Here There and Everywhere

Lodges, Sea and Mountains

You may remember, I am an Alaska girl. It goes deep. When we moved to Pensacola, my husband and I looked for a house on the water, which we found, and did not buy for a lot of really good reasons. One is that it showed signs of having been underwater at some time(s) and another was that the water here doesn’t do much. In Alaska, on the West coast, there are waves, and sometimes they are lovely huge crashing waves.

So one of the things I need to do to feed my soul is to get back to where I can be near mountains, and sea, and nights without a lot of ambient light, and scenes of sheer grandeur. We are all wired differently; I NEED this connection to restore my perspective on what matters, and what does not.

We started our journey out of Edmonds on the Edmonds ferry to Kingston, a ferry I have taken a lot in my life. Here is a map of our first day:

We stopped by the Edmonds bakery to get my Mom a maple bar. If you ever go to Edmonds, WA, the Edmonds Bakery is on Main Street, close to the roundabout, and has been making the best pies and pastries around for many years.

We said our goodbyes, and by the grace of God, made it to the ferry line just as it was boarding, no wait. It’s raining lightly but in Edmonds, teams are out playing soccer, couples are hiking around the hills of Edmonds, and the rain doesn’t stop normal activity, it is a part of normal.

The Edmonds Ferry

A rainy foggy day in Edmonds

I hate it when we are parking on a slant! They put blocks behind the wheels, but I have visions of the car just rolling right off.

That’s the Edmonds Ferry going from Kingston to Edmonds seen through the ferry car-carry area.

Someones fanciful house in Kingston

The dock in Kingston approaches

The Ferry system in Washington state is a part of the highway system. It’s how people living and working on the islands get gas and groceries and household goods. The ferries can hold a full sized moving van, and daily there are construction vans, electrical maintenance and highway maintenance vehicles traveling via ferry to remote destinations. It’s a part of life. Many people commute to the “mainland” from the islands for work, keeping a car on each side to reduce ferry costs (it’s a lot cheaper to walk on than to take a car on board).

When we planned this trip, I told AdventureMan “I don’t have any control over the weather. It might be rainy and cold the entire time.”

And AdventureMan grinned at me and said “I’ll bring books.”

He’s game.

I tried to take him to a wonderful restaurant on the Dungeness spit called The Three Crabs. We found Three Crabs Boulevard, but . . . no Three Crabs. It no longer exists.

We ended up at a small restaurant just outside of Port Angeles. We would have eaten in Port Angeles, but every restaurant we saw was a chain restaurant, and we were on a detour and had concerns about staying close enough to the road we needed to be on. As we left Port Angeles, we found the Fairmount, the kind of place we love to try, a local place, full of people still eating breakfast, or drinking coffee, or eating pie, but mostly checking on the latest local news.

 

 

 

AdventureMan wanted a hamburger. He said it was pretty good.

I had thought “Port Angeles! Fish!” and ordered halibut. This is frozen halibut; I could get this is Pensacola.

By this time, though, the skies have lifted and we are seeing some blue sky, which is really amazing, because we are in the Olympic Rain Forest. During the next couple of hours, on our way to Kalaloch Lodge, it must have alternated sun and rain, sometimes even heavy rain, fifteen or twenty times. We were just thankful it was not a steady dreary rain.

Along the way, we marveled at the trees. There were some very ferny kind of trees, and also some trees with lots and lots of moss on them.

 

 

We took a stretch break at Storm King Ranger Station, on Lake Crescent, where one of the funniest incidents on our trip happened. We were walking out on the dock and a group with two dogs were out there, and the dogs jumped in (they didn’t mind the cold water) and swam and swam, the happiest dogs you ever did see. As one was exiting the water, he stopped and pooped. His owner, a young woman, yelled “Oh no! Oh no!” She is waving her plastic poop bag (people are SO conscientious in the PNW) and goes on to wail “How am I going to scoop that poop out of the WATER??”

Well, I think sometimes you just have to leave well enough alone. Her earnest concern, her utter shame at not being able to recover that poop just totally cracked me up, even as I felt sympathy for her. “You can’t do anything about an act of God,” I laughed, “that’s just what dogs do.”

 

 

Mostly, I really wanted you to see the color of the Lake Crescent water. Isn’t it gorgeous?

 

April 30, 2018 - Posted by intlxpatr | Adventure, Community, Geography / Maps, Pensacola, Quality of Life Issues, Restaurant, Road Trips, Travel | Edmonds Ferry, Lodges Sea and Mountains