The Reverend Dave’s Lopezapalooza

For several years Ian's friend Dave has reserved three campsites at Odlin County Park on Lopez Island for the 4^th of July weekend (or a long weekend's worth of days if the 4^th falls mid-week.). The years have not all been consecutive, because the three campsites are truly the best in the park, and if someone manages to beat Dave to the punch, he doesn't go. He was lucky this year, though, and scored the favored spots. They really are perfect: Odlin follows a curve of beach along Upright Channel, between Lopez and Shaw Islands, with most sites in direct sunlight right on the beach, and a few up on a bluff in the trees. These three sites comprise both environments, and are near a composting toilet as well.

Dave is quite the organizer, and this year was no exception: 24 of us (including a 10-year-old, a 16-month-old, and a six-week-old, and two dogs . . . well, they make 26) took him up on his invitation. The first night that Dave was there, with one other friend, the on-site ranger came by to talk to him about the numbers he was expecting, understandably concerned (we were a little, too). A maximum of 8 people are allowed to stay at each site, but 24 all together was a lot. Dave assured him that we were calm, quiet and mature, though, and that we were intending to pitch tents in the outer two sites and focus our kitchen and gathering space in the middle site.

In the event, the entire three night stay was awesome. First of all—the adults really all seemed to be adults. We took turns cooking and washing up, taking care of the kids, tidying up the campsites. I fancy myself a pretty competent cook in the kitchen, but these guys (primarily, with the notable exception of baked goods—biscuits and a pineapple upside down cake baked in Dutch ovens in the coals, done by ladies) were gourmet campfire chefs. Dave himself cooked a breakfast for the entire camp of scrambled cheesy eggs with peppers, hashbrowns, and bacon; another morning, S (who brought his boat as well) made breakfast burritos for the lot of us, including chorizo he spiced himself, peppery eggs, black beans, and of course tortillas kept warm in foil on the less hot part of the grill. There were pancakes and sausages, marinated grilled tofu, spiced burgers with grilled onions, cheesy grits and, of course, a couple salads and a lot of fresh berries and cherries (from enterprising salespeople on the ferries and in the ferry lines). I won't include all of them here, but Ian, as a good Taylor should, took a large number of food pictures over our stay.

Most people (including us) arrived on Thursday; it seems that most of the estimated 20,000 people who went to the San Juans for the long weekend intended to arrive on Thursday as well. Several campers in our group waited hours longer than they were expecting to to get on ferries; the couple with the 6-week-old arrived on the last boat of the night and had to put up their tent at around 12:30am; another couple was turned away late in the night and told to come back in the morning. They did, and made it to Lopez before we were even up Friday morning. They had to leave Sunday, and were out of camp silently and on the 6:30am return ferry with time to spare. They were taking no chances. Several of our group did, in fact, decide to stay an extra night.

This year more than previous years revolved around boating—Ian and I, of course, had our boat, and S (who recently moved back to Seattle after a couple years in the Bay Area) brought his 21-foot fishing boat. Dave and his fiancée and recently acquired a new dinghy, and he took on the responsibility of ferrying people and belongings to and from the other boats, which were moored at buoys instead of the dock.

S&L also came with a boat--an 8-foot long sailing dinghy.

Friday the 3^rd, most people's first full day, a bunch of us decided to go to Roche Harbor on San Juan Island for, perhaps, lunch and cocktails in the afternoon. We put mostly boys in S's boat, and the girls in mine (Ian stayed back in camp). We took the southern route around San Juan Island, through a bit of sketchy water (a combination of two currents and some wind meeting infelicitously and creating a 2-3 foot chop), where I, white-knuckled, imagined L, our 10-year-old, falling out of the front seat of the bow where she was riding. We soon passed the most harrowing part, though, and started leisurely up the west side of the island, so that S could fish (Chinook season had just begun, and he was hoping for fresh grilled salmon. Alas, no luck.). Personally, I find fishing boring, and the ladies in my boat also seemed to think so. Still, it was sunny and clear, and Vancouver Island was right there, and we were on vacation. I finally couldn't take it anymore and piddled over the side of the boat, then another one of us did, then another did.

