Moonrise at Dash Point

Tuesday, January 2, 2018

How many times are we in the right place at the right time, through no apparent effort of our own?  (And yes sometimes we are in the wrong place at the wrong time, that happens too.)

This outing was an example of being in the right place at the right time.

Sitting at home after dinner, I got it in my head that I wanted to be outdoors.  It was early January and COLD, so I dressed warmly and drove the 6 minutes down to the Dash Point fishing pier and the beach there.  I kept asking myself why I was doing this since I hate to be cold … but, whatever.  Evidently, I was supposed to be there … grrrr (and brrrr).

I walked the beach a bit.  Hardly anyone was around except the fishing people out on the end of the pier along with a Christmas tree that had lights on only the bottom 1/3 of the tree.  The star on top was nice though. 🙂

A woman came walking down the beach with her elderly dog.  We chatted a little.  I sat down and the dog came over and sat next to me and leaned into me.  The dog wasn’t cold so I figured it was just a very friendly dog.  The woman said the dog is never friendly.  The dog isn’t fearful or aggressive; the dog just doesn’t like people.  But the dog sure liked me!

So the very nice woman and I talked and then she and her dog walked on up the beach.  Why I waited in the cold, I don’t know, but I did hang around.  The woman and dog came back and we chatted for quite a while, with the dog again leaning up against me.  Had it not been for the woman and the dog, I would have gone home long before this.

Tomorrow, news media all over the Pacific Northwest would report this moon rise.  But I was here today!  This very evening!  The moon rise was spectacular.  There are probably thousands of photographs of it online.  And I was lucky(?) enough to have been out there on the beach with a front row seat.

Our moon is about 239,000 miles away and ordinarily looks about the size of a dime in the sky, or maybe a nickel once in a while.  And yet tonight it looked like it was only 300 miles away, right above Walla Walla, Washington, while I was standing in Tacoma, Washington, and that moon was larger than the largest mountain on earth, I swear.  There must have been a stunning sunset to the west, out over the Pacific Ocean, that was shining on the moon for our benefit.

If you have the time and a large enough screen/monitor, please click on each photo to enlarge it.

Christmas was already over for the season.  But I thought this moon rise (and that dog’s and her owner’s companionship) was a stupendous present nonetheless.