Is there a Ghost in my house?

Have you ever seen anything you just can't explain. Heard something you can't explain either. I have!

I'm not one to believe in ghost, as a matter of fact I can usually think of ways that those ding dongs on those ghost hunting shows could be misinterpreting their findings.

Here are a few funny things that have happened in the past few years. One night in our old cabin in the mountains, the cute girlfriend and I had just gone to sleep. It was her birthday that day and we were pretty tired.

It is funny I just mentioned this little incident to the cute girlfriend tonight....lol

Anyways, we had been asleep maybe 10 min, when something weird woke us up. It was very weird and something I had never experienced before. The best way I can describe it is that a huge charge of static flew over us and then hit the TV. It was an older tube type TV. It crackled like it was going to turn on but it never did. Here is the best part...the TV wasn't even plugged into the wall.

I asked the cute girlfriend what the hell that was. In a half asleep voice she said it was probably her mother coming by to say hi. I can not tell you how interesting it was to feel a charge go through a room like that. The TV crackling only confirmed that I wasn't dreaming. The thing with cute girlfriend saying it was her mom while she was almost asleep was also interesting.

That old cabin was a funny place anyways. Cold drafts running through the place, the feeling of something moving the hairs on your body.

The economy was crap back then and I had to let the cabin go back to the bank and we moved to an apartment closer to the cute girlfriends work. This place was brand new and we were the first people in this unit.

We were there a couple of months when a new something happened. I was in the bathroom shaving and I hear this heavy sigh. It was like it was someone was standing right next to me. I asked the cute girlfriend who was reading way up in the front bedroom if she had just sighed...she said no.

I spent several weeks looking for things in the apartment that could make that noise. I checked the toilet, it made weird noises when you flushed it...not that. I stood next to the Fridge...it made a weird hushing noise when it shut off but it was very quiet. I checked the drawers, the doors, the blinds, anything that moved. I could not replicate that noise.

Not long after that I started to feel that someone was sitting on the edge of my bed as I was just about to go to sleep. I kind of put this off as just me being at the edge of sleep and I was dreaming it. My cat would go sit in that spot after it would happen.

Cute girlfriend and I would trade off sleeping in the front bedroom there because the bed up there was a little uncomfortable. One nite I had this dream that something like a face was pushing in and out of my vision and it was trying to get inside. I had it happen a second night up there and started sleeping on the couch instead...dream stopped. I'm not saying it wasn't a dream. Just a disturbing dream but it is what I experienced.

A couple of months after this I saw something. This was the first shadow not attached to a person I have ever seen. We were walking in with groceries one nite and I was carrying most of them in my hands and was going to the counter in the middle of the room to set them down. I was looking at the wall across the room. I saw the shadow of a little round head move across the wall.

It had only been a brief view because cute girlfriend was right behind me and had turned on the lights in the room. I turned the lights off and moved over by the couch, and recreate the shadow with my hands with the light from the streetlights and the digital clocks and LED's that lit up the room. I spooked her a little when I told her I just saw the shadow of like a little boy.

I spent several nights trying to recreate the shadow. It didn't have pointy ears so it wasn't the cat although the cat came from over near there to greet us when we came in. the size of the shadow from my recreations could only be made by something passing in front of the couch. My shadow at the kitchen and front door area where huge on that wall.

I went round and round on the next thing. I started having a tapping noise on the hardwood floors. there would be two taps on the floor on the other side of my computer desk. I would get up and look, nothing was there. I thought it was just me then the cute girlfriend mentioned she had heard some weird tapping behind her sometimes.

I got lucky one day and I was on the other side of the room sweeping and I heard the tap. From where I was standing I could hear the kids in the adjoining apartment bouncing a ball. It was making the right noise.
My guess was that the sound traveled under that floating hardwood floor and stopped at where there was weight on it and that is where our desks were.

Those neighbor kids were rambunctious and would slam closet door and shake the house. They were good kids though and always said hi and yes ma'am and no sir to everyone. So we never mentioned how the house would shake at night as the kids slid those closet doors closed....grin

It was nice when I lived in the 100 year old American Four Square, in North Dakota, that nothing happened while I was there. It was kind of eerie when we first got the house. The down stairs was completely gutted and down to the studs.

One interesting thing did happen while at the Four Square. When you walked down the stairs as you hit the bottom it would sound like someone was right behind you coming down the stairs. It was easy to debunk though. The cladding on the stairs would creak back into place after you stepped on it. It made sense, that poor old oak cladding had been under water for weeks and was probably warped and putting weight on it would make it flex. It was just funny that it would be creaking two or three steps after you took your weight off it.

In September of 2012 we moved into this old house next to a river here in the Longview/Kelso area of Washington State. This house was built in 1928 or so. A couple of years ago the river in the back yard backed up do to a log jam against a bridge south of here. the basement was flooded. It has been rebuilt and the place remodeled.

I was still working in North Dakota when we moved up here. I would hear from the cute girlfriend and she would say that this house makes a lot of noises. It wasn't until I got here and stayed in the house for a while that I started noticing things.

This is a good time to talk about debunking. I'm a curious type of fellow and want to know how things work. If I see something or hear something I want to know what it is. The world does plenty of things that we can't see, and interacts with thing in weird ways. Just air movement alone is a very funny thing.

Warm air rises and cold air sinks, this is the general rule of things but air in a room can be a very complex. small things can change the flow in a room. Wind pushing into a room from a leaky window can push little bubbles of cool or warm air into a room and it may take a while for that bubble to dissipate and sink or rise. I was sitting near a window at our old cabin one time. I had the wood burning stove heating the house, but it was kind of wet and blustery outside. A big gust happened outside and I felt this little bubble of cold air near my arm. I felt it come in next to me and linger there.

This was one of those "Cold Spots" those ghost ding dongs talk about. I could define it. I gently felt around it with my hands and could feel this bubble of air, cold in the middle and warm all around it. It wasn't a ghost I felt it get blown in through those nasty old aluminum windows that were on my cabin. It was just a bubble of air and it just hovered there next to me and after a time the room warmed it up and it disappeared. Not that the damned wind didn't blow some more cold air in.

Have you ever seen a mist appear out of nowhere. I have. I walked down the stairs in that North Dakota Four Square one morning and saw three of them. It was as cold as hell outside that morning, like -20 cold. Right in the center of the three windows I could see cold coming in through the glass and slowly start to sink into the room and form a mist.

Now picture the bubble of air described above and picture a bubble of cold air moving into a warm humid room. The moisture in the room would condense in that cool bubble and form a mist. I felt cold air coming off the wall last night as a matter of fact and a cold bubble of air was near my face. If the wall is cold it will cool the air near it and start to sink. Once you know this I can usually say a cold spot is just that a cold spot.

Debunking noises. Just like the "sigh/breath" I heard down in our apartment in California I will look for a noise that happens in the house. I never could find anything that could replicate that noise. Now this old house has a lot of noises.

There is this gentle knock that happens from time to time, right under the my feet at the desk I'm typing at this very minute. The first time it happened I actually went to the door to see if someone was there. What makes that noise?

In this house we have two sump pumps that go off a lot. We have a lot of ground water under this house and they go off many times a day, and as they clunk on and off the pipes that carry the water bang against the walls they are attached to. Alas that noise is not the knock. I kept that knock in my memory for a long time, and was at the right place at the right time down in the TV room. I had just used the down stairs restroom and when the tank got done filling it shut off and I heard the knock.