And then, suddenly, the orcas were around us.

Maybe 20 feet from the boat, a whale surfaced and blew, pwhoo, and sank back into the water. From our boat arose a universal squeal. From our VHF radio, S's voice, from the boat a few hundred feet behind us, said "SHUT UP." We quieted down immediately, and shut off the engine, and for the next 45 minutes or so, the pod (probably J pod) swam near us. There were a couple of breachings, but mostly in the distance. Also in the distance, we saw a whale lying on its back with its pectoral flippers flapping—perhaps engaging in an inverted pectoral slap. There were two babies in the pod, and at one point, one came up out of the water near us and went SQUEEEE before it sank back in. In all my years of visiting the San Juans, I have never been so lucky, and when we went out the next day with a different group but to the same place, the whales were there again! (photos are from day 2)

Roche Harbor was a madhouse of yachters celebrating the holiday—there are 377 slips, some accommodating boats up to 160 feet long, and the harbor itself was thick with boats at anchor or on buoys. We stopped and gassed up and grabbed quick bites to eat at the little grocery at the head of the dock, I piddled again (although in a toilet this time), and we headed for home.

Most of us didn't actually go into Lopez Village for the spectacular (Paul Allen-funded) fireworks display this year, preferring to laze about in camp and watch the phosphorescence in the water instead. On the 5^th, when Ian and I headed off for our next adventure, a whole string of fellow campers helped us portage our camping gear from our beachside site to the county dock to load our boat.

And then we were on our own . . .

The Drive Up

First of all, we discovered that the Essential Baking Company (link not included because it's one of those annoying websites that shrinks your browser to fit its picture) opened at 6am—coffee and pastries for the road! Our plan to hide our trailer overnight at our marina worked like a charm, and with a great deal of backing and filling and frustrated talking to myself (why, WHY can't I just get this right?!?), I backed the trailer down the Sunnyside ramp and collected the boat that Ian brought around. Six-thirty in the morning is a relatively traffic-free time to head north on I-5 from Seattle, and things were fine until we hit Lynnwood and a guy in a beat up old van next to me drove slightly into my lane. Now, I was not all that comfortable with what I was doing—after all, I had only been driving a boat on the freeway for about 15 minutes out of my whole life—and so I honked and I swerved—a normal evasive maneuver—to avoid him.

Let me say right here, NEVER SWERVE if you are pulling a trailer. It set the trailer rocking back and forth, which of course started pulling the car back and forth. I'm good at driving in snow, and so I started to do what I do in snow—I let my foot off the gas and tried to adjust to match the motion. This did not work. Fortunately, Ian knew what to do, which is to hold your hands as steady as possible and allow the trailer to stop on its own. "Just hold your hands steady," he said, quite calmly. "Just drive straight and keep your hands steady."

"Wow! Thank you!" I said, once we were moving smoothly again. "Thank you for knowing that, and thank you for being so calm about telling me!"

"My exterior belied my interior," Ian admitted.

The next potential challenge was to gas up the car and boat. Boat gas is simply regular unleaded gas, with a different color additive and a different (much higher) cost. We had wanted the tank to be mainly empty for the drive, not wishing to add unnecessary weight to what we were towing, but figured there was a good place in Anacortes to stock up, before getting on the ferry. This actually went very well, and included compliments from passersby about our boat.

We got to the ferry dock soon after that, and paid $185 for the two of us and our car and trailer. Okay, yes, a lot of money, but probably not so very much more than we would've paid for fuel driving the boat from Seattle, and we were able to go 60 mph for most of the 100 miles instead of 25. Plus, that was round trip. We weren't necessarily aiming for any particular boat, but we happened to make the 10:05am, just barely. They slotted us into a space that appeared to have been made for us—narrow around the car, just slightly wider to accommodate the boat and trailer, maybe one car behind us. We were in the middle of the main deck, between a large moving van-type truck and a tanker with a trailer. Driving the whole set up felt big on the freeway, but on the ferry we looked little.

