Thyme Patch Park on Monday

Dear Diary,

On Monday I visited all the City of Seattle park restrooms and water fountains known to me (which means, more or less, those I found in 2020) in the area I think of as Northwest - specifically, west of 3rd Avenue NW - except for those in Carkeek Park, which I intend to get to a little later.  (The 3rd Ave limit means I omitted also Sandel Playground and Sunset Place.)

All the restrooms were open.  (How weird it still is for me to write that line.  It won't be true of subsequent hikes in this series, though.)

All but a few of the water fountains were running.

In other words, I found exactly the boring baseline I was looking for.

Parks visited:

• Ross Park (restroom pair and water fountain)
  
• Gilman Playground (restroom pair and water fountain)
  
• Ballard Commons (pseudo-restroom and water fountain)
  
• The Burke-Gilman Trail (water fountain)
• Ballard Playground (water fountain) and Community Center (restroom pair)
  
• Thyme Patch Park
• Webster Park (water fountain)
• Salmon Bay Park (restroom pair and water fountain)
  
• Loyal Heights Playfield (water fountains) and Community Center (restroom pair)
  
• Golden Gardens Park (restroom pairs and water fountains)
• Soundview Playfield (restroom pair and water fountain)
• Crown Hill Park (water fountain)
• Baker Park on Crown Hill

The links point to folders of photos of the plumbing features.  Those folders are in my Google Drive account.

I didn't, on this hike, visit the Ballard Locks, where there are federal restrooms, which in the past I've found reliably open, and federal water fountains, which in the past I've found reliably on.

Water fountain issues:

At Golden Gardens Park, the south water fountain, right next to the Eddie Vine Boat Ramp, is un-usably damaged, as it has been for some time.

At Crown Hill Park, the water fountains, which had run fine in the past, gave no water at all:

And at Baker Park on Crown Hill, there continues to be no sign of a water fountain.  In the past, I've been fortunate enough to meet someone who said they'd grown up near there, and never had seen a water fountain there.  But the City of Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation continues to advertise such a water fountain:

Now that things are pretty much back to normal, the parks department should really redeem its word and put a water fountain there.   Until it either does so, or removes the claim on the park's Web page, I'm going to treat this as a defective water fountain on my maps.

That said, in NW things are, very much, back to normal.  N and NE will be less so, but this is still pretty much the boring baseline I expected.  Well done, parks department.

Some things I've done in the past which I didn't do this time:  I didn't test the restrooms' sinks and dryers, except at Ballard Community Center, where I had to, and found that the excessive water pressure in the water fountain was also in the restroom sink.

And I didn't look for neat stuff to photograph.  But a couple of pieces of it fell into my lap.  First of all, as always, doing the Ross Park restroom door shot also means photographing a mosaic:

And second, I accidentally walked right past Thyme Patch Park, one of those tiny one-lot nice parks, as I was looking for Webster Park.  I wrote how pleasant it is when I first visited it in 2020, and took photos of its art, but I hadn't been back.  On Monday it was a one-person park.  Someone was working in the attached P-patch, but left once I started eating tortilla chips fairly loudly; so I left when someone else showed up to work in the P-patch.  But as I was leaving, some red flowers caught my attention.  I don't think they actually show up in this photo, but here the photo is anyway:

All for now.  I still have three-quarters of this work left to do, and hiking for another of the pages I mean to write this month as well.  So we'll see how much I actually get done and when.  But until I have more to write about, happy days and pleasant nights, dear Diary.