Water flowing through a pipe doesn't like being blocked all of the sudden, just like shutting off a valve fast the water has momentum and pressure is built up and bang you have some water hammering. No ghost communicating with you in Morse Code on the walls.

Seeing things out of the corner of your eyes and shadows. These thing happen a lot here in this house. I discredit most of them. My bifocals cause weird effects and bend light and distort things near the lens edges. Also our brains are kind of wired to see things out of the corners of our eyes anyways as a protective mechanism. Also according to my eye doctor those things that are floating in our eyes are proteins and they can confuse the eye at times. I analyze what I see in this house a lot. We already think we have a ghost in the house but I'm not going to let my imagination run wild with this and think everything out of the corner of my eye to be our wayward spirit.

Shadows. Car lights going by cause shadows to move, and as mentioned above our brains are hard wired to see things like this and try to identify it as a threat or not. I have seen a few unidentifiable shadows here in this old house. One night I saw one almost head on and not out of the corner of my eye. I started to ask the cute girlfriend if she had seen it and she told me to stop because the kids where in the room. I guess she saw it too. From time to time I see shadows in the bedroom at night. It is interesting to say the least.

We had the cute girlfriend's daughter and her three kids with us here for almost a year. She told us that on a few occasions she had seen a shadow looking in on her from her bedroom door. She had thought it was me at first, but it wasn't. She said it creeped her out.

I have seen a shadow pass in front of the TV in the TV room. It was dark at the time, and light from the electronic equipment was the only light source in the room. Something moved from one side of the room to the other. Can't explain that one.

I try to debunk before I go straight for "The Ghost Did It!" One day I was here at the computer when there was this loud squeekie/thunk type noise outside the computer room. I spent 20 minutes wiggling things and swinging doors to see if hinges made that noise. I think it was like Christmas day that I discovered what it was that made the noise. It was a door, a door I had checked on. We had stored presents in there and when I went in to get them the door was stuck and it made that noise when I opened it. This just made the mystery a new problem. How did this door open. It wasn't windy the day the door made the noise and all the windows had been closed. the air flow from the heater/AC flows out of the room not it. What the hell opened that door.

We save our aluminum cans here and store them in trash bags in a corner. From time to time you will hear one of them fall inside the bag. This is probably gravity doing its job and making thing move to the ground, but those bags are normally closed tight. I'm going to give gravity the benefit of the doubt here. Its just that in that corner a lot of thing happen up stairs and down stairs.

Why does the flat screen in our bedroom make noises, When it is OFF!
Ok those thing can make noise when they are cooling down. The screens get pretty warm when you run them, touch on sometime you will see. I can see it making contracting noises as it cools. Fine, then why is it at 2 AM that it makes crackle noises? It took me a while to figure out how to replicate the noise but that just made it more mysterious.

This bedroom is actually in the basement and the TV sits in the corner right under where those cans are stored. Now you would figure that a basement would have concrete floors but this bedroom doesn't. I'm not sure how this wood floor is secured under the carpet but it has a lot of give to it. I walked by the TV once and put my foot right next to its stand, a electric fireplace, and it crackled just like it does most nights. It crackles like someone is standing there next to the TV.

Cute girlfriend says she hears someone walking on the carpet at night. This carpet is rather noisy. You can hear carpet backing rubbing against the foam pad underneath it. In the quiet of the night it is rather loud. She looks up to see if I'm coming and no one is there. This might be dismissed because she might be half asleep when she hears this but it is hard to say. She says she hears it. I know that TV makes noise every night after it has cooled and I'm wide awake looking at it when it happens...grin

This was kind of weird for a short time we had a cat here and it use to play with me as I would come up the stairs. One morning I was playing with the beast and I was trying to get a picture of him to post on Facebook. All of the sudden the cat who had been intently looking at me was now looking over my head at something. The Cat was sitting on the main floor of the house and I was on the stairway landing almost into the basement, so the cat and I were eye to eye. I looked up at what he could be looking at and nothing was there. It had his full attention and his eyes were locked on it. It was like he was looking at something that was peeking around the corner from the kitchen. It was very weird. Here is the pic I took he is looking up at something

The weirdest of all. There is something that I have seen that I can not explain. I have seen it three times here in the house. The first time it was something out of the corner of my eye near the basement backdoor. I dismissed it as some light play in my glasses. Then one evening we were watching something in the TV room and right next to me I saw the phenomena again. I think I had a John Wayne movie on. Right off the edge of my glasses I see what best can be describes as a scintillating distorted wavy line standing next to me. I didn't want to move fast so I turned my head slowly to get it in focus with my lenses. I didn't turn my head to far, more my eyes. There was something there. I looked back to the TV and then turned my head to look in the direction of the distortion, but it was gone.

I saw this type of distortion again a couple of weeks ago. I was hear at the computer typing a story and I felt something moving some arm hairs near my wrist. This type of crap happens all the time and I usually dismiss it as standard body hair movement. Like if you have been laying on it and you get up you can sometimes feel it moving and standing up no longer compressed against your body.

Down and just slightly to the right I saw that distortion again. It was about the size of a finger tip. I looked down to it and it disappeared. Very weird seeing something like that and you can't explain it.

This is a very active house. Even as I type this there is a noise over by the upstairs bedrooms.

It wasn't too long after I got back to Washington state that the cute girlfriend said that one of her employees lived right across the street and had told her that an older gentleman had died in this house. That can make your spook level go up a little.

It was kind of funny when we told our landlord about her other renter. She looked a little weird and kept saying "Don't tell me this, don't tell me this". We told her we weren't concerned so she shouldn't be.

Is there a ghost in our house. I have no idea! Is there weird things that happen in this house absolutely! Do I want to make contact with any spirits that might reside here at this old house, no I do not! I don't think getting into the world of the dead is a good idea anyways. My closest interaction with the weirdness in the house is to yell down stairs to say not to make so much noise down there.

Is it spooky? I'm not so far. Cute girlfriend can be a little jumpy at times, but she hasn't said "we have to move now!" just yet. If we do have a spirit in this house it has been pretty benign as far as haunting might go. If some poor middle aged heart attack victim is here with us and doesn't know that he is dead or is afraid to move on well there might not be to much I can do about that.

If the activity gets out of hand we have plenty of options. I'm just curious for now. I will watch and debunk and learn. I'm going down to the basement to check on a noise typo at everyone later.

Too Much Christmas?

It is January now and I have 95% of Christmas put away. There are still some lights on the roof that I need to take down, but I need a tall later that I don't have to get at them. I would keep them lit until March but since I put them up way early this last season I unplugged them.

I love Christmas. I love the light displays, and the joy of the season. Right after Thanksgiving I can't wait to hear my first Christmas song, and always hope it is one of the instrumental versions of "Sleigh Ride". The Christmas shopping I'm not all that fond of, but the togetherness of Family is important to me and I want to gather with as many of them as I can at this time of year.

The Cute Girlfriend has Grand Children that I love dearly and have earned the title "Papa" from them, which warms my heart wonderfully. I'm blessed with a loving significant other that is totally a Christmas Light Addiction Enabler. She will come home with new stuff for me to put in the yard or on the house. Our light displays are more than some people would want but less than some of the more fanatical enthusiasts.

I kid people that I want enough lights on the house that the Astronauts on the International Space Station can see it as they pass over, but I know that might turn our nice neighbors against us.

This year was my first year decorating this house we are in. Last year I was in North Dakota working so I couldn't put up lights. I started early this year. It has not been a year of good fortune for us, and my feelings on the economy and our political climate prompted to start spreading the Christmas cheer early. My work had been so slow during October, November, and December for that matter I had plenty of time to put up lights.

