Orcas Island and Getting My Groove Back

This being a paddling blog one might infer from the lack of entries that I didn't have much paddling stuff to write about these past months. And that would be correct. I sort of lost my taste for paddling. Why isn't terribly important except perhaps to say I think I stopped paying attention to what I liked about paddling and started paying attention to things I somehow convinced myself I was supposed to like.

Anyway and luckily I happen to have friends who live in the San Juan Islands (Orcas Island specifically) and were nice enough to put me up for a couple of weeks. And if you're looking for a nice place to get (back) into paddling there's no doubt in my mind the San Juans are a world class destination. My friends also are pretty fun and quite decent paddlers so that makes it that much nicer. They don't really drink enough for my tastes, but I've been working on that and I think slow progress is being made. It's good to have goals and getting them to drink more is not as bad a goal as some I suppose.

The trip up there is a pain in the ass though. It's about a 14.5 hour drive from my house to the ferry landing in Anacortes. Mostly for nostalgia I do the trip in one day. Since I drive through both Portland and Seattle it's important to schedule things so I don't arrive during rush hours. There are two ways of doing this. One is to drive on a weekend. Saturdays and Sundays are relatively traffic free. If I go on a weekday I have to leave by around 4:00AM. It takes about 12 hours to get to Seattle, so that puts me there at 4:00PM which, truth be told, is not really a great time to take the 5 through the city. But it's better than being there later and I really don't want to get up any earlier than I do. So 4 it is.

I live in the San Francisco bay area (the east bay). For years I used to commute across one of the bridges between 3 and 5 days a week so I have some appreciation for traffic. But for some reason the traffic in and around Seattle (hi Tacoma. hello Everett) comes across as really, really awful. I'd chalk it up to 12 hours of driving except on the way back I've hit it after only about 2 hours and it still sucked. Part of the problem is, no doubt, that many WA drivers seem not to understand that the left lane is the go fast lane. Rather it appears they think it's the I'm-going-fast-enough-go-around-me lane. Which gums the works a bit and tends to make the left lane, in fact, the slowest lane on the freeway. Still though, at the end of the traffic, if you're going north, is Anacortes, a ferry ride, and the San Juan Islands and all of their just stunning beauty (says I).

The ferry ride to Orcas Island is one of the highlights of the trip. You arrive in Anacortes and get in line for the ferry. My friends, who live there, advocate one be there (at least) an hour before the ferry is scheduled to depart since they do sometimes fill up. And if you don't get on the one you were after the wait can be many hours. So you wait at least an hour. Then you drive on this big assed boat (they put several 18 wheelers on them sometimes) and spend another hour to one and a half hours making your way to your destination. You stop at such and so island, people get off, people get on, nobody is in any discernible hurry and, eventually, you get to where you wanted to be. The whole thing is sort of a scrubbing off of the mainland pace. Like the decon scene in the Andromeda Strain. Except for the whole worrying about  deadly space organisms part.

A quick drive after getting off the ferry and I arrived at my friends place. I was staying in what they call their "barn". Here's a picture:

It looks barnish, at least to my non-rural eyes, but I don't know if technically it is a barn. That's what they call it though. See the windows there on the upper floor? That's the apartment portion of the barn (see, how many barns have apartment portions?) It's a bit rustic, having no bathroom or electricity. It has a sink with running water, but the shower is outside. Right there to the right of the downstairs rightmost window, that's the shower. For a bathroom there's an outhouse that can seem a distressingly long way away sometimes. Oh and a stove. It has a stove. So you can make coffee in the morning. That's important. Mornings come early as hell up there. There's light in the sky and the birds are making (loud) noises at around 4:30AM. It's surprisingly pleasant in a sort of yah-yah-they-sound-pretty-but-why-now kind of way.

So that's where I stayed for about 2 weekes. Minus the night I stayed at one of the finest restaurants in the world.