Why Don't You Come to Olympia For A Visit Sometime?

Sam and I invite you to Olympia this summer. If you’ve never traveled to Washington State this is a good time – unless you are a terrorist. We don’t want to be bombed or shot.

Actually, Sam and I and Kathleen (the lady of the house) live in Lacey, next door to Olympia. Lacey, as I have explained many times to friends, is a town without very definable borders and looks like a cancerous growth on the butt of Olympia. 

Washington State house behind Capitol Lake

Still, we’d like to have you visit unless you’re not too keen on ethnic diversity. The Olympia area is a rich melting pot of people of all races speaking a polyglot of languages. We have American Indians, Black Americans, Asian Indian, Chinese, Filipinos, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Native Hawaiian Islanders, Guamanians, Samoans, Hispanics, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and more. Better yet, we seem to have a restaurant for each ethnicity, which makes for some totally yummy eating. Kathleen and I currently favor one of the local Thai restaurants.

In honor of our rich ethnic diversity, we host an event here every February called the Procession of the Species. This parade, to commemorate Earth Day, often features weird life forms from outer (or inner) space and draws nearly 30,000 spectators. Many of the parade creatures show up at The Evergreen State College graduation later in the year too. I watched the graduation ceremony one time when former Governor Gregoire handed out diplomas to people who were dressed in sheets and boxes and dinosaur costumes – and those were just the cute ones.

We have Dragon Boat races here. This annual celebration, hosted by Saint Martin’s University, features spirited dragon boat races (Kathleen’s crew fell overboard a couple years ago), Chinese traditional art demonstrations, traditional lion dances, music, and martial arts performances.

Olympia also is home to the Oly Rollers, a women’s flat track roller derby league. That may be because women outnumber men here 52.21% to 47.79%. I’m suddenly reminded of that old country song about the women all getting prettier at closing time. Too bad Olympia Brewery, which called this area home since the late 1800’s fell on hard times and the plant now sits idle waiting for somebody to buy it and demolish it. Strangely enough, Olympia is located at the southern end of Puget Sound on Budd Inlet, but the brewery company apparently let that outfit with the horses – now owned by foreign interests - steal the saying, “This Bud’s for you,”

If you do vacation to this area, make sure you bring a coat and/or raincoat. We have had more rainy days per year on average over the past 30 years than any city in the lower 48 states – although last year was exceptionally dry and this year looks like it might be too.

Just up the road we have the championship Seattle Seahawks and it looks (at least on paper) like the Seattle Mariners could put together a decent win streak this year. Safeco Field, where the Mariners play is (in my estimation) one of the great ballparks in America.

Shoot! I almost forgot to mention that Olympia is the capitol city of Washington. I don’t recommend a tour of the capitol building. All the grey marble inside makes it look like a huge men’s urinal. You could take a nice walk around Capitol Lake if you held your nose. The lake is pretty polluted and our state legislature seems unlikely ever to settle the question of whether to dredge or not to dredge to clean the lake up.

Anyway, ya’ll come see us. We’ll try to leave a few Northern Lights on for you.