I usually put up lights the week before we went up north for Turkeyday to visit my folks. This year I wanted to get a real early start. I really needed some Christmas cheer in 2013. On November 10th I started to put up lights.

I posted this on Facebook and got a few..."Already?"..from some of my friends. I was on a mission though. I just felt that I needed to spread the Holiday cheer, now! We went shopping and found some more displays and lights.

It was about this time that I started to notice from my window here at my computer desk that all the cars that normally race by were slowing down to take a look. Local parents with their kids would stand at our fence and look a the lights. I was starting to think my mission was accomplished.

One night I noticed the UPS man slow as he passed the house. We have a very low bridge up the street so trucks like a UPS truck have to turn around and go out the way they came in. I saw him slow like he was looking for addresses. I went to the front door to see if he had something for us. He turned around and stopped down the street for a few seconds then came up and stopped at our gate. He stepped out and said he didn't have anything for us but he was enjoying our lights and thanked us. This was still before Thanksgiving, mission accomplished.

Alas I wasn't done yet. The cute girlfriend bought something huge for the front yard.

This is not a great pic of this Frosted Ferris Wheel, the lights blink and twinkle which made it so the poor camera on my phone could not focus. This thing is 6' tall and boy does the wind catch it!...lol

We had a few more lights to put up, and I got the cool Ferris Wheel up in the yard.

The cool thing or maybe not so cool thing privacy wise, is that the back yard can be seen from across the river. This worked out well because we bought this funny little inflatable Santa in a boat which would fit in well on the River side of the house.

I strung lights on the gazebo too. I could have done the windows on the back of the house but I think I was taxing this poor old houses electrical system as it was.

Here is a huge warning. For those of us who like putting up Christmas lights, after you have them all plugged in and lit. Feel the cords coming out of the socket. If that cord is at all warm to the touch you need to pull some lights off and reroute power from some other source.

This house was originally built in 1928 and although most of the electrical has been updated it is still limited.
I had to run power from the back of the house to the front. If you do this you need thicker gauge electrical cords because of the distance. Distance can equal electrical resistance with small electrical cords so be careful.

We found out one night that one of the circuits in the basement was running a lot more that we thought. Poor cute girlfriend wanted to take the chill off of the TV room and turned on her electric fireplace and POP. I unplugged the lights so she could run her heater.

Timers can be important, I found some that have a photovoltaic switch that turns the lights on at dusk and then will stay on for a few hours and turn off.

The lights were having there affect more and more cars were driving by would slow down to a crawl and view our display. It warms the heart when you can spread the Holiday cheer like that.

We had found these cute Christmas cartoon character sidewalk lights at Big Lots. I had this idea of making a cute little display with them. It was the Peanuts characters skating. I wanted to make it look like they were skating on a frozen pond. So I mixed some old decorations with some new and this is what I came up with.

I thought it turned out pretty good.

Christmas lights can be a crazy affair down in California, with whole neighborhoods decked out in lights. Not so much here in the Pacific Northwest as far as I can tell. There is one house here in our town that was not to be out done. There is a Sheriff's vehicle normally parked in the driveway of this home so I commend this officer for his Christmas spirit. His display is a computerized light extravaganza. Complete with musical accompaniment. There is a sign in his yard telling you to tune your radio to a certain FM radio frequency and then you will hear what the light display is timed to. It is pretty cool. I don't think I would go that far but it is very cool.

One of the things that is popular in this area during the Christmas season is at the Portland Zoo. Known around here as Zoo Lights and is usually done on the Zoo's train that is in the park. This year the train was out of order so it was a walk through display. The lights of course are animal based but it is pretty cool.

It is very popular in this part of Oregon and Washington and can be very crowded at times. This night it was not as busy. We went twice during the Holidays, each time taking a different group of Grand Kids. The displays can be very elaborate. This dragon one puffs rings down over someone standing below it.

I loved this Lighthouse one.

The Animated displays are very nice. Down by the Elephants there is a display with birds of pray swooping down , Hippos popping up out of the water, Lions chasing Gazelles, even Alligators opening and closing their mouths.

 

 

Made a YouTube video of our trip to the Portland Zoo Lights above showing the Animation.

We had all the Grand Kids over for Christmas and a large Christmas, Turkey dinner with all the trimmings. As always the Twice Baked Potatoes were the hit.

One of the hard things about the Holidays, especially if you are counting your carbs, is the sweets. We bought a whole bunch of pies. Pumpkin, Dutch Apple, Chocolate Cream, Key Lime pies all stacked up on the counter calling out the amount of carbs they contain and then our names. I had a huge hunk of Key Lime Pie Christmas night and had a sugar rush that knocked my socks off. I was sparing on the amount of pie I ate and kept the carb intake as low as possible this season and didn't gain any pounds. It took me most of a week to finish off the last of those pies. One hard sugar rush a day...grin

I didn't get to see my children this Christmas. Work has been horribly slow so there was no money in the wallet for that...sniff

New Years was just like the 4th of July here. Cute girlfriend had to work early New Years Day so we went to bed at 9pm and were waken by the firing of canons and fireworks at Midnight. It sounded like the shelling of Fort Sumter. It is funny how the people in the crappy trailer park down the street can't afford to put paint on their homes but can afford hundreds of dollars of fireworks...sigh

I'm ready for 2014 maybe a better job will come my way. I have a lot of applications out right now.

One last thing. In October of 2012 on a joke I started a story for the cute girlfriend. It was suppose to be a couple of pages and be ready for the 2012 Christmas season. It took me well over a year and 84,000 words but I finished what now can be called a Novel for my girlfriend on January 5th 2014. Seeing as I haven't written anything like this before and never did well in college composition I have a lot of correcting to do now on my story to get rid of the bad grammar and run on sentences. For those of you that have read my posts here I'm sure understand what I'm talking about....lol

Thanksgiving in Placerville California

I started this posting the day after Thanksgiving it is about time I finish it!

My Father lives in California near Placerville. We have been going there for Thanksgiving for a while now. We were all from Southern California originally, but back in the 90's they moved way up there into the hills above Sacramento. For the Past few years we have been enjoying the Christmas Festivities in Placerville's old town section.

The sad part of this is that my dad lives alone now. My mom passed away a year and a half ago which makes this all a little hard. Mom had everything ready for us when we got there so we could get a nice family Thanksgiving dinner ready to be made. The last few years she would let me help make the meal. Momma didn't always let other people in her kitchen. I was still working in North Dakota last year and we had just moved up to Washington State so only I could make it down there to be with dad on his first Thanksgiving without my mom.  It couldn't have been sadder going to the restaurants that Mom and Dad use to go to and the wait staff asking him where his wife was.

Placerville Ca. is the county seat of Eldorado County California, and is one of the epicenters of the 1849 Gold Rush. It is about 15 miles from Sutter's Mill where the California Gold Rush got started. There are tons of old towns and gold mine camps around with names on the map for places like, Fiddletown, Whiskytown, Pokertown and one of my favorites Volcano. I blogged about that town a couple of years ago.

If you are into Antiques Placerville has quite a few shop to look at. Being the nostalgia junkies we are the cute girlfriend and I love this place.

Our trip here was a little rough. Left our home in Southern Washington about 5pm and got stuck in horrible traffic in Portland Oregon. That set us behind and we had to spend the night in Grants Pass Oregon. I have not had a lot of luck with Motel 6 and from this point on Tom Bodet can turn off the light for me because I won't be going back to them for a while. We get a room at the Grants Pass Motel six and it is like grand central station there. When we got in the room the heater was on and the room was around 90 Deg. and the place took for ever to cool down. You could also hear ever bit of noise passing by our door, and at 4am when the toilet in the room backed up causing a nightmare we had had enough of them and left.

