American Discovery Trail: A Place I Really Walked To

Our "pier"

I walked a long way this week, averaging 12,000 steps per day, which leaves me in the suburbs about 15 miles outside of Cincinnati. Rather than pictures of the Ohio suburbs, I have a few photos I took yesterday on my walk.

I never think of it this way, but I guess I live in a development with a private beach. Technically, the beach and the path to it are only open to people in my community and the one next to us, although other people come and walk there anyway. Arlo and I had not gone down to the beach yet this year, but yesterday we made the effort. It is a long walk: 10,000 steps and about two hours round trip. I let Arlo run on the beach unless we encounter another dog, so it's fun for him.

We live at the far south end of Puget Sound, not quite the southernmost point, but close. The beach is about two miles from our house. When we got there it was an hour after low tide. If you go at high tide, you can barely step on the sand, but at low tide there is plenty of beach to walk on.

When we moved to Jubilee six years ago, there was quite a bit of the pier still standing. There were places you could have stood on it, if you could get up there. It looked like an old, broken-down pier. Now it is just eleven pilings and one crossboard hanging on. Beyond the pier in the picture is Anderson Island, one of many islands in the Sound. People live on Anderson Island, and it has roads and parks and services and a cemetery, but you can only get your car there by ferry.

Looking east along the beach. We walk over to the tree you can see in the distance lying across the beach. On the other side of the tree is someone else's private beach. I have no idea where our beach ends and theirs starts, but the tree makes a good dividing line.

We have our own shipwreck, on the beach next to ours. I have walked to it a couple of times, treading on our neighbors' private beach, and you can see various pieces of the boat, now almost all covered in barnacles. It is not really a shipwreck, but rather an abandoned boat left there long ago.

We have shells on our beach!

Arlo checking out the beach.

Someone is coming! Or maybe going, appears to be paddling between us and Anderson Island.

On a good day, you can see both Mount Rainier and the Olympic Mountains from the beach, but today was not that good day. I will have to go back.