Political Correctness

US work culture has become very politically correct. Of course I always knew this, but living and working in Israel has really opened my eyes to how much political correctness is ingrained in my everyday work interactions.

When I worked in the US, I distinctly remember conversations that would drift into issues about gender, ethnicity, politics, and other topics and, although I wouldn't say that anything particularly offensive was said in these conversations, I could feel the collective "this conversation is about to take a turn for the worse" and then I would witness the subsequent change-in-topic. Even if this change-in-topic didn't occur, if you were to tell someone later "hey, man - you should probably watch what you say about <topic> because that might offend <other person>," then that person would usually understand and try to adjust their behavior. I think I've taken that sort of interaction for granted.

Here in Israel, things are a bit different. With some things, there just seems to be much less ingrained empathy. Not to say people aren't friendly - in general, people are very friendly here (well, at least in our encounters mainly around Tel Avi) - it's just that when it comes to some things, people here are more unapologetic about their opinions or comments.

In my first few weeks of working, I was a bit appalled at the variety of topics covered. First there was the politics. The conventional wisdom in the US is that you shouldn't talk about religion or politics at work. Well, that idea hasn't reached Israel yet. I would say that most of my early lunch conversations revolved around these issues. Oftentimes these conversations would lead to arguments with raised voices - something that I both love (if I'm involved) and cringe at (if I'm just a bystander). I started working right around the time of the US elections, and everyone was interested to know who I was voting for. They were particularly confused when I would try to avoid the conversation by saying things like "well, I dunno, we'll see" or "I have my own opinions..." They'd badger me, not understanding how I either didn't know who I was voting for or how I didn't want to talk about it. I eventually caved, but I had a distinct feeling of discomfort if the conversation about politics involved more than just one person.

The other work conversations that make me uncomfortable are more gender related. Software engineering is definitely a male dominated profession, especially in Israel, but our office has quite a few women in it. As such, I try to avoid any topics or discussions that feel too much like a discussion that you'd have in a frat house, mainly because I feel like those conversations probably make the women in the office feel uncomfortable. However, I've had quite a few conversations that make me feel uncomfortable, and it seems like the women either ignore it or are just used to it (well, probably both). This past week, a whole-company (30 people) email chain got a bit inappropriate, leading to the office manager (a woman) telling us to stop the discussion. This particular email chain had about 20 replies, but I had immediately recognized the inappropriateness of the emails and was a bit surprised that the chain didn't stop sooner and that it required a woman in the office to say something. I was glad that the office manager had cut off the conversation, but some of my colleagues were confused about why the office manager had complained, saying things like "I don't know what the big deal is, that didn't offend me."

Of course I'm generalizing here - the US is not devoid of confrontation or offensive emails - but when it comes to the workplace I'm used to, being politically incorrect seems to be more the norm here. On the one hand, it's a bit refreshing to hear more unvarnished opinions from my coworkers. On the other hand, I understand the importance of political correctness and I have to say that I actually find a lot of comfort in political correctness.

Share your thoughts - international workers out there - have you experienced these differences-in-workplaces? Has this made you more aware of the goods and bads of American work culture?

Life in Israel (Part 2)

So, I had written a fair bit more in the previous post but it seems to have disappeared. This is because I tapped out the post on my phone, and the Blogger app had, for some reason, created two post entries that I thought were the same, so I deleted one of them. Guess I chose wrong. Oops. With that in mind, I thought I would just make a new post and finish my previous thoughts.

I've been working in Israel for over 3 months now. It's been a great experience. I love the people I work with and Klarna TLV is generally just a fun place to work. There are days where I miss the convenience of working from home - the Aeron chair, no socks, 15 second commute - but overall I've enjoyed having more human interaction.

As other trailing spouses have pointed out (more elegantly than I will), there are some definite drawbacks to working in the local economy, especially in Tel Aviv. The first and most obvious is that my vacations don't typically overlap with Sophie's, which means that we can't really use our vacation days efficiently. The other less obvious problem with working in Israel is that the US Embassy & USAID in Tel Aviv work the Monday-Friday schedule, while every other business in the region works a Sunday-Thursday schedule. This means that I have every Friday to myself and Sophie has every Sunday to herself, and we can't do overnight things on Saturday night (or Thursday night). It also means that there are very few shared 3-day weekends. Ze basa.

