Gig Harbor Street Scramble and Folk Fest

This past weekend was very busy for Liz and me. We continued our growing obsession by going to the Gig Harbor street scramble. Gig harbor is south of Seattle near Tacoma across a very pretty bridge. We got really luck with the weather, it was really clear and warm and the rain held off until overnight. Just leaving Seattle Liz was able to snap a nice picture of Mt. Rainer from I-5.


Then here are the bridges to and from Gig Harbor. I don't know what the story is, but the one bridge seemed older than the other and each only had traffic in one direction. In any case the bridges looked fantastic and I can't resist including a picture here.


We got a bit of a late start and had ~1:15 drive to Gig Harbor so I dropped Liz off to sign us up so we'd make it on time. By the time I found parking and walked back, Liz had already gotten a map and we were in the 30min period were the Street Scramble elite plan out their routes.


Some of the bikers, and possibly runners are pretty serious about getting to all the locations, or as many as is possible. So a fair amount of effort is put into trying to figure out the shortest / easiest route. The picture below shows the dock and the tents set-up for the event and some of the scramblers mulling over the map.


After all the planning people got going. I was a bit too ambitious and also proved a terrible navigator, so I lost the privilege of guiding us around Gig Harbor pretty quickly. Liz did much better. Here you can see me running ahead to get the answer to one of the questions, which was something like what is the number painted on the fire hydrant.


This next picture is from the top of a set of stairs that served as a cut-through from the street above to the street right on the water. This shot was from #15 on the map and looks across the harbor from the west end.


We did OK. We were 7th of 9 in our group; 27th of 56 in our class; and 42nd of ~130 overall.
http://www.streetscramble.com/results/2008/gigharbor

So that was our Saturday.

On Sunday we took in some more local culture going to the Seattle Folk Life Festival. The festival had a number of different things going on, but what I remember most is the craft vendors and the musicians. We met Ian and Katy at the fountain at the center of the fair.

And then made a couple of laps around to see what all was going on. With the good weather it was packed, here is one of our crowd pictures.