We arrived on Orcas, managed to leave the ferry without getting scraped or scraping anyone else, and drove to our land where we picked up some camping gear from the outhouse and loaded everything into the boat. After a brief slipping and sliding on our pasture grass and having to put the car in 4WD Low to get out, we hauled over to West Sound Marina to enact our plan.

Our plan was to put the boat in the water at the West Sound ramp and have one person motor over to the county dock and the other person return the car and trailer to our land, then walk down to the dock.

Except that it turns out West Sound does not have a ramp. We cleverly stopped the car and trailer in the parking lot and went to look on foot before driving down what we thought was a ramp, so it could've been worse. We then asked the marina owners who did have a ramp, and got a number of a place in Deer Harbor, just a bit west of us. They said sure, come along, and so we went. It was somewhere around here that I realized Ian knew, much better than I, how to back the trailer, and so he became the driver and I the spotter for the narrow, dockless ramp leading down into the north end of Deer Harbor.

Well, suffice it to say that we got the boat safely, if slowly, into the water; Ian motored around to the West Sound County Dock as planned originally, and I drove car and trailer back to the land and walked down to meet him. We cruised over to Odlin on Lopez to meet our friends, only jumping one wake in a way that made me very uncomfortable (and I was the driver.).

First Wrench in the Works Removed with Aplomb

I've been somewhat anxious planning for this trip that we are embarking on early (6:00) tomorrow morning, more so than I ever am leaving the country. We're just going up to the Lopez Island to camp with friends for the long weekend, which we did a couple years ago and which totally rocked. The kicker is that, after three nights with the group of 20 or so (no, that's not what's freaking me out), Ian and I are heading off on our own, in our little ski boat, to tour some of the places I haven't been in, oh, about 17 years.

To tour on our own in our own boat, we must first get it to the San Juans, and we decided to do that by towing it behind the car. We could, of course, motor by sea all the way up those 100 miles, but I really think that would be an awful way to spend a day. Noisy, cold, boring, and expensive. No, when we bought our boat, we bought one that would fit within the 5,000 lb towing capacity of our car.

Lucky for us, Mom and Marsh have a sizeable piece of land, and they've been willing to store our trailer, rent-free, in their satellite garage, since our boat is stored in a dry stack facility seven blocks from our house. Last year when we took delivery of our boat, I towed it at about 25 mph around the lake to the launch ramp where we launched it, then drove the trailer out to Maple Valley. Today I went out to Maple Valley to pick it up.

Marsh and I hooked it up to my car together, slowly, making sure to connect all the various chains and cables, then plugged the cord for the lights into the back of my car. I got in and turned on the engine, and tested the lights. I turned on the left turn signal and Marsh nodded and motioned to the right. I then turned on the right turn signal and he said "Yep! Looks like they work!" And I thought Awesome!. But then I thought . . . hmmm. Wait a minute . . .

"Marsh," I called, "which lights went on when I first signaled? The left ones?"

"No," he said, "the right ones."

"Yeah, okay," I said, "because I think I was trying the left ones. I'm going to try again, and you see if the ones blinking match the car." I turned on the key and tried to indicate left.

"No, Calin, those don't match," said Marsh. "Neither do these other ones."

Hmmm.

I got out of the car and we looked at the wires running from the trailer into the plastic doohickey that plugs into the car. There were some white ones and brown ones, and one blue one, and a yellow one, and a green one. I had no idea what any of them meant, and couldn't see how we might do anything about them, even if they were the problem. I called Sea Ray.

"Whoa," said David in Service, unhelpfully. "I guess you'll have to remember to push the turn signal the other way!" He laughed at his own joke. That wouldn't be a problem if I were only signaling one direction, but I would be signaling two no matter what. Not surprisingly, David didn't really have much assistance to offer at 4:47pm on a Wednesday afternoon, 13 hours before we planned to get on the road, although I will be dropping the trailer off there on the 8^th when we return to Seattle.

I hung up the phone and Marsh and I put our heads together. Parked parallel to my trailer was Marsh's new trailer, a handy little flat bed with a similar connector to the one my trailer has. We decided that, before doing anything else, we should check to make sure it wasn't actually a problem with my car switching the signals, so I backed over to his trailer. No, not surprisingly, the problem was not with my new Toyota. In looking more closely at Marsh's wires, then, I saw that they were almost the same, and that the yellow and green ones were labeled, very small, "right" and "left". Ah HA! We were on to something!

