{"id":1135,"date":"2012-09-14T18:28:37","date_gmt":"2012-09-14T23:28:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.maryjoandwill.com\/?p=1135"},"modified":"2012-09-14T18:34:50","modified_gmt":"2012-09-14T23:34:50","slug":"saltwater-state-park","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.maryjoandwill.com\/?p=1135","title":{"rendered":"Saltwater State Park"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last weekend we went to a state park south of Seattle near the community college where I had been teaching English.\u00a0 We left pretty early; I think we left the apartment around 8:00 am.\u00a0 We stopped along the way to pick up some food for grilling and eating at the park.\u00a0 Traffic was the best I had ever seen it which is one of the advantages of being out early on a Saturday.\u00a0 It’s a little weird; on the weekend things really don’t get going until around 10 am.\u00a0 The Fremont Sunday market isn’t all set up until 11 I think, but the flea market in Annandale, MN starts super early.\u00a0 I say it’s because the hippies don’t like to get up.<\/p>\n

But we got there and there were a few people on the beach already and a bunch of people were setting up for some Indian cultural event.\u00a0 We had brought swim suits but we never did swim.\u00a0 I guess I decided it just wasn’t worth getting wet.\u00a0 Any way, the beach has a bunch of driftwood on it.\u00a0 It’s on Puget Sound, so it is saltwater and it’s affected by the tides.<\/p>\n

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When we got there the tide was out.\u00a0 When it comes back in the water covers all the ground you see in this picture.<\/p>\n

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The green stuff is seaweed.\u00a0 A bunch of other sea creatures are also exposed.\u00a0 Barnacles for example.<\/p>\n

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I don’t know if these are really barnacles.\u00a0 That’s just what I call them.\u00a0 I also found two little sand dollars.\u00a0 I didn’t take pictures of them though.\u00a0 The park’s website claims you can also see starfish, sharks, and whales at the park.\u00a0 Will and I have concluded that this means that someone claimed to have seen these organisms once so they felt justified putting them on the list.\u00a0 I also found a big old crab arm next to this cute little stream that feeds into the sound.\u00a0 I thought about taking a picture of it, but then I thought it would be weird to post pictures of pieces of animal carcasses.\u00a0 So instead I’ll post this picture of Will next to the stream.<\/p>\n

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I like how it just flows over the gravel when the tide is out.\u00a0 These ducks seem to like it too.<\/p>\n

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They have a lot of clams.\u00a0 You can cook and eat them but you’re not allowed to take clams from this beach.\u00a0 If you click on the picture, you can see more detail.<\/p>\n

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You can also go scuba diving of the shore where they built an artificial reef.\u00a0 I bet that’s where you see the more interesting sea life.<\/p>\n

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It’s a nice park.\u00a0 They have some nice hiking trails and there are campsites too that are a little farther away from the beach.\u00a0 They also take reservations for the picnic shelters and some of the bigger fire pit areas.\u00a0 There’s a small cliff a little way from the beach.\u00a0 If you look to the right of this picture, you can see how some of the land rises more sharply out of the water.\u00a0 Some of the hiking trails lead up there.<\/p>\n

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One of the hiking trails includes little laminated cards that have been stapled to logs.\u00a0 They tell you something about the plants and how Native Americans used them.\u00a0 The best thing about this was the berries.\u00a0 Berries are a thing here.\u00a0 Particularly the blackberries.<\/p>\n

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I discovered berries I had never heard of before called salal berries.\u00a0 The first syllable is like “suh” and then the second syllable rhymes with “gal.”\u00a0 They were really tasty.\u00a0 Sweet but also kind of spicy.\u00a0 Maybe that spicy flavor is poison, but the info card said they could be eaten raw, so I did.\u00a0 I tend to trust cards I find stapled to logs in the woods, don’t you?<\/p>\n

I think the park was worth going to.\u00a0 Although if we wanted to go camping, there are big national parks we could go to.\u00a0 On the other hand, the list of wildlife at this park did not include bears.\u00a0 But Saltwater does have sharks.\u00a0 So bears or sharks?\u00a0 Hmm.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last weekend we went to a state park south of Seattle near the community college where I had been teaching English.\u00a0 We left pretty early; I think we left the apartment around 8:00 am.\u00a0 We stopped along the way to pick up some food for grilling and eating at the park.\u00a0 Traffic was the best […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maryjoandwill.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1135"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maryjoandwill.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maryjoandwill.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maryjoandwill.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maryjoandwill.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1135"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.maryjoandwill.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1137,"href":"https:\/\/www.maryjoandwill.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1135\/revisions\/1137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maryjoandwill.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maryjoandwill.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maryjoandwill.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}