Greetings to my fellow Thursday Door Bloggers. I’ve missed more postings but I was able to do some doorscursions while traveling in Washington State the past week and a half ago. The trip was for pleasure (since that’s what we retired folk do) to visit some nice areas to do some photography and it was fun while it lasted.
The second part of the trip had us traveling to the mountains to see Mt. Rainier and it was a beautiful National Park to visit but we did have clouds (no photographer complains about clouds) and a few drops of rain, but not much to complain about, and some cool weather. Funny thing, I checked the weather before leaving but our initernary was spread out over the state and I didn’t pack for cold weather so my T-shirts and thin rain jacket was not insulating when the temperatures cooled in the evening but fortunately, I live in the San Francisco Bay Area and this is my kind of weather. But still, I had to purchase a souvenir long sleeve T-shirt to add to my light wardrobe for this part of the trip.
Our evening in Mt. Rainier ended with a nice dinner at their resort called Paradise, and then trying to photograph the sunset but the compositions in that location just wasn’t cutting it so we packed up and drove to our motel outside the park, about a 45 minute or more drive. It was getting darker as the sun setted and we had not been to the motel yet so we followed the GPS to another exit from the park. But fate was with us and we passed an overlook turnoff which I failed to stop at in my haste to get out of the park before it got too dark and I looked over the edge of the roadway and saw the peak of Mt. Rainier to my left standing clear with some clouds and the sunset light. I found a turnoff within a minute on the opposite side of the road to make a U Turn to get back to that lookout and we had the best views of the peak with the sunset lighting up the clouds. A few lucky people also stopped at the lookout to enjoy what we saw.
When the sunset show ended, it was back to the curvy mountain road in the dark to find our motel and a slow driver was not willing to pull over until we got down to lower elevations. Anyway, I drove quickly in the dark because it was a long day and we were late to check into the motel so we had no idea what we passed on the dark road.
The next morning, we drove back up Mt. Rainier to visit other locations we could not get to on the first day and we passed through a small town of Elbe which we couldn’t see as we passed it in the dark the night before. What a surprise! It was a little railroad town with train rides and rail cars turned into small diners. We stopped for a little break and I found the historic white church which is the feature of my Thursday Doors post this week. According to Wikipedia, The town of Elbe is called, “a census-designated place (CDP) in Pierce County, Washington, Washington, United States. The population was 29 at the 2010 census.
The Elbe Evangelical Lutheran Church, a tiny white church built by the German immigrants who established the community, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on October 8, 1976. The Mount Rainier Scenic Railroad begins its excursion trains in Elbe, with seasonal tours to Mineral Lake, just 3 miles south.” More about Elbe can be found on the Wikipedia link: HERE
This is the church and it’s door.
These are a couple of bonus postings for resident TD Blogger, Dan Antion, since he always appreciates a good train photo.
And, you must have been thinking, why did I entice you with my story about Mt. Rainier’s sunset; well, here’s a panoramic sample that I shot.
Thank you for visiting my post and thanks again to Norm 2.0 for his creation of the Thursday Doors website that gives us bloggers an outlet to let our thoughts be put on paper or in this case, web space. For more posts and photos of doors by others please go to: Thursday Doors.