Marsh decided that the most logical thing to try would be to snip my yellow and green wires, and then splice them back together crosswise, and in five minutes, it was done. AND IT WORKED!

The electrical tape Marsh wrapped around the splices is not watertight, the way the original wires were, and the trailer is, after all, hauling a boat which will need to be backed into the water at some point. There is a chance that the fix will short out before I can get back to Seattle in a week, but I hope if it does, it takes the blinkers out completely.

I am confident that the other parts of our trip—driving the boat north, filling it with gas without running into any canopies over the gas station, putting it back in the water, motoring about with tides and currents and winds, and visiting a whole world I haven't seen since my dad died there when I was 19—will all work out. I'll let you know.

Better to be Late

Our flight home from Dallas to Seattle last night was delayed. It was one of those where multiple things went wrong. First of all, the crew of the flight deck was delayed arriving at Dallas, and then they had to hike over from Terminal C to Terminal A to get on our plane. We noticed, in a dismissive sort of way, a mechanic getting off the plane with a towel before we got on, but didn't think much of it until we settled into our seats (30D and 30E, way in the back), and the people across the aisle and slightly to the rear suddenly stood up from their seats, spoke for a minute with the flight attendant, then moved out of the way into the galley. They had just had cold water leak on them from the overhead compartment.

Turns out the mechanic hadn't done quite enough taking apart of the plane, because when he came back and removed the ceiling panel, a lot of water poured out. It was somehow related to condensation and the air conditioning, but after digging around in the guts of the overhead compartment for 20 or so minutes, the mechanic finally decided the problem was bigger than he could fix at the time and we needed a new plane.

The new plane was over in Terminal C again, and was slightly smaller, so a couple of standby passengers lost their seats. Also, it was a plane that had been acquired from TWA and the galley configuration was slightly different than the classic American Airlines plane, and so more time was lost in figuring out drinks carts—and food for purchase wasn't available at all.

All the passengers dealt very well with this, though, even the half-dozen mothers traveling with infants. "Better to be late than dead!" said the man who had been in the wet, drippy seat. Better to be late than dripped on by icy water too, I say.

We fell into bed around 3.

Meat Sweats

From what I understand, there are very few open pit barbeques left in the US, even in Texas, and one of the few is the Salt Lick, about 30 minutes outside of Austin in the town of Driftwood (to me, driftwood is huge silvery logs washed up on Puget Sound beaches . . . the operative word there being "washed" . . . I have no idea why this town, in the middle of this arid state, has this name.).

The Salt Lick is crazy, like a Texan Knotts Berry Farm (not really like that, because the only amusement seems to have been the meat). The parking lot alone holds hundreds of cars, and the buildings where you eat seem to go on forever. Driftwood is in a dry county, so the place is BYOB. I'm not sure that being allowed—no, encouraged—to bring your own beer and alcohol, and open it on the grounds and drink it around everyone's children, really follows the spirit of the law, but we were happy to do it.

Bas came with us, and as he'd been there before, he pretty much took us all under his wing (did I say that Bas is about 6'5"? We could all, even Ian, fit under his wing. He is the perfect example of why KLM has more room between rows than any other airline on the planet.) and finagled a good table, then pushed the menus aside and ordered family style for five. Family style was served with bowls of sides and a platter of meat: potato salad, coleslaw, baked beans, pickles and onions, and pork ribs, beef brisket, and some kind of sausage, fresh out of the pit and slathered with barbeque sauce, with chipotle BBQ sauce to add if you wanted. We ordered at least three platters of the meat, and ate as if we were Hoover (We had made an attempt to not eat too much too close to dinner, although there is a fine line. J&C have coined a term for what many of us become when our blood sugar gets low: Hangry. And five hangry people is not a good combination.)

We finished off with a shared bowl of blackberry cobbler, bundled up our leftovers, and hit the road back into Austin. I had to make an emergency pit stop along the way (those bowels! They have no idea what to do with this crazy new schedule), which probably saved me some of the more enduring issues of the rest of the group.