We did get to have Breakfast at one of our favorite diners.  We try to stop at any Black Bear Diners that we see in our travels. They have them all up and down the west coast. Kind of a rustic Americana set up inside these diners that we get a kick out of.

Our poor truck does not sit well for the cute girlfriend so we had to stop a few times to let her stretch her legs. At one stop we walked out with an extra 6 bucks from the Casino we stopped at. We made it to Placerville around 1pm Turkeyday and had lunch with my dad. Later about dusk we went down to a local restaurant and had a Turkey dinner.

The Day after Thanksgiving is fun time up there in those hills. After the gold miners left someone started planting apple orchards up on all the hills. Later some other Entrepreneurs started growing pine trees and vineyards. The pine trees of course are Christmas trees. This area is Known as Apple Hill and it seams that the people of the Sacramento area have the tradition of coming up the day after Thanksgiving and getting a fresh cut Christmas Tree and stopping at these Apple Orchards. Some of the large Apple Orchards have Crafts sellers in tents around their apple shops and it looks like a big fair.

A couple years back we started counting the Christmas Trees on top of cars (some have 2 or 3 trees on their car roofs), we hadn't clued in on all the Christmas Tree Farms up there on Apple Hill yet.  It started out as a gag of sorts and turned into a fun game. My son use to go up there with us, so I texted him with the word "one" to see if he got the joke. He didn't....lol, he got it when I told him about the Christmas Trees up by my dads.

I found this shingle at one of the shops on Apple Hill.

 

On the day after Thanksgiving the town of Placerville closes down Main Street and has a huge tree lighting ceremony. They have a large pine tree across from the Court House and main street is filled with people to watch the lighting of the tree. It is not really a spectacular tree like some of the gaudy things that you see in the malls, but it is very Christmasy.

The old part of Placerville has some very old buildings in it. They really play up the old west for Christmas.  They have this old horse drawn stage coach that they decorate for the Holidays with two pine trees strapped on top destined for some old west homes parlor for their Christmas Tree and usually some modern Christmas lights twinkling on the back of the luggage cover. There are a few people that get into the spirit of the old west and come to town all Cowboy'd up. There are caramel corn booths and face painting booths.
All the shops are packed with people. The old General Store/Hardware Store is a very cool place and we spend almost an hour in there alone.

We were going to bring my dad along with us but he bowed out. It was packed full of people so he probably wouldn't have liked that. Just going from shop to shop was like a salmon going up stream.

Look what showed up in Dad's yard the day after Thanksgiving, I'm telling you they know when to hide!

If you are ever in the Placerville area during Thanksgiving do go to the town and get some old time Christmas spirit in you. If you are a Thomas Kincaid fan they have a huge shop there. He lived there in his youth and some of his paintings are of some of the old Victorian Homes in Placerville during the Christmas time. Some of Kincaid's most treasured Christmas paintings are set in Placerville.

The Saturday after Thanksgiving we have gone exploring to some of the cool old gold mining towns there in Gold Country. One of those places is Sutter Creek Ca. The buildings on Main Street are from right out of the 1800's.

In the past the cute girlfriend and I would go our by ourselves, or maybe with my son or daughter on these explorations. My mom couldn't get around to well in her later years so they always stayed home, not that we didn't invite them.

This time I talked my dad into going with us to Sutter Creek. It was a good ride and outing for him. We walked through some of the shops. He is not really a nostalgia junky like the cute girlfriend and I, so he was not getting why we were in some of these antique shops. Some of these antiques he had used when he was a kid so big whoop, been there done that right?

It was good to get him out of the house and into the fresh air but all the walking and stair climbing was taking it's toll on him so he bowed out towards the end and went back to our truck to wait for us. We speed browsed through the last two antique shops and met him back at the truck. I'm happy we got to have him with us, he needs to get out more. We took home a few things from a craft fair that was at the town auditorium, but that was all. Not to many, "Oh you have to have" Antiques in the shops right now.

It was a good visit with dad, but sadly we had to leave early Sunday morning to head back to Washington. The drive home was uneventful, except when we stopped at a casino in Oregon called the Seven Feathers and I walked away from one game with a couple hundred extra bucks.

Christmas was now in full swing!

Bakken Fail....Trucking accidents in North Dakota

The Bakken Oilfields, or the Bakken for short, is that crazy place up in North Dakota you hear about from time to time. The Bakken formation is actually a huge oil deposit the sits under the states of Montana, North Dakota, two Canadian Provinces, and even some of South Dakota. They kept doing ground surveys while I was up there and the amount of oil under all that land just keeps getting bigger and bigger. Before I left I was reading an article that they had found even more oil under the current formation. Eat your heart out Middle East!

I drove a truck while I was up there. I hauled miles of pipe, huge portable buildings and large tanks down those dusty and muddy roads of North Dakota. I learned real fast you have to have some respect for the road conditions up there, and the crappy roads too. One turn of your head and an inch of rift of the steering wheel and you are in the ditch faster than you can blink. You have to respect what you have on the back of your truck too, Those farm roads will loosen up your tie down straps in 500 feet or less.

The Spring thaw is almost a little worse than the winter driving conditions. The farm roads are mostly dirt and that crap when it starts to thaw is the slipperiest and most unpredictable stuff you could ever drive on. You may think you are driving straight down that slippery farm road, but the crown they put on that road will push you to the edge in a heartbeat.

You can't be in a hurry on these road. You can't be impatient on these roads, and you can't be a knucklehead on these roads. You will get tore up or dead just like that. It was a daily occurrence to see a truck like this or worse.

   This stuff is still happening today, and if you toss your truck in a ditch or burn it up it will end up on a happy place on Facebook.

I think it was sometime in the Summer of 2012 I discovered a Facebook page called Bakken Oilfield Fail of the Day. Some of the stuff you see on there are just over the top crazy. Some of it heartbreaking tragedy. The shear comedy of some of the pictures of modified vehicles and cows down in the flame pits on well sites is priceless.

This Page has a huge following. You can't do anything remotely odd or stupid up in the Bakken without the wheels or your truck sticking in the air showing up on that page. I would get texts with links to this page showing some truck that turned and ran over a stop light pole, or turned too early and the back end of his trailer is all twisted in the ditch, and I had passed that very accident on my travels.

I think my favorite is always the side dump trailers that dump on the soft shoulder of the road and the whole truck goes over the side. So much of this is preventable, but it is a fast paced environment and you lose focus on what these roads can do to you.

This web page probably does the Bakken a great service posting all this craziness, hopefully reminding many a driver to be careful up there! I must mention that the comments are probably the best part the site. Although sometimes crude, it is some of the best free comedy on the internet. On the tragedies you do see that most of these rough and tumble people truly have heart that shows in their comments.

While working up there I saw a great many beautiful thing, but the sharp contrast was always the accidents.
There is so much truck traffic up there that at times there were diesel fuel shortages. I talk to one guy at a fuel supply company and between him and one other guy they had pumped something like over 50 million gallons of fuel in a year.

Let me tell you what these roads can do. Eat you alive is the simple way to put it. I can remember driving down muddy roads and trying to steer away from the edge of the road  and just sliding straight towards it. You have to push in the clutch to get the back wheels from pushing you sideways in that slick crap.

I have just pulled my truck onto sites and my front wheels sink in to the ground up to the bumper and have to be pulled out with a loader. I have had mud so bad that I had to actually toss my truck into the ditch to keep it from going on it's side.

