I think I’ve posted about most of this on my social media sites, so feel free to ignore this if you wish. And I’m totally aware that I come off as a city girl, but that’s okay.

1) They love traffic circles here.

Supposedly they put so many in because of some study about how they keep traffic moving. And while I can understand the reasoning behind that theory, especially if you’re in a rural area where a stop light just isn’t possible, they’ve gone a little bit overboard in some areas.

For example, there’s a street by our house that is just barely big enough for two cars to pass each other. They have four traffic circles at various intersections along this road. One is big enough to be a proper roundabout because it’s right where the street becomes a normal sized street and it crosses another normal sized street that’s a popular thoroughfare. However the rest of them are so tiny that it’s ridiculous.

2) The bugs are insane here.

Now that summer is roasting us alive, all sorts of bugs have come out to play. The ants said hello first and promptly laughed at our attempts to control them.

Then there were the bees and the wasps. The wasps up here are especially vicious. It doesn’t take much to piss them off and if you do they will hunt you down. I avoid normal honey bees like the plague, but the bumble bees are totally harmless and pretty much tame.

The spiders need to die in a fire.

3) There are farms EVERYWHERE.

In Orange County it would take you at least an hour, maybe two, to reach farm country. In Olympia, you can be out in the middle of the country side in fifteen minutes or less. In fact, the Boyo’s school was surrounded by farms on two sides and a forest on the other.

4) The playgrounds aren’t kidding around.

The park we go to has a four story tower with three slides. Some of them are pretty steep too. It also has a merry go round (haven’t seen one of those in ages!) and a freaking zip line!

5) They have otter crossings.

OTTER. CROSSINGS.

And yes, we’ve seen Otters using them too.

6) The amount of pollen in the air is scary.

We went to the zoo and saw it coming off the trees in waves whenever a gust of wind shook them. And there was a week or two there where the air was filled with white fluff from all the cattails. You could see it drifting around like snow.

7) Deer are surprisingly used to humans sharing their land.

I mean, they aren’t docile enough to let you pet them, but they’re smart enough to let traffic clear before they try to cross the street. Towards the end of the school year we would either see a deer before we went to pick up Boyo or after, and they would wait patiently for us to pass before crossing to road.