Camp Report
By my recollection, the last time we visited San Juan Island was in something like 1986. We stayed with some friends who have since moved off the island, and it was remarkable for the fact that our son that weekend learned to ride a bike without training wheels. He told us he was ready to try, so I took the training wheels off and helped him through many crash-and-burn iterations. Moments after the second picture below was snapped, however, he caught the knack and became an official big kid.
(Click any picture to enlarge.)
Unless you fly or have your own yacht, a trip to the San Juan Islands begins and ends with a ride on a Washington State Ferry. Since I hadn’t made the trip for so many years, I had serious sticker shock at the fare - $62.50 roundtrip!
This was our second outing with an REI tent we bought a couple years ago, and we still have to refer to the instructions to figure out where everything goes. Fortunately, it wasn’t raining, or dark, when we arrived at the park.
It did start raining that night, however, and continued into Friday.
By Friday afternoon it stopped raining and, although the weather was some shade of gray all weekend, it only rained at night. The picture below, looking from our campsite across Haro Strait to Vancouver Island, shows the schizophrenic nature of the weather, like one of those Yin-Yang icons - sunny and inviting on the left, shrouded in rain on the right.
We were fortunate to have some experienced camp cooks on the trip, and we ate well!
All of us on the trip brought kayaks, and we did a lot of paddling. On Friday, shortly after we launched, a pod of Orca whales paraded through the strait, trailing their paparazzi entourage of whale-watching boats. A mother and young whale, however, appeared next to shore about 200 yards from our boats, apparently feeding. I couldn’t get a picture, darn it! I did get some other shots on the water, however:
There were a couple of minus tides, allowing inspection of some tidepools.
That’s not me below - I never opened my laptop the whole weekend.
In all, there were 8 adults, 2 6-year-olds and 1 3-year-old in our group. The kids were a blast, played well together and behaved very well. One left me slack-jawed the first night by harrassing his parents to put him into bed.
One evening, after dinner was over, the adults were sitting by the fire and the kids were romping, one became upset because he hadn’t won one of the footrace games the kids were playing. His dad told him to go ahead and run to the finish line again, and then asked us adults to cheer for him when he got there. I asked the dad, “Are you sure you want to go there? It’s a slippery slope. Soon you’ll find yourself fixing teeball games.” Never taking his eyes off his boy, he said matter-of-factly, “I’m the coach.” We were both joking. But he is the coach.
Things were just starting to fray a little as we packed up on Sunday and headed for the ferry home - I heard one parent hiss, “Get going - you can cry and walk at the same time!”
Great weekend, all in all.