The first freeze is a great time of entertainment. Even the locals who have lived there all their lives are not immune from this fun. Family vans and station wagons on there roofs, Welders and Mechanics trucks with their tool scattered all over the middle of the road and their wheels pointing skyward. The roof of some poor Honda protruding out of one of North Dakotas ubiquitous Kettle Lakes. All of this because they don't slow down for the weather after spending a whole summer flying down these roads and forget the dangers of that Ice.

The way they make roads up there is ridiculous. On the dirt roads they heap earth up from the sides of the roads and pile it in the center making this huge slopes to either side of the road. I know they need this for water run off, but why so much?

I'm not sure what the ground has in it but there are so many places on the dirt and paved roads where there is these huge sags in the road. You can tell where they are from all the skid marks from the truckers drop down tag axles hitting the pavement. They can toss any vehicle around a great deal.

The paved roads up there are some of the skinniest pieces of crap you have ever seen. Some of them, the white edge line is painted on the pavement drop off. That pavement drop off can be a good 5" sometimes and can suck a truck off the road frighteningly fast.

God forbid you are driving a truck with walking beam suspension and the back end instead of the front wheels get sucked off the road. I was driving on a road in a fuel truck one time and had the back end get sucked off. It damn near sent us sideways. Thank the Lord there was no on coming traffic, when I got the truck straight again I was in the wrong lane. That type of heavy duty suspension kind of pivots some and in the right condition can really shift the back end of the truck to one side. You see those a lot on cement and dump trucks

Now the real horror story. Thank goodness Bakken fail wasn't around then or I would have been on it's page as a poster boy for FAIL.

I had only been there in North Dakota a little less than 4 months and was about to go home for the Holidays.
It was the day after my birthday. A couple of weeks after that first incident my partner was driving and the back wheels got sucked off the road. it caught the poor guy totally off guard. We were in a fuel truck with a half empty tank and when my partner tried to correct, it made the rear suspension pivot in the opposite direction and amplified the correction and caused an uncontrollable fishtail. It was over on the third swing sideways. The truck swung hard enough to the side that the truck rolled. I cannot tell you what a horrible feeling it is to be in something that large and it is rolling over to your side.

As we started to roll I leaned into the center of the cab and grabbed onto the steering wheel. That probably saved my life because my door flew open. It was sickening to feel the truck going over for a second time. We came to rest in a ditch next to an oil well pad. The truck was on its side and my poor partner was hurt and hanging from his seat belt. I got myself unbuckled and had to lift him with my back and legs enough to get him unbuckled. We exited the truck through the front windshield. I got my partner out and he laid down on the ground, pretty messed up from being smashed into the roof.  I got back up to turn off the key in the truck I didn't want a fire. My eye glasses were missing and I couldn't see real well.

I must have looked like a shock victim after that. I was trying to find my phone so I could call my boss but it wasn't in the truck or in the street where I wondered around squinting looking for it. My cheesy trak phone was still in my pant pocket so I had to call the only company number I had in it and tell them to get a crew out here because we created a mess.

We got taken by ambulance to the local Hospital. My poor partner who was laying on the ground as the ambulance arrived. He was asking me why he was so cold. I had to assure him it was ok because he was laying in some snow. He was out of work for a couple of weeks to heal after that.

I might as well tell you about the funny part of this accident. I get put in a hospital room and they are checking me over. The doctor comes in. He is a foreigner. Nice guy and all but he did something that shocked everybody in the especially me before he left the room. He was asking me if I had any pains and was checking me for broken bones. He looked over the lump on my head.

He is finishing up and says in broken English that I look ok and that should be ok. Next he grabs onto the fold in my pants right where my crotch is and says, "At least you didn't break this". The nurse gasps and looks over one of the paramedics and says, "Oh lord I can't believe he just did that".  I'm from California and have seen a few weird things from people in my life, and here I am in the middle of the bible belt and being shocked by this doctor.  I looked at the nurse and shook my head.

Not long after that my girlfriend calls. I answer and she asks "How I'm doing?" I'm thinking she just got ESP or someone may have called her, but wasn't sure. I questioningly asked her what she knew. She gets a little mad from my weird way of asking.

"I'm asking about your head!" The day before on my birthday I had been hit in the hard hat by an overhead door. I had to inform her I was in the Hospital and that we had just been in a roll over accident in one of the trucks. She is such a good girlfriend. She got very concerned and almost started crying and I assured her I was just sore and that I was alright.

We were lucky that nothing worse than some bashed ribs and bumped heads was all we got. Since that day I have been a very cautious driver. That accident happened in about 5 seconds. You have to be on your guard up there.

Thank goodness no oncoming traffic was involved, and a hearty thanks to the people first on the scene.

Drivers if you are thinking of going to work in North Dakota beware! It can happen to you. Let's be careful out there. Be safe so we can all go home to our families.
Thanks    

Tagus Triangle...The Mystery and some fiction

After I started up in North Dakota, I started driving one of the vans into work for some extra money and some less sleep. As I have said before it was an 80 mile drive from Minot out to the oil fields. We would leave the yard at 5am and not get back until 7 or 8 pm sometimes. I would drive a van full of sleeping oil construction workers.

I can't tell you how hard it is to drive 14 people for 80 miles while they sleep.  I'm a sleep psychic, if there is someone sleeping in the car with me I can read their sleepy mind and want to sleep.  The power of 14 sleepy people is like Kryptonite on Superman....lol

I would have coffee with me and play something annoying on the radio, NPR to piss me off, or Coast to Coast to listen to all the UFO, Bigfoot, Chemtrail people talk about their hobbies. I saw some cool stuff out there on the prairie in the early mornings, a nice Lunar Eclipse one night, and the Aurora Borealis dipped way down south and we got a cool light show.  Kept and eye out for cows and other animals, snowy owls are cool if you can see them. But I never saw a UFO or Bigfoot...grin  Coast to Coast for those of you not familiar with late night radio is one of the most listened to late night radio shows in America. It focuses on mostly the paranormal and conspiracy with a sprinkling of normal stuff. It's topics can drive you nuts, but they can keep you awake while driving, with their madness.

There was a little anomaly that I notice one dark morning. I tend to watch the mile markers so I know where I am on road. Just outside of a town called  Berthold ND there is something out of whack with the mile markers.

But first I need to tell you about Tagus ND.  I think I have mentioned it in an earlier post. In Berthold there is a sign with the distance to the next town ahead.

That is the sign post up ahead we are entering the Tagus Zone.  I looked up Taugus ND on Google and it came up with some fun stuff.  It is mostly a ghost town, just a few residence left at this point. It is a destination on the sign above but there is no sign directing you after 9 miles.  Taugus has a spooky story to tell though.

Urban Legend has it that the old church had been used as a place of satanic worship and that there was a stairway to hell in the basement.  Read some of the comments on this site Ghost of North Dakota.  I guess the local kids liked going out there back in the 80's and there ghost stories ballooned into the urban legends that are today. It is unfortunate that vandals burned the Tagus Lutheran Church down.

I'm interested in ghost towns, I love going and seeing the old homes and buildings, nostalgia junkie I guess. Because we couldn't ever find Tagus, we started calling it the Tagus Triangle when we found this next anomaly.

There is a problem with the mile markers on Highway 2 west of Berthold ND.

 One night I had just passed this mile marker, and a tenth of a mile later my high beams where making the next mile marker glow green.  I though I must really tired for a mile to go that fast. When I saw the next mile marker number I knew I was really friggen tired.

