I had a four great days in Olympia, Washington - other than being slightly sick. I had an amazing group of eight mentors for training, and Sue Tait, the diocesan coordinator, could not have been more warm and hospitable.
I had a few hours on Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning to walk around Olympia. I had never spent any time in Washington’s capital city before. In fact, usually when I thought of Olympia it was as a place where I had to watch the signs carefully so that I made it to Seattle instead of finding myself on the Kitsap peninsula.
Oympia is an older city than Seattle. As the plaque indicates, it was the end of the Oregon Trail.
The town is dominated by the State Capitol and the other surrounding buildings which form the Capitol Campus. Designed around 1910 at the height of the “City Beautiful” movement, they sits on a hill overlooking the town and the Deschutes River. Done in the classical style - at least as interpreted by the Ecole des Beaux Arts - the complex of buildings has the look and feel of a modern acropolis.
As I was wandering over the complex of government buildings, I found this intriguing monument to Korean War Veterans.
I was staying at the Phoenix Inn, a hotel near the waterfront. A couple decades ago various industrial buildings covered this area, but there has obviously been an effort to both clean up the environment and to open up the city to the lovely Budd Inlet, the southernmost point of the Puget Sound.
I finished my training today around three, and Sue drove me back to Sea-Tac. My flight to Oakland, unfortunately, wasn’t until 9:00 in the evening, and I had to wait there for hours. It would have been a little more tolerable had I not been feeling quite sick. John graciously agreed to pick me up from the Oakland airport despite, and I made it to bed by just before midnight.
