprised that St. Martin's is that close to Olympia. The Olympia city limit is barely a mile or so from the campus entrance.

This is annoying: a road whose name isn't a proper noun, but merely a generic term:



I once worked for two weeks as a telemarketer; this was years and years ago, back when I was stupider than I am today. The company had a shady aura, as was evident in its name: Dealer Broker Trust. What the hell kind of name is that? I quit soon after joining once I realized that the positive response rate to my cold calls was under half a percent.

My route from the campus took me first to College Way, then to Pacific Avenue, then to State Avenue. Along Pacific, I saw:



The romanization tips us off to the fact that the place is Korean, because what you're seeing is the Korean pronunciation of those characters. "Myeong" (or "myong," or "myung") is "ming" in Chinese. I don't know what it is in Japanese. "Myeong" means "bright" or "brilliant." The "sae" is a character found in the pair "sae-gye," or "world," so I'm pretty sure "myeong sae" is "bright world."

Our first glimpse of the capitol:



I think this building houses a local newspaper, The Olympian:



We're heading steadily downhill and closer to both the capitol and the water. Cool painting, bad dumpsters:



Below, we're downtown and moving uphill toward the capitol:



I think the stone below marks the spot where Lewis and Clark stopped walking, looked at each other, shouted, "We're fucking DONE!" and then exploded in a shower of blood, bone, and meat.



Monument to John Rankin Rogers, two-time governor of Washington:



Below: a BBQ joint whose smell had impressed me the previous day:



We're at the capitol! Note the wacky tree, all puffed out on the [our] left side. There were weird trees all over the grounds there.



Getting closer to the capitol and the Temple of Justice (not visible here, but sitting across from the capitol's front entrance):



Modern art tribute of some sort plus modern, stylized totem pole:



Another weird tree. This one looked like a brain that had sustained a blow from an axe:



Memorial to the fallen of WWI:



Closeup:



And the back of the monument's pediment pedestal (thanks, Charles) says...



The capitol building was too large for me and my modest camera to encompass, especially from up close. I tilted the camera to get this top-to-bottom shot. Sorry if it makes you dizzy:



Behold-- the Temple of Justice! I keep expecting superheroes to fly out of it.



Another dedication:



The following shot shows you an obelisk and, across the street, the other part of Capitol Campus:



But what's on the obelisk? Why...



The following pic shows a fountain that is supposedly a replica of the Tivoli Fountain in Italy.



Another shot of Capitol Campus:



This should be self-explanatory:



Below: the back of the Korean War Veterans Memorial. Today is 6/25, the date marking the beginning of the 1950-53 conflict in Korea. Maybe take some time out to remember those who fought, and to celebrate how far along Korea has come since those days.



When I saw this wall from a distance, I could have sworn it was a rock-climbing wall.



The Korean War Veterans Memorial, wide shot:



Closeup:



The Forgotten War (that's what it says in Korean, too):



Flowers at the monument:



These rocks mean something, but I don't know what:



A touching poem dedicated to those who fought:



[NB: If the image is cut off, right-click on it and do a "view image" or "view picture" command. This works for all such images, by the way.]

I wonder how well the English and Korean texts match up in this one, especially given the language about North Korea:



A closeup of the Korean soldier:



A closeup of the American soldier:



A footbridge that leads back across the street to the capitol side:



A shot of the nearby inlet. This was taken on the switchbacking path that lies behind the Temple of Justice and leads down to the water.



A sign about the Olympia-Yashiro friendship bridge, which extends 4th Avenue across the river:



This is the little, sculpted park uphill from that bridge that contains the world's weirdest park bench:



Another shot of the park:



As you see, it's called the Park of the Seven Oars.



More nifty landscaping at POTSO:



Voilà! Here at last is the world's weirdest park bench. You might not be able to tell, but the bench itself is tiny. The thing looked singularly unable to support my weight, so I didn't try sitting on it.



The eponymous oars:



You see how salmon figure prominently in the mindset of coastal Washingtonians:



Looking back from the park, across the river to the capitol:



A shot of the inlet's marina:



You know, if someone had asked me where I'd like to go for vacation, my first thought would never have been the Olympia/Lacey region. Now, though, I'd answer differently. The entire distance I've traveled since Blaine has been well worth the trip. There's a lot to see and do here. The only thing is that you have to put up with the often-gloomy weather, but that gloom is easy to forget when you have a string of bright and happy days, as the past few days have been.

I took the following pic mainly because I liked the clouds.



The following pic takes us back downtown toward the capitol and all that. I took this street pic because, whenever cars rolled over those bricks, the sound reminded me of the noise of horses galloping-- but sped up about five times. Horses on cocaine, then.



Ah, love. Sometimes it happens between a tall woman and a stubby man. (Not in Korea, though, where almost every college girl I talked to said she'd never marry a man shorter than she was, no matter how kind, smart, rich, and handsome he might be.)



A weird mixture of Japanese art and Arthur C. Clarke:



I'm dying to know what animals are on this totem pole, which stands at the foot of one of the two bridges crossing the water close to the capitol:



After circling the end of the inlet twice, I headed back up to the capitol and saw the Vietnam memorial:



Another shot:



Flags:



A dedication:



More flags:



Crossing over to the Capitol Campus again, I was freaked out by how quintessentially Washington, DC the building architecture was:



Upon leaving Capitol Campus, I saw this strange, shady grove of boxed-in trees:



On my way back uphill toward Lacey, I had to get a shot of this kinky representation of clouds cheerfully eating each other's butts:



Thought I was joking? It even says, "I eat clouds"!!



And here, at long last, is the Yoda prank:



A closeup of the old guy:



Those traffic signal buttons usually look like this:



Below, you see Happy Teriyaki III, the place that serves the ever-mysterious "happy trio."



Finally, I took this pic of Han's Burgers, not far from the entrance to SMU. I wanted to capture this sign because, if I'm not mistaken, it's sacrilegious to refer to Philly's pride as a "Philly sub." It's a Philly cheesesteak, Mr. Han!



If you do a Googlefight between Philly cheesesteak and Philly sub, the latter wins, but this is because the phrases aren't wrapped in quotation marks. When you put quotation marks around those phrases and do the Googlefight, you get zero results for both. But if you wrap the phrases in quotation marks and use good old Google, you discover that "Philly sub" nets you a little over 6,000 results, whereas "Philly cheesesteak" nets you 215,000. Slam.

So! That was yesterday's walk. In a moment, I'll give you distance calculations and will add the update to this post.

UPDATE: Whoa-- not as far as I thought. 39.2 miles. I've made up the "cheated" distance, but only just barely.


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