But wait, I really hadn't gone that far in that amount of time.  The Strong Kum and Go coffee was working it's wonders on me. (yes there is a convenience store named Kum and Go, I started calling it the "unfortunately named Kum and Go" after I got there)
That night on the ride home I came over the rail road bridge, you can barely make it out on the left in the photo. I came to marker 117 and made note of  the odometer numbers and only 8 tenths of a mile went by when we hit the 120 marker....what the?

For the next couple of weeks any victim that sat shot gun with me got treated to the mile marker mystery.  It was very funny when a couple of months later I'm riding shotgun and the driver, a new guy, started telling me to watch the mile markers and he was telling me my story...lol

Another thing about this area is the ICBM's  There are hundreds of missile silos dotting the land scape of northwest North Dakota.  You are driving along and there is a road sign that says I-8 thru 11 that way, the missile numbers, and next to the road there is a fenced off area with all this surveillance equipment and the no trespassing signs.  Occasionally you will see a Military Humvee with a 50 caliber gun on the roof in front of these areas or on a hill nearby keeping an eye on a site from afar.

When they move one of these missiles they are all business.  Military Police and armed Humvees on the road in front and behind a convoy.  They burst onto the highway without stopping and you better get out of the way.  The local sheriff usually runs blocker for them.

With all that missile/ Air Force activity and the mile marker anomalies and my joke about it being the Tagus Triangle I came up with a tall story for my friend one night. They never change the mile markers to fix them because they are in the right place but the military has a secret base there and they have some sort of break in time and space there and we pass through it and don't even know it.  My friend laughed and said I should blog about that story and "spin my tale" as he put it.

Here is my tall tale.

The Tagus Triangle
We start out at five every morning from a yard in Minot ND, and we head 80 miles west out onto the prairie to go work in the oil fields. My friend and I stopped and got some coffee as we left our house and our snacks for the day. Yesterday had been a warm day, but this morning there was the first hint of chill in the fall air. It wouldn't be long now and the prairie of North Dakota would be covered in snow and ice for the next 6 months. We got in our van, today was my turn to drive, and we headed out of town.

Highway 2, the western part, starts in Michigan and follows the route of the Great Northern Railway all the way to Everett Washington. As you leave Minot you head north up a valley that follows the Souris and Des Lac rivers and then finally pops you out onto the prairie where you travel through rolling land of wheat, soy, flax, and rapeseed better known a Canola, oh and cattle.

This morning was like all the rest for us Minot based oil workers.  Hour and a half drive west work our butts off for 10 to 12 hours then and hour and a half drive east back to home for some quick sleep and repeat that the next day. It was cool this morning so I had to run the heater for the first time in months.  That dusty unused smell hung heavy in the air for a while as we headed west.  The sky was clear and the stars were brilliant. I turned on the radio as everybody usually is knocked out and starte their snores, farts and mumblings. No Country right now, Definite no on NPR that my friend always listens to, AM was what I needed, a talk show to keep my mind from getting highway hypnosis.  Coast to Coast AM was still on, what was the topic for today. They were talking about the Mayan Calendar and this guy was saying the coming Dec 2012 end date didn't mean that the world was ending.  Finally something with some sense on this show.

I drove on listening to the show, the gentleman giving some interesting information on Mayan culture and beliefs. His proper Spanish accent made him sound very credible. We were coming up on the town of Berthold ND, you had to slow down from 70 mph to 50 there, the company had installed these little satellite tracking box in all the vehicles. It tracked you by GPS and if you speed it rats you our by emailing your boss on his smart phone. I usually would slow down late and set the email off going in and out of Berthold to wake the boss up, it was 5am after all and he shouldn't be sitting in bed lounging. I always tell him it is a lag in the cruise control slowing down and speeding up the van. He hates that answer.

There was the sign for Tagus 9 miles ahead. Berthold was one of the companies way points, if the weather or some other condition warranted it we were to stop there and hold until it cleared or head back to Minot and not risk the trip. Blizzards and heavy rain were huge problems here in North Dakota and could strand motorist very easily.

This is where the day took an unexpected turn, literally. Outside of Berthold was a oil tank farm and a set of railroad tracks  that you crossed and after that the speed limit went back to 70 mph, then 4 miles down the road there was an overpass that went over more railroad tracks and it was an almost straight shot to Stanley ND where we sometimes stopped to get some grub for breakfast.

After mile marker 120 the road starts to turn to make the hook to go up over the overpass. This morning there was something different about the turn. The dash on the van flashed ever so slightly and the cruise control had turned itself off. There was also a weird sensation the went over my body. A huge rush of absolute tiredness.

I was guiding the van around this curve that was a little sharper than normal and all of the sudden there was a lot of street lights overhead and I was coming up to a gate and guard shack. There was red lights and blue strobes flashing. I had the foggy view of what looked like the gate to a military installation.  There was a guard standing at the curb next to the shack he had his pistol out and pointing down and one hand out to halt me. He was talking on what looked like a microphone on a headset.

I had this hard urge to stop and I pressed the brake and held it there. We stopped.  The automatic locks popped up and the door was opened and the guard reached in and put the van in park, I tried to move my right arm to help him but I couldn't.

I could hear him talking, I guess on his headset, "the driver is still responsive, we may have to have him wiped".  That voice where have I heard it before, it was very familiar, like the hint of a voice that had grown up from a younger voice. I literally had to force my head to turn to look at the guards face. When I did that he looked very surprised and his eyes went wide with recognition. I knew this kid, well he was a good looking young man now.

"Ryan is that you?" I got the words out and my mind was starting to clear a little. It was just like fighting heavy road fatigue and you had to will yourself to stay awake. I knew Ryan Gamble pretty well, he was a once pudgy but starting to grow Boy Scout in my sons Troop over 5 years ago. He had camped with us in my son and I's tent a couple of times on outings. We helped him on his Eagle Scout Project, a very nice Forest Service help project that got him some good recognition in our local papers. After that he joined the Air Force with a lot of adventure ahead of him. He was tall and trim now, I was proud to see what he had become and that made it easier to make the fatigue go away.

"Mr Larsen!"
"Good to see you son, look at you, I'm very happy to see you"
I turned to introduce my friend to Ryan but he was out cold sleeping, I turned and looked behind me and the whole crew in the van was out cold too. It dawned on me right then that I was probably not suppose to be where ever I was right now. I turned back to Ryan he was talking into his headset.
"Captain I know the man at the gate sir, he is coming more awake by the minute, I can't explain it, he is not making any moves to exit the vehicle, I doubt if he will"
Ryan looked at me and held his hand up. "Mr Larsen please do not exit the vehicle"
I looked at him as he was about to close the door on me. "I shouldn't be here should I Ryan" I asked mildly.
The door closed and he shook his head no, at me.

I unwittingly rolled down the window, and caught more of his conversation with the captain at the other end of his radio. "Yes captain it is from the same company, you better get those tech people up here to fix this GPS device." there was a pause, "Yes Captain he is awake, he is being cooperative, but we will need to wipe him"
That is the second time he has said "wipe him". I was sure that he was not talking about my nose or my backside.
Ryan held his hand to his ear as if listening, "copy tech team en route, I will have the driver exit the vehicle for the wiping procedure".
I was looking around, maybe not the best idea considering where I might be. I could see something shimmering beyond the gate. It hid what was really behind the gate so someone that stumbled into this place wouldn't see much, but that little, for lack of a better term, porthole we had just come through would be enough to set anybody's curiosity on overdrive. What ever hid this place was way advanced stuff it must hide something pretty damn special.