I'm not sure if I've made this obvious, but I don't really speak Hebrew. I took some language classes when we first got here and at the time I felt pretty confident with basic social interaction, but that knowledge and confidence has faded a fair bit over the last few months. Everyone in my office speaks English very well, so it's felt sufficient to just know English, but there are days where it's hard not knowing Hebrew. With people in my office it's easy, but if I go to a conference or a MeetUp, I have to build up my confidence to blast into someone's space and start speaking English with them. I consider myself fortunate that there is another person in my office who doesn't speak Hebrew, and it's been interesting to me how much I notice when he's on vacation. If we have an office get-together and people are milling around beforehand, I'm very aware that the only person speaking English is the person speaking to me, so it makes me feel like a bit of a nuisance sometimes. This is of course to-be-expected, but I've found it interesting how very different it feels when the only English I hear is the conversation I'm involved in compared to when I can hear another English conversation, however soft or far away it may be. Having that other ongoing English conversation is oddly comforting. Anyway, I'll probably start taking more Hebrew classes in the next few weeks, which might mean that I'll say more than just 'sababa' (cool), 'boker tov' (good morning), and 'man yanim' (what's up?) in the office, but no guarantees.

Not knowing the language also has its perks. Consider this. I was interested in making a pound cake, so I stopped by the grocery store and found all the necessities except for the cream cheese. Well, I did find cream cheese, but it's the Philadelphia brand and a block of it was the equivalent of $5-6. Since Israel has a lot of dairy products, I figured that there was probably an equivalent product that cost more like $1, so I got to work comparing the letters on the Philadelphia box to the letters on other cheese containers. I couldn't find a match, so I decided that I would get the nice, English speaking cashier to help me. She very confidently told me that they had 'skim' cream cheese, and pointed to where it was. Now, I say that I don't know Hebrew, but I can mostly read and I can especially read it when it's just an English word written in the Hebrew alphabet... and I knew that this container said it was cottage cheese. So now I was left with the awkward experience where if I rejected the cottage cheese, I might make the nice cashier feel bad, and it wouldn't make much sense for me to buy the Philadelphia cheese, since I had just complained about the cost. So, I decided to just buy the cottage cheese with the off-chance hope that maybe, just maybe, I was reading it wrong. When I got home, I confirmed that it was in fact cottage cheese, and I tried to figure out how to handle the situation, so I googled for cream cheese substitutes and discovered that some people actually substitute pureed cottage cheese for cream cheese, 1:1. סבבה, I thought, so I opened the cottage cheese container and the top of it was completely smooth. I stupidly thought to myself "wow! I bought pureed cottage cheese!" and dumped it into the mixing bowl, only to discover that the cottage cheese was, in fact, normal, chunky, cottage cheese. Oh well. The pound cake actually turned out just about perfect and tasted a bit lighter than the cream cheese version, and so now I know that I can put cheaper, lighter cottage cheese in my mom's pound cake recipe - something I never would have discovered in my normal, cheap English-labeled Philadelphia cream cheese world of yesteryear.

Life in Israel (Part 1)

It's been quite a while since I posted anything on this blog. Part of that is because I've been busy, but I think part of it is that I also know that there's a much higher liklihood that someone I know in Israel will read the posts. In El Salvador I felt like I had a fair amount of online anonymity because I felt like, at most, my embassy friends would read it.

However, I'm not in El Salvador anymore. I quickly realized that once we got to our high rise apartment in Tel Aviv along the beach. We can drink the water. We can walk almost everywhere without fear of being robbed. Most people that we meet speak English well. Life is different here.

As I said in my last post, I got a job in the "local economy" working as a software engineer for Klarna. They're a Swedish company who enables online payments centered around "try before you pay" and they opened an Israel office about a year before I started.

So far it's been a great experience. I think I was a bit naive when I was doing my job search at the beginning. I assumed that employing me would be easy peasy, so I was looking at a large breadth of companies. Looking back, I think that it would have been hard to work at some of the smaller places because, well, they really didn't seem to have well functioning HR departments and, like it or not, I'm an anomaly. Not being an Israeli presents all kinds of weird annoyances to working here.

First, there's the national ID. It's a 9 digit number where the 9th digit is a checksum digit. This means that every system where you enter your ID will deny you if your 9 digits don't check out. Of course, US passports have 9 digits, so I figured I could use that in most places. Nope. This means that the insurance agent does things like... making up a random number that involves my birthday and passes the checksum validation and then uses that on the official documents for me. What could possibly go wrong with this? This debacle has also meant that I have been unable to get an Israeli credit card through work... they just can't wrap their head around the fact that a non-citizen would want one of those.

