Pictures of the Hoh Rainforest and my "Magic Eight ball" day

It turns out that driving hours through winding mountain forest roads, then spending many hours on trails ending with a face plant which has left bruises on about 20% of my legs SO far: that kind of day turns my autonomic system into a magic eight ball. So I get up and say (no joke), “I think I may be stronger than last week.... maybe this exercise is a restart.” Followed almost immediately by my passing out.

I go downtown to Hello Kitty store. Followed by passing out. Let’s shake the eight ball and see what it says? It says you feel great! And I did for 25 minutes where I talked to an RN on vacation about the variations of the same disease in presentation before “shaking the magic eight ball” again and got: voice slurring.

I get home (read that as: forcibly abducted by Linda and Cheryl and taken to Cheryl’s house) for lunch and “shake the magic eight ball” and pass out again (I get that one a LOT). Was it worth it? Well not so much for the Hello Kitty store but YES. I tried all summer to go to the Hoh Rainforest, just the fact that I had a terrible week and kept trying makes it worth it. But several hours of views like this: Yeah, that makes it worth it.

Here is another of the green scenery in the “Hall of Mosses” (What is it with Americans and big names? Canadians just name the forest (or giant stretch of land – The Shield) and leave it at that – I am worried that all new forests in the USA will now be Forest Liberty and Freedom! Or The Operation Amaze and Astound National Park).

And to prove that I was at the Hoh, here I am in the requisite “going under the tree.” The parks service learned that hallowing out a giant redwood or other trees to drive through actually, wait for it, KILLS the tree! So now, as cool as it was in the 50’s to drive through the tree, they have had to top off the tree. So currently you are allowed in the Redwoods National Forest to drive through the giant redwood STUMP. So here, at World Heritage Site they pretty much just leave things where they lay. Which is cool as there was one tree that was 190 feet long, we could see the broken off stump where it fell over. Yup, 190 feet of trail is following this log at tall as we are high (with kids walking the top) and we find out, the top of the tree was taken away to clear the trail. So it was TALLER than 190 feet. Makes my 6 foot 3 inches seem pretty puny, eh?

To give you an idea of what Linda and I did A LOT of the time so I could enjoy this, was doing things like this, for collectively I guess over an hour. The slope I fell down was the one leading back DOWN from the plateau to the trail joining trails together and had about a 20-25 degree slope, so yeah, scary times. But also, it is always those last 300 yards that will get ya!

Anyway, back to today: during lunch the eight ball shakes up and up bubbles, “Blow off the back of the head” which is Brain-go-Boom slang for a type of seizure where it feels like someone is blasting out of the back of my head with a shotgun, which then goes into blinding pain, head and torso shaking and then more stuff which I pass out for, before I wake up blind. My body is so rigid it can’t be moved (like, try to move the arm…break the arm), and then after 45 seconds to 2 minutes it starts again, and again, and again. Oh the fun we have. I was put to bed and slept many hours. Don’t know if I ever got to finish lunch.

But I can’t predict what happens after, and yes, healing from a lot of traumatic injuries probably isn’t helping and all the bruising makes me worried for TIA’s and other minor strokes but was it worth it? Yeah. I saw the Hoh, I did, I went, I lived. It took Cheryl to drive and Linda to help me over the steps and roots and inclines but we did it and saw it together. That means something to me. So does this little guy.
If my health has recovered enough, I will be attempting to cross back on the Ferry tomorrow, where I can download our cameras and get you more pictures. These pictures are from Cheryl, and thanks for letting me use them. Just wanted to give you an idea what was worth trying again and again to see (an incentive to come visit me? See how wheelchair accessible it is!).