A cylinder started coming out of the ground across the roadway from the gate. It had a door and it slid open and several armed men and some tech looking guys popped out the door. Ryan came back to the door and opened it.

"Please step out of the vehicle Mr Larsen"
"I hope I haven't got you into some trouble Ryan, I wouldn't want that to happen".
"Everything will be fine Mr Larsen we will fix a few things to correct this stupid problem and then.."
Ryan hesitated. "You and your crew will be on your way to work"

I nodded at him in understanding. I'm sure I still looked a little wide eyed. One of the tech guys came and put a laptop on the drivers seat, another tech opened the passenger door and pointed a strange gun looking device at the dash right over the motor compartment and some LED lights lit up on the gun.  The Tech with the laptop taped a key and said, "there is the code and frequency". He entered something into his keyboard then hit the enter key saying "sent". The guns LED's blinked and then turned green and the techs pulled out of the van and left for the door they came from. I hadn't notice but the armed men had stood on either side of Ryan and I.
Ryan nodded to the armed man behind me and he opened a door on the back of the guard shack. Ryan Guided me to the door. It was a small cubical with a chair and some sort of apparatus that I had to step around to sit down.

"Ryan this wipe you keep talking about will it hurt?"
"There is two parts to it Mr Larsen, one is the sleep inducer and then the image replacer"
"Ok Ryan which one hurts, you have walked around it son"
"I always liked you Mr Larsen, I'll give it to you straight.  The sleep inducer will hurt if you fight it, the image replacer will flash some images to replace the ones you have of your time here, the science on how it works I do not know. Some people show a flash of pain when the bright lights flash but it is gone in an instant"
"Thank you Ryan," I paused. "Do me a favor son, check on me in a few weeks and see how I'm doing. Surprise me at store or something. I live in Minot, will you do that for me?"
"I will see what I can do, you will be ok, our government has it's secrets but it is not in the business of doing harm to it's citizens, you know me sir, I wouldn't be here doing this if it would hurt you."
"Exactly what I thought son, thank you, you take care."
"Thank you sir, sit here and look and focus on this light"

I did as I was told. The wave of exhaustion hit me again, I let it happen. There was a flash that hit my eyes, it did hurt, I felt myself jerk, I was floating and then that horrible noise and feeling as you hit the side rumble strips on the side of the road, something like and echo voiced something in my head, The van just died guide it off the highway, stop put in park and try to start it"

That's what I was doing, I could see it, we were just before the over crossing and I guided the van to a stop on the side of the road. My friend woke up in the seat next to me. "What happened?"
"Van died" I told him. I had it in park and tried to start it, it came to life and I put it in gear and we headed off to work. As I pulled back on to the highway I looked back over my shoulder looking back towards where we came from. "That was so totally weird"
"What my friend asked"
"I don't know" I looked at the dash, "The dash blinked and the cruise control shut off and the van died"
I shook my head.
My friend switch position and mentioned I need to write up the issue and give it to the mechanic shop so they could look at it, and he was back asleep.
"It is probably just the type of crap that happens in the Tagus Triangle" I chuckled.
"Tagus Triangle" he mumbled and chuckled
We made it to the shop, my boss was mad that we were ten minutes late, I handed him the report to inspect the van and told him it had died outside of Berthold.  I wasn't sure how it could have made us that late.

I was at Walmart a couple of weeks later and a young man came up to me. He was lean and tall and had a military hair cut. I smiled. "Ryan is that you!?"
"Yes Mr Larsen what the hell are you doing way up here in North Dakota?"
"Working in the oil Fields, money is good"
"I'm stationed up at Minot Air Force Base" Ryan smiled and then asked "how are you doing?"
"I'm doing great, maybe eating too well" tapping my belly, "but doing well"
"Mr Larsen give me your phone number and we can go get a meal or something when we have some time"
We exchanged numbers. I'm so friggin stupid I should have not kidded with him. I gathered him in a fatherly hug telling him I was proud of him and then whispered. "I think that bright light gave me a tumor" I could feel him sag right there in my arms.
"Mr Larsen your sense of humor is failing you right now"
I knew by the look on his face how badly I had screwed up. "Are they listening" I asked
Ryan nodded his head. "I have vouched for you Mr Larsen don't make me regret it"
"I was just kidding Ryan, anyways what is there to tell, and I'm sure that is the way they want it"
Ryan screwed up his face and nodded again

I spent over a month with some heavy weight military brass telling them I wasn't a threat, I even talked to the inventor of the mind wipe/image replacer to find out what went wrong. They told me they would tell everyone I was crazy if I got to talking. They were all very discrete in their dealings with me and I got a few meal out of them. I got out of one General that kept a watch on me that our companies GPS tracking devices under the dash of our vans was triggering the porthole to open, and that they had finally reprogrammed all of them to get them to stop. I'm not sure how that porthole works or what that cloaking field is that covers that hidden base, but it is fantastic to think about. I guess none of our other drivers knew they had made that turn into the Tagus Triangle.

I have dinner with Ryan from time to time and he got me on the base one time to see the flight line of B-52's they have there at Minot Air Force Base, but we don't talk about what he really does. I don't think he knows what he really does and what is happening on that base. I'm proud of him though, I told the General I was proud of him.

On another morning as I passed by with the same van load of sleepy passengers and listening to Coast to Coast AM. The guest was talking about Area 51 and how there was a hidden UFO base there, he sounded ridiculous. I looked at the spot after mile marker 120 where I thought the porthole might be. I could go on Coast to Coast and tell them how I saw a top secret guard shack that is hidden on several square miles of North Dakota property and that the GPS in the van opened the porthole...where is it?...I don't know, you can't see it. What is on the base, I don't know you can't see it. No one would believe me!. 
The End

I hope you enjoyed the story...grin

Anacortes Washington...another romance of boats

My work has had me doing a lot of work up north.  The week of 8/19 I went up to Port Angeles Wa. to work for a company my work sub contracts with from time to time.  We worked on a new boiler at the paper mill in town. It was an interesting process to get the boiler ready to start up. I had no idea you did this elaborate process to keep the boiler in good shape.  We used a lot of water in this thing. It held 20,000 gallons. One of my duties while filling this monster was to go to the top of the boiler, 7 stories up to the top of the structure it was in. It was 142 steps to the top.

I think I mentioned that I have a new aversion to heights in an earlier post.  I'll be damned if that it is going to get the best of me though, I grab my lunch bag and head up the stairs. Normally a building like this would be covered with aluminum siding but they haven't installed it yet. It was wide open to the elements, a little unsettling because the floors on each level is open grating, meaning you can see right through it to the bottom.

I was acclimating to the heights by looking out at the view when I noticed 3 cruise ships coming into view.
Port Angeles is a port town on the northern tip of Washington States Olympic Peninsula and is on a body of water know as the Straights of Juan de Fuca. The Straights are the entrance to the Puget Sound area where Seattle is, and it separates the US and Canada.  It was quite a sight to see.  These 3 fancy cruise ships zig zagging through the channel.

I had to steady myself to get this shot. You can just barely make out the 3rd one on the right, it was coming nose on to the camera so could barely make it out.  As you can see the port is a nice sheltered harbor, and that tower out on the end of that point in a US Coast Guard Airbase.

That Morning I morning after breakfast I took a walk around town and went down to the boat docks. I found a nice sail boat with my daughters name on the back.