The other thing is taxes and pensions. While I felt reasonably secure in El Salvador that I was paying the correct taxes, I have no such feeling here. Hopefully the tax people (yes, plural) will assuage my fears.

Unemployed no more!

I start a new job tomorrow! I'll be working as a software developer for a company here in Israel. I can't wait!

Off to Israel

Our final days in the US were quite quick. We had a wedding to go to in Knoxville on the night before we left, and since Sophie was in the wedding, we had to drive up there the day before. We had a great time at the wedding - since a significant number of our friends from DC and Chattanooga went to the wedding, we were able to say a final goodbye. However, we did have to wake up in Knoxville the morning after the wedding and make the 2 hour drive back to Chattanooga, pack, and get on our plane.

We were looking forward to an easy day of flying, but of course, we were mistaken. Our flights were Chattanooga to DC, DC to Newark, and then Newark to Tel Aviv. Unbeknowst to us, United had decided to cancel the DC to Newark flight we were on, meaning that we would miss the Newark to Tel Aviv flight. This happened a full hour before we left Chattanooga and United could have notified us and instead flown us to Charlotte and then on to Newark, but that would be too logical. Instead, we were caught off-guard and didn't find out that the flight was cancelled until we arrived in DC. At first, the United people told us that we could only fly out on the flight that left the next day, which I was actually pretty happy about, since we could have spent the night in DC and had another night with friends. However, it is quite annoying to change plans so drastically, so we asked the obvious question of whether there was another way for us to get to Tel Aviv, perhaps on a different carrier. We soon discovered that we could take a later flight to Newark, taxi to JFK, and fly out on an El Al flight, albeit 4 hours later than our original flight. What fun!

Of course United would pay for our taxi fare to JFK, right? Well, sort of. They did pay the $85(!) fare to JFK, but they neglected to give us enough money to pay for the tolls and tip, which amounted to about $40 more. You'd think that this thing is common enough that they'd know what the total cost of the far would be, but I digress. When we got to JFK, we were asked a few silly questions about who packed our bags, but the people at El Al weren't joking. I felt like any response that was perceived incorrectly would lead to us not getting on the flight, so I decided to keep my snickering to a minimum. The people at El Al were nice enough, just very serious. There was a bit of discussion between the security people before they came forward and asked us, in an incredulous tone, "why did you get your Israeli visa in San Salvador!?" When we answered that we were living there at the time, their eyes brightened and they welcomed us into the ticketing line. We got our tickets and headed to the gate. Of course, at this point it was around midnight, so the TSA people manning the security line were not in the best of moods, and I guess I can't blame them.

When we actually arrived at the gate, there were a lot of people sitting around, waiting. I couldn't help but notice that the gate attendants were occasionally walking through the seating area checking for unattended bags under seats as well as checking the trash cans for what I can only assume to be bombs. Also, about 45 minutes prior to boarding, a pair of heavily armed Port Authority (I think) men came and stood out front of the gate. Like, with large rifles that I'm used to only seeing in Central America, not the US. Needless to say, this made me wonder what the hell we'd gotten ourselves into. Then there's the rather odd slogan of El Al - "It's not just an airline... it's Israel!" All of this made me a little antsy. Once we got on the plane, though, that anxiety went away. The flight to Tel Aviv was uneventful and comfortable.

We arrived into Tel Aviv at night and were met by one of Sophie's coworkers, a friend who we'd met back in DC a few years prior. Of course our bags hadn't made the trek from Newark to JFK, but El Al assured us that we would receive them the next day. We arrived at our new place in Tel Aviv and promptly went to bed. Our social sponsors were nice enough to stock our fridge with some food, and they also left us with a huge amount of a delicious chicken and rice dish.

We woke the next morning to a great view of the Mediterranean, a view that we'll have for the next 4 years. After months of preparation, anxiety, excitement, and nervousness, we had arrived and settled into our new home in Tel Aviv!

Home Leave Part 4 - Oregon and Beyond

None of us had ever been to Oregon, so we didn't have much of an idea of what to do. We knew that we wanted to check out Portland at some point, but beyond that, we were lost. I'd been reading Wild, so I really wanted to see some of the volcanic features of Oregon like Crater Lake and Mt. Hood, but I also recognized that we didn't have that much time to hang out in Oregon, especially if we wanted to see friends in Idaho and Colorado. Besides, we'd been surrounded by volcanoes in El Salvador, so what's the big deal anyway? So, we did what any tourist does - we bought a Lonely Planet guide to Washington & Oregon, the first time I've done that for a place in the US.

