Hike 1B: Mid-Northeast, part I

Dear Diary,

Gosh, I'm sorry.  It's been four - no, five now - days, hasn't it?  But I put off telling you about these parks because I expected to finish with the area soon; but then Wednesday I took so many pictures that it seemed best to split them anyway.  So this page is about two parks I visited fairly late Sunday.  The next is about one of those parks again, and a third one, as I visited them Wednesday morning.

I originally hoped to do these three, Maple Leaf Reservoir Park, and Magnuson Park in one day.  "Mid-Northeast" then would've meant parks north of 65th St and south of 85th St in northeast Seattle.  But as it turned out those other two parks got separated, so what's left is "mid" east-west as well as north-south.

Dahl Playfield

A playfield whose men's room has a serious privacy problem - I was always going to have a problematic relationship with Waldo J. Dahl Playfield, but it's close enough that I've told you bits and pieces about it often enough anyway, dear Diary.  Introduced May 6 in "Go North, Aging Man", then featured October 2 and 3 in "A Thank You" and the first two parts of "Water Fountains - An Interim Report", and finally getting a bit more attention December 15 in "The End of the Tour".  Remembering that as more extensive than it actually was, I meant to keep my visit to Dahl Playfield strictly business.  Everyone said its restrooms would be open; were they?

But I'd ignored Target's restrooms, incensed that they continue to pretend their water fountains are "out of order", so the last restroom I'd been near was Maple Leaf Reservoir Park's, not actually very far horizontally but hours before.  The whole way east and south, taking creek action shots I'll probably never use, my need to do Number Two got stronger and stronger.

So...  Here's the restroom building:

And here's the open door of the men's room:

And, um, ...

here are my shoes in the inches of water sitting in the deepest part of the room, near the sink, which unfortunately is not where the room's drain is.

It had rained inches in the preceding days, so I wondered if this was overflow.  That finally led me to the women's room:

Notice the dry floor.  Turned out the women's room had a slight stoop outside, enough to keep most rain out.  Did the men's?  Yes.  What I'd had to wade through was a cleaning technique, not an act of God.  The men's room had been hosed down.

So it seems I'll continue to have a problematic relationship with Dahl Playfield.  But everyone was right; the restrooms were open.

Ravenna-Eckstein Community Center and Park

The postcard shot:

The closed door:

The water fountain out back, no longer surrounded by "DANGER" tape.  I don't know whether it would have run this year; either outcome, this coming spring, will be a surprise:

But something was bothering me, and I came back to Ravenna-Eckstein three days later.