Ian, for example. We were lying in bed hours later, still sated, lights out, and Ian just couldn't get comfortable. He kept flailing about with the sheets, and then he would roll over to a cooler part of the bed, which felt to me like he rolled over three times to do it. We were on an inflatable bed, which I normally hate, but this one is really great. The secret is the foam pad under the mattress pad—it takes care of the coldness of never being able to heat up the mattress because of all the air and, conversely, the problem of getting sweaty because of lying one thin layer of cotton away from vinyl. Not Sunday night, though, for Ian. He was a furnace, presumably from his body ramping up, trying to process all that meat. We eventually opened the window and, panting, he was able to drop into sleep.

Day 10 Starts Out Very Like the Morning After a Long Night on the Town in Europe

We went out in Austin last night with J&C and several of their new friends, only one of whom was American (from Georgia). We had Bas (pronounced "boss") from Holland (who is a post-doc in neuroscience and helped explain to me what the MRI was doing), Andrea (he studies invisibility and can make nanoparticles invisible . . . of course, we can't see them anyway, it was pointed out) and Suzanna (she is a cognitive linguist working with language acquisition) from Italy and Holland, Andreas from Germany, and Gustavo also from Germany (I believe). I guess there were two Texans as well who joined us briefly, but I can only remember Coco's name, not the guy. Anyway, we started close to 8:00pm in a brew-smelling bar serving lots of great beers, many on tap, many of them Belgian, then moved (most of us) at some point, maybe around 9:00pm or 9:30pm, to a nearby Mexican restaurant (okay, that was not European) which was fantastic (and I am very glad I still have at least half of my dinner from last night). We finished up there around 11:00pm (very European), and went out to another bar for a nightcap. I ordered a house special martini which, in what I believe must be true Texan style, had muddled jalapenos as one of the ingredients (along with gin and a house-made blood orange-cello, like lemoncello). It was very good.

We made our way back home around 2:00am, I think (I can't really tell what time it is on my watch, and really not after several drinks), all fell into bed, and slept until almost afternoon today. My constitution stood me in very good stead, however, I am pleased to report, and so the experience of waking up after the long night on the town (and I was annoyingly self-satisfied about this) was that everyone else was feeling a bit grotty and I wasn't.

Feels Like Home

Several weeks ago our friend J emailed us from Austin and told us that the weather would be hot and dry. He moved here from London in January, and in his experience, this was absolutely true. In fact, just around the time of the email, it was so hot that he couldn't sleep, as he and his wife C hadn't yet bought a fan. A week or so after J's email, a few days before we came here, C emailed and said, essentially, "just to be on the safe side, and so you think of us as a truth-telling couple, I'm going to say that it will be cold and rainy for your visit. That way we will have all the bases covered." At the time it was 86 in Austin, and we were very much looking forward to some hot dry air to clear our sinuses and kill the moss growing between our toes.

Well. A couple days before leaving for Austin, we started monitoring the weather, and lo and behold, C was on track to be right. Temperatures in the 40s, rain showers. There was a possibility of clearing Sunday, and temperatures in the low 70s, and maybe slightly warmer on Monday, but the forecast for those days was far enough away to be truly theoretical. The day before we came, we exchanged a few more emails with C, who declared her extreme annoyance with J for causing the rain by claiming it wouldn't happen, and hinted that we would be spending all our extra indoor time doing some intensive marriage counseling.

In the event, it is actually cold and rainy here. It's in the 40s, and it's wet. Of course, everywhere I've gone in the last three months the weather has been essentially the same, both places that I'd expect this to be true (Portland, Oregon), and places that I really wouldn't (Santa Cruz, Austin, and even Hawaii—where, okay, it wasn't 40, but it was rainy and cold for there).

I suppose the irony is that Seattle weather actually hasn't been endlessly, mind-crushingly like that this year—we've had a lot of snow, and a lot of bright sunny days, and a lot of "serious" cold (like, hovering around freezing). Last year was pretty much 42 and gray for six months, but this year has felt like a real winter, not just an exercise in stoicism.

Good thing I've been traveling.

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