The day before my birthday, I headed out on one of my favorite local rides. It’s called the Three Pass Blast because you head through three very different mountain passes: Snoqualmie, Blewett and Stevens. I’ve done this before (and incorrectly counted it as four passes) and it’s a beautiful ride. I did it clockwise this time, and since I set out to do as little on two lane roads as possible, it changed the route a bit for me. I headed down 203 to Fall City and headed up past Snoqualmie Falls to North Bend. I hopped on I-90 for a few miles and then got off at exit 47 to catch NF-56. It’s a fantastic little twisty road that I’ve videoed before. When I’m king of the world, I will block off this road and stage a motorcycle race. After that I pounded the pavement on I-90 through Snoqualmie Pass before hopping off to catch US-97 north through Blewett pass. The dry, arid land is a stark contrast to Snoqualmie Pass. The heat was also starting to build so I didn’t waste any time getting to Leavenworth. I stopped for a quick lunch and then finished up with a beautiful ride through Stevens Pass.
It was a gorgeous day for a ride, and I was having so much fun that I didn’t stop to take any pictures. Sorry! You’ll have to take my word for it. I timed the traffic well and had fairly clear sailing until about 10 miles west of the Stevens Pass summit. It wasn’t anything too bad though and the 240 miles flew by.
While Luke, Rachel and David were here last week, we had a sunny BBQ up at Tim and Chelsea’s house. They made one of the most amazing lunches I’ve ever eaten: grilled carne asada, rice, refried beans, guacamole, salsa, and 
I headed out with the Brandt family to Alder Lake State Park for the Fourth of July weekend. It wasn’t our first choice since we got a late start on reservations, but the campground actually was pretty nice. The biggest downside was that it was close to Hwy 7 which is the western entrance to Mt. Rainier, but the traffic died down a bit at night and the fan in the camper drowned out the noise.
We have had quite a few new young couples join our church recently, so we decided to put together a camping trip. Unfortunately I picked a weekend when not a lot of the new people could join us, but we still did get a good crew together for a fun weekend.
It inevitably rains in the Puget Sound area over Memorial Day, so this year we decided to head east of the mountains. For those of you unfamiliar with Washington geography, the Cascade Mountains run down the state and create two very different environments. The west side is dominated by the ocean weather so it’s very mild year round with lots of rain. The east side of the mountains is a certified desert with extreme temperatures. You’re almost guaranteed to get sunshine. So with that knowledge in hand, we looked into a trip to the Grand Coulee Dam.
A few friends are thinking about getting their motorcycle licenses so there have been quite a few chats about safety floating around the lunch table. I decided to do some research and figure out just what the statistics tell us about riding a motorcycle.
September 11 Retrospective
I was in my senior year at Purdue and it was going to be a big day. It was the start of a two day job fair out in Memorial Mall on campus. John Deere had recently told me that although they wanted to hire me after my internship, they couldn’t because of a hiring freeze. That put me into a bit of a tail spin and I felt that I really needed to come out of that job fair with some solid options.
The first I heard about the attacks was when I went down for breakfast. One of the ladies who worked there was a friend of Grandma Hinkle so we always had a little chat when we saw each other. She told me that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center, but since she didn’t seem too concerned, I didn’t think much of it. I was picturing a little Cessna that had an accident or something along those lines.
I took the food back up to my room and flipped on the TV. That’s when I saw how devastating it actually was. A few minutes later, I watched the second plane crash and then the towers crashed.
Looking back now, I don’t think I realized how big of an event this was. It doesn’t seem possible now, but watching on a little TV screen with so many unanswered questions, it didn’t bring the same feeling that it does now. I knew it was a big deal, but I had no idea who was behind it or what would follow in the coming years.
So I suited up and head out to the job fair armed with resumes. The first thing I noticed was how quiet campus was. Purdue has one of the busiest airports in the Midwest (in terms of touchdowns and landings, mostly from small planes), but there wasn’t anyone in the sky. When I got to the job fair, it was a bit chaotic. Some company employees were on the phone with their loved ones or their home office trying to figure out if they should stay or go. The armed forces booths were being hurriedly packed up. Trains seemed to be the transportation of choice, but people from the west coast were left wondering if they should just start driving because the train tickets were quickly snatched up.
A majority of the companies stayed at the job fair. I ended up getting a few good interviews that resulted in some job offers, but in terms of world events, that was far from the most important thing that happened.
Later in life, I would meet people who were actually in the city at the time, see a lot of friends head off to the ensuing wars, and visit the site of the old towers a few times. It still brings back a wide variety of emotions and I can’t see that ever changing. I wonder if this is how Pearl Harbor felt. Are they comparable? Was Pearl Harbor scarier for the average citizen because of the small amount of information? Was 9/11 worse because we had so many data streams coming in everywhere we looked? I think about people like my grandparents who lived through both of them and wonder how they connect the two events. I’ll have to ask Grandpa and Grandma about this at Christmas.
After writing that paragraph, I went back and read what I wrote on the day it happened. Most of my post seems to be about how this event was much worse than Pearl Harbor. I don’t know if I agree with that anymore, but I’m so glad that I took the time to write down some thoughts on that day. It doesn’t really matter which one was worse. They were both terrible in their own right.
I’ve included a few of the videos below. Posting images of this seems to be taboo in our culture, but I think it’s important for us to see it happen and remember back to those first few minutes of horror and confusion. Put aside your politics and just watch these…