With our guide in hand, we decided to head down the Oregon coast and see what differences there were between it and Washington. The beaches seemed similar, but we were blown away by the feeling of natural-ness on the Oregon coast - something that is really hard to find on the east coast, save for a few places like Cumberland Island. Our first stop was at the Short Sands beach in Oswald West State Park. We had a grand time checking out the sea life living in the tidal ponds: starfish, sea anemone, small fish, algae. Although the weather was a bit cool for beach-going weather, we still enjoyed the beach immensely. After the beach, we were thinking about potentially heading inland to do some hikes the following day, but it just seemed so much easier to stay at the beach and relax, so that's what we did. We drove down to Nehalem Bay State Park and spent the night just on the other side of the dunes from the beach. This is a huge state park and it was almost entirely full, but it was still pretty relaxing.

We got up the next day to head to Portland. We checked our Lonely Planet and decided to go to the Kennedy School, since it seemed like the most Portland thing we could find. It's hard to describe what this place is - it's an old school building that has been repurposed into a hotel with pool, gym, a few bars, a few restaurants, a theatre that serves beer, and a few other amenities. It's really well done, and I think if we lived in Portland it would have been a pretty cool place to grab drinks. However, going there in the middle of the day is a bit weird. For one thing, it's an old school building, so that means it's in the middle of suburbia. Also, we weren't hungry and it felt too early for beers, so we just ended up checking it out and moving on.

We parked in Portland and walked around. None of us really felt like doing a tour or anything formal, so I ended up texting a few friends who have been to Portland, and that is how we found our way to the Dechutes brewpub. They have a tasting option, so we spent the next few hours eating great food and drinking great beer. It was pretty chill. Although I wanted to continue our beer tasing escapades by heading to the Rogue brewpub, we ended up grabbing donuts at Voodoo Donuts. The donuts at this place are pretty out there, both in names and in content.

Sophie's sister left us the next morning, flying back to Tennessee in the wee hours of the morning. Our next stop was Boise, which was about a 9 hour drive from Portland. I used to play The Oregon Trail a lot as a kid, so it was pretty fun driving through all these places that were in the game. As we drove through The Dalles, I imagined myself guiding my overladen wagon cart through the rapids as I sought to keep my family safe - the same family that had escaped dysentery, snake bites, and starvation. Fun times.

We got to Boise in the early afternoon. Boise is gorgeous, and our friends there were quick to brag about how they can mountain bike from their door and be on a great trail within 10 minutes. I was definitely jealous, although we didn't have time for them to prove it to us. Instead, they gave us a tour of their house before we headed out to the pedestrian mall in Boise. We dined at a place that had locally-sourced ingredients and beer in red text, and everything else in black. I think I had a really good burger, but since I forgot to take my camera, my memory, now a good 2.5 months later, is a bit hazy. I do know that we tried some beers from the Boise area that were fantastic. We were sad to leave Boise after just a single night there, but Colorado was calling.

Lovely Boise

Our drive to Colorado was very trying. At about 13-14 hours, it was the longest stretch of driving that we'd had so far, it was hot, and it was everything we could do to not go crazy as we drove across flat, flat Wyoming. Don't get me wrong, Wyoming is a beautiful state, but I-80 can drag on forever. We were both extremely happy when we finally arrived at my sister's house in Denver.

Our time in Denver flew by. We slept in and then met up with a friend in Boulder for lunch. For dinner, my sister had set us up with reservations at a new, super-hip restaurant in Denver that served street food from around the world. I don't think they had pupusas, but we did eat a ton of other great street food, too many different things to name. Oh, and there was good beer, of course. When the dessert menu came, I just about jumped out of my chair in excitement because there, on the menu, was coffee from El Salvador! Sleep be damned - I loved my double espresso at the end of the night.

My sister took the next day off so we could all go for a hike. We drove west for about an hour before stopping at a parking lot that was literally just off the interstate. After about 15 minutes of mostly uphill hiking, we could not longer hear or see the interstate, and we were walking among majestic mountains, tall trees, and beautiful streams. Our goal was Herman Lake, a small glacier lake tucked in the mountains. About 2/3 of the way there, it started hailing. Luckily, we were still below treeline, so we just waited for the storm to pass, about 20 minutes. When we got to the top, the weather had cleared and we had great vistas. It was a perfect day to be up there. As we headed down, it was starting to look like a storm was coming in. It hadn't rained in Denver for a long time, so none of us had brought our rain jackets, so we were a bit worried about how unprepared we were. However, we ended up timing things perfectly because about 30 seconds after we got into the car, a deluge of rain came down. My sister rejoiced at the rain as we carefully made our way out of the mountains, unable to see much in front of us since the rain was coming down so hard.

my three favorite ladies

That night, we ate dinner with my sister, her boyfriend, and one of the groomsmen from our wedding, who I hadn't seen since the wedding. Once again, great food and great beer. We were sad to leave Denver, but our next destination was the Royal Gorge in Cañon City, Colorado, where Sophie's brother was working as a raft guide.

