1996 World Championships

One of our forays into youth sports led us to the 1996 ISI World Recreational Team Championships in Seattle.

Funny, I was pretty sure it was 1995.  I think I got that impression from reading the front of the world champion's souvenir t-shirt.

That's her gold medal for world championship and her silver medal for world championship runners-up.

Obviously there is more to the story than that but I think that's enough of it for this time.  Perhaps the world champion will want to tell the story at some point and there just isn't any reason whatsoever why the version that she tells should not be the official version.

Anyway, yesterday I was searching for the cap I wear to hockey (it says Minnesota Hockey) when I stumbled across a cap which belongs to my wife.  It bore a patch indicating that it was a souvenir of the ISI World Championships in Seattle in 1996.  I looked at this photo again and I guess that I only thought that last digit was a 5.  1996 works just as well for my purposes here.

It's good to have secondary sources.

We had some down time between events and we visited some of the major tourist attractions.  I took some photos.

One day we took the ferry across Puget Sound and drove all the way out to the Pacific Ocean.  I know that I usually think of Seattle as coastal but that body of water is the Sound and the Ocean is actually quite a bit farther away than I expected.  But we got an early start and had enough time to see a few things and make it back in time to catch the last ferry of the day back into Seattle.

This one was taken at Rose Beach in the Olympic National Park.

The day was a pretty big success actually.  On the way back we stopped at a supermarket in some tiny town out there on the Olympic Peninsula.  There was a restaurant attached to the store and we had dinner there.  A dinner that both TOPWLH and I remember as absolutely some of the freshest fish ever and one of our favorite of all time sea food dinners.

In a restaurant attached to a grocery store in a tiny town apparently in the middle of nowhere.

We also visited Mount Rainier.

TOPWLH had recently had some sort of injury while playing tennis in the cheapest possible shoes that she could find.  No support, she rolled her ankle is what I remember.  She was using a cane and couldn't walk a long distance in hilly terrain.

That meant that Wireless and I ascended a half mile or so up the trail behind the Mount Ranier visitor center to this mountain meadow without her.

I am going to say that we were right at or just slightly above the tree line.  Pretty high up for a flatlander like me.

And this one is of the actual summit of Mount Rainier.

You can't really make it out in the photo but as I recall there was a climbing party on the mountain while we were there and we could make out the tiny dots of the individual climbers in that snow field  just frame right of the summit.