 I posted it on Facebook for her, telling her I found her boat there in Port Angeles. I was there for 5 days working a night shift and trying to sleep during the day.  The Gentleman I was working and I would eat breakfast in the Hotel Restaurant, they had a nice breakfast buffet that would allow me to stick to my low carb diet. As I was walking out of the restaurant I notice a framed picture on the wall and took a picture of it.

Yes that is the Kalakala I have blogged about her before. She is everywhere. A waitress told me that there was a mural on the side of a building there in town that the picture is based on. So I went out to find it on the last day there.

 This mural is awesome, I love how the kids are all on the dock watching her come in.  Near the end of her Ferry days the Kalakala took cars and passengers from Port Angeles to Victoria BC, Canada.

I wish someone that had some cash would rescue her, I just can't seem to get the right Lotto Numbers to do it myself.

I was reading that the Kalakala was the first civilian ship installed with radar. She holds License #001.

On the last day at the paper mill we had an awesome sunrise. I didn't get the shot I wanted, the earlier colors were much better, but it took me a few minutes to break away from our task to get the shot.

There is some ripples in the water were a small tidal basin outflows into the harbor. The Harbor Seals love playing in it.  There are actually 3 seals in this picture....lol

Here is one of them. They like to watch you as you watch them.

We finished there in Port Angeles and drove back home.  Then last Monday they sent me back up there to pick up some pipe that needed to be transported, now we are talking! I hauled miles and miles of pipe while in North Dakota. I picked it up and drove it back to our base down in Kelso. I was suppose to take it to one of our other shops way up north in a town north of Bellingham Wa. The next day the plan changed and I was to take it to one of the Refineries in Anacortes. I left very early in the morning to beat the Seattle traffic, Seattle has the suckiest highway system I have every seen, I have driven the 91 freeway in So Cal so I know!  As a matter of fact I was sent up to Bellingham to pick up one of my companies many trucks and got stuck in 2 hour to go 30 miles traffic in Seattle because of a big accident on the 5 freeway. Funny thing is the other day as I passed through Seattle at the start of rush hour and a news report on the radio said a study had Seattle has some of the worst drivers in the country and as the news item ended there was a small pick-up spun out and on the wall, and a patrolman hitting the smoke under the hood with a fire extinguisher...sigh

I had a little time after I dropped off the pipe and I wanted to do a few things in Anacortes.  I wanted to see where the house was that I lived in when I was very young.  My brother and I ended up there when I was about 5, my mother was very sick and dying at the time so we were sent up to my aunt and uncles there in Anacortes. I also wanted to see where the Enchantress sat while she was in the Fidalgo Bay on the east side of Anacortes

I Googled Anacortes and found out how it got it's name. It is the consolidation of a woman's name, Anna Curtis, the wife of one of the earlier settlers there. It was hoped when they incorporated the town that it would be the terminus of the Transcontinental Railroad, nothing works out as planned. I have not been in this town in 45 years so my memory of it was nill.

I remember where the house was and how to get there though, I think I have always been aware of my surroundings.  It was the fun memories of playing with my cousins when we were up there that probably stuck the location in my head. The house overlooked a small bay with an Island across the water. It was kind of up on a hill. I had looked it up once on google earth but so much had changed. I headed into town and when I hit the northern end I made a right and headed to a point on the northeast corner of the town. Then I looked for a house that sat in the right location. 45 years is a long time and many of the houses are new in the area.  I remember small cottages in this area but now there is a lot more modern dwellings there. I spun down the street where I thought it should be and came to a house that was in the right position. The little bay was hardly there now filled in for a ship yard and such. The vacant area that I remember to the west of the house had a barrier of trees now and some industrial stuff there now.

The house though, it sat right where it needed to be and I was hoping really hard that it was the house because it was my favorite kind of house, a Craftsman, it was all shingled up and looking awesome. I could be wrong though the house may not even exist anymore.

I remember that bay though. One time a bunch of logs were brought into that bay and my uncle told us kids to stay away from those logs. I'm sure this was more like and invitation to two troublesome 5 year olds like my cousin and I. First chance we got we were down on those logs. As would be expected we got out pretty far on those logs and one of the logs moved and in goes my poor cousin.  He went in up to his waist and he and I had a hell of a time getting him back on the log. I don't think my aunt and uncle found out. I'm not sure, but I think we snuck back in the house and got him some new pants. My uncle would have skinned us alive if he had found out, we were two times lucky on that log adventure.

I remember vividly a smell from around that neighborhood. It was the most wonderful smell I have ever encountered.  To this day I'm not even sure what I smelled. We were all playing around on the hills riding tricycles and large Tonka trucks down the hills and my aunt had warned us not to go up to far so as not to disturb the neighbors or something like that. It was a wonderful sunny day and that smell came wafting through the air. It was someone baking. I can almost smell it now. I smelled something like that smell later in life and someone told me it was Irish Shortbread.  I think they use Almond extract in that and that very well maybe the smell.  I remember going to school there for a short time and I remember the phone call from my dad when my mom passed away. I didn't understand at that age, but I remember the sadness in my aunt as she hung up the phone.

 I remember a boat my uncle used to own and we went out on a couple of times. My uncle tried to teach us to fish but I think Hyper-active me was not listing all that well and almost hooked my cousin by mistake. We still had fun...grin

We were a large family while I was up there and it was fond memories I have of being there. I sure hope it was that Craftsman...grin

Not too long ago I was looking at Anacortes on Google Earth and found some pictures posted there of this poor dilapidated Tugboat that had sunk in Fidalgo Bay. Her name was the Enchantress.





She was 120 foot Army Tug and due to some shady dealings the owner had set her adrift and she got hung up on the old wharf pilings you see around her and she took on water and was stuck there.
Thank you Alaskandave.smugmug.com for the photo.

The Enchantress became kind of a fixture there inspiring people to photograph and paint her with Mt. Baker and the Cascades in the background. Thank you thenewstribune.com blog for the photo.
The Enchantress..here are the pictures you can find on Google images.  I like the Eagles on the mast on this photo.

She was unfortunately a "Menace to Navigation" according to the Coast Guard and she was scheduled for demolition and removal.  That brought out some of the local artist to try and save her.  She is rather enchanting I must say. She technically wasn't going anywhere hung up on those pilings so it probably wouldn't have been to bad to leave her there. The fight to save her failed and she was demolished early 2010 or there abouts.

I would have loved to have a few pictures of her myself. I didn't find where she sat so I headed back. I have one more boat story though. A few miles south of Anacortes is the town of La Conner Wa. There is a boat there that I have loved looking at for years. She has her own web site even. MV Argosy.

She was sold to a couple that has it moored there. So I went down to take a picture of her. The Argosy.

The early morning gloomy light didn't help this picture. I took some pics a few months ago, a day after that I-5 bridge collapsed up in Mount Vernon Wa.

This boat when it was made never looked like this, she at one time blew up and sank but her hull was raised and reused to make what you see now, It is an interesting story follow the link above.
The first time I took a picture of this boat a gentleman on the boat started looking at me through some binoculars. I waved to him but he didn't wave back.  Where this picture was take is in a log storage area, they float logs down the channel then haul them on land then truck them from there to the mills.
I rolled onto the lot and a guy was sitting right were I was going to take a picture. I rolled up to him to make sure it was ok for me to be there and that I only wanted to take a picture of a boat. He seemed a little humored by my statement and said sure and drove off....lol

I want to own a boat someday and live on it until I can't be on it anymore. I want to travel from Alaska down to the Panama Canal and then search what the east coast has to offer. It is a big dream but I tentatively have the cute girlfriend sold on the idea. I keep looking for the right boat...someday!