We had a great time rafting down the Arkansas River and going through the Royal Gorge. The sheer walls of the gorge are very humbling. Simply beautiful. After rafting, we got dinner with Sophie's brother before finding a hotel room. The hotel looked pretty simple from the outside, but little did I know that many famous people had stayed at this hotel. A significant number of rooms in the hotel had placards next to the rooms saying "Goldie Hahn stayed here" or "John Belushi slept here." Our biggest mistake was not knowing to ask for the Belushi room. Hopefully it'd been cleaned up in the past 40 years.

Cañon City marked the end of the destinations for our road trip. We then had to make our way back to Tennessee. It was a long haul, but we decided to take a quick side-trip to 'Garden of the Gods' in Colorado Springs. It would've been fun to climb or camp here, but we just did a quick hike and were on our way.

If you've ever made the trip through the middle of Kansas on I-70, then you know there ain't nothing there for you to see. We made it half way through Missouri before stopping. After spending the night, we decided to try to take a trip up the St. Louis Arch. The arch itself is really pretty since it's surrounded by a huge park and the Mississippi River. Going up in the arch is quite an experience - they ask you if you're claustrophobic or afraid of heights before selling you a ticket, and, well, those are two good questions to ask, since the pod that carries you up is really small. It fits 5 people in it, all sitting. Even though I was sitting, I still had to hunch over. It's a pretty cool experience and I'd recommend it to people who are passing through.

the highlight of Kansas - wind turbine rotors!

inside the pod

the view from the top

After St. Louis, we made the long haul to Nashville, where we stopped and saw a few friends from high school who are now parents. We came, we ate, we danced, and then we decided that we were tired of traveling and finally got on the road for the final 2 hour push back to Chattanooga. It was good to be home, even though we had only a few days left before we would be making the long flight to Israel.

She's going to be a dancer

Home Leave Part 3 - Washington State

We drove into Seattle and picked up Sophie's sister and spent the day checking out Seattle. Of course, we drank a lot of coffee. We really didn't have any ideas on what to do in Seattle, so we went with the typical tourist ideas: Pike Place fish market, coffee, food, and the Space Needle. When we got to the Space Needle, we found a Dale Chihuly exhibit next door. Sophie knew this was there, but I guess I just hadn't been paying attention. Strangely, we had never heard of Chihuly until the week before, when Sophie's parents were watching a PBS special about his work. Basically, the guy is a phenomenal glass blower and has created some of the coolest works of art I've ever seen. I'm the kind of guy who goes into the Louvre and says "yea, ok, can we eat yet?" but man is Chihuly's stuff different. It's just fascinating.

those boats are real boats - so, this stuff is quite big

just to be clear, that big green thing on the right is mostly glass, and was made for an exhibition in Phoenix (I think)

After the Chihuly exhibit, we went up into the Space Needle, which was fun, although now that I've done it, I probably won't do it again. heh. On our walk back to our hotel, we found a great place to eat that had great food and great beers. The US really does have the best beer scene in the world.

The next morning, we drove up to Anacortes, Washington to take the ferry over to our next destination: the San Juan Islands. Sophie had been there before, and she was gushing about the beauty of the place and the whales. Sophie loves whales. On our ferry ride out there, we passed a few harbor seals swimming by. When we got to San Juan Island, we immediately got into a van and made our way to the put-in for our sea kayaking whale watching tour. Of course, they can't guarantee that you will see the whales, so Sophie was prepared to do whatever was necessary for us to see whales, even if that meant extending our time in the San Juans and doing kayaking trips every day. Luckily, this turned out to be a non-issue, because a pod of whales swam by as we were packing up the kayaks. Our tour guide was probably in her 50s or 60s and I really have never seen a person of that age as downright giddy as she was when she saw the whales. She has lived there for the past 5 years, sees the whales on most days, and still gets excited to see them. Hopefully I'll have the same zeal for the world around me when I get to be her age. Our sea kayaking trip was fun - we paddled down the coast for about an hour before stopping and having lunch. After lunch, the whales swam back by, so we got to see them once again, although this time they were much closer to shore. On our way back, we saw seven harbor seals sunning themselves and a bunch of purple starfish. Good stuff.

kayaking amongst the bull kelp

a whale passing by another group of kayakers

We spent the night in a state park right on the water, hoping to hear whales go by at night. Alas, this didn't happen, but one can dream, right? On the first night, our campsite was next to a group of a bunch of boy scouts. They were very well behaved, but the next morning, the leaders seemed to be complaining to the camp host about raccoons getting into their stuff, seemingly implying that the camp host should have told the scout leaders about raccoons. Come on, man. As an Eagle Scout, it was annoying to hear a car-camping scout leader complaining about wildlife bothering him. Sigh

nighttime at the campsite

We spent the rest of our time on San Juan Island checking out English Camp, American Camp, and enjoying Friday Harbor, the tiny town on San Juan Island. Apparently, there was a serious land dispute between England and the US over who owned the San Juan Islands. This lead to the Brits and Americans both stationing troops at opposite ends of the island. Luckily, there was no war about it, and the disagreement was solved peacefully. While in Friday Harbor, we went to the whale museum and learned about the fascinating subject of marine mammals. Essentially, it is believed that marine mammals actually lived on land for a long period of time before returning to the water. Pretty neat. I also learned that the orca whales in this region were placed on the endangered species list in 2005, which is really sad. Washington state is removing some dams on rivers that used to have large salmon runs, but it may be too-little, too-late, since many people think that the population size is small enough to where the ill-effects of inbreeding may restrict population growth. Hopefully they're just being pessimists, but regardless, I am very grateful to have seen these beautiful creatures swim by.

a butterfly in English Camp

After Friday Harbor, we took a ferry over to Vancouver Island and Victoria in British Columbia. We spent 3-4 hours in Victoria before catching another ferry to Olympic National Park back in Washington State. Victoria at this time of year was gorgeous, and I got some great pictures of your everyday Canadians.

sharing a 'pink cow' (ice cream + pink cream soda) in Victoria. The B.C. parliamentary building is in the background. Note the Canadians.

the harbor in Victoria

I had heard of Olympic National Park, but to be honest, I'd never investigated what we were going to see there. The prominence of the mountains there is amazing. They basically rise from sea level all the way up to 7,980'... and there are tons of peaks. We dropped off tents at the Heart o' the Hills campsite before driving up to Hurricane Ridge. We got extremely lucky, because there weren't many clouds obscuring our view from Hurricane Ridge. It's really pretty up there - in one direction, you see nothing but peaks. In the other direction, you see the ocean. Pretty neat.

the Olympics as seen from the ferry

Hurricane Ridge

After spending the night at Heart O' the Hills, we headed out the next morning to check out Sol Duc Falls. We had a great hike there. Again, it's hard to complain when you're surrounded by such huge, majestic, covered-in-green, trees. After our hike, we made our way to Forks and Rialto Beach. Sophie and her sister were both obsessed with the Twilight series, so we got lots of pictures of Forks, even though the little town isn't that interesting. The city does have a pretty good humor about it - they have signs warning of werewolves and vampires. They've definitely taken advantage of all of the press.

Sol Duc Falls

Rialto Beach is simply stunning. I spread out a camping pad on the stones, read, and took a nap while Sophie and her sister ventured up the beach to see some more sea stacks. You really could not have asked for a nicer day at Rialto Beach - blue sky with a few clouds, warm-ish temperatures, and, of course, the beautiful sound of the ocean. Rialto Beach is also covered in huge driftwood trees, making for a uniquely-Washington experience.

quite a large drift-tree

Sophie's sister climbing on a sea stack 

sea stacks seen through a hole in the roots of this ancient tree

We spent the night at a campsite near Rialto Beach. We woke up and started driving towards our next destination: Oregon. Along the way, on a random stretch of road without much around it and still inside Olympic National Park, we came across a few animals that looked to be dogs. It was a bit strange to see a group of obviously-from-the-same-litter dogs in a deserted stretch of road, so we laughed that maybe these were actually wolves. Well, it turns out that there are wolves in Olympic National Park, and we found pictures of these wolves that looked exactly like the 'dogs' we saw. So, I'm going to say we saw wolves. Cool! We didn't chase them into the woods to get pictures, but maybe we should have.

Our last place to visit in Washington state was the Quinault Rain Forest. Of course, it was gorgeous. We were sad to leave Washington, but we were also excited to see a new state for all of us: Oregon!