The San Juan Islands

This picture is the view from atop Mount Constitution on Orcas Island. We spent the weekend vacationing in Moran State park. If you're not sure where the San Juan's are situated click here http://maps.google.com/maps?q=friday+harbor+washington&ll=48.685547,-122.932874&spn=1.197266,2.141383&hl=en

The islands are situated east of Victoria BC, in the straight of Juan de Fuca. We stayed on Orcas island, one of the larger islands, at Moran state park. This was also the first use of our pop-up camper. Another family came with us - they had a daughter Kaitlyn's age as well as a younger son so the little girls had a lot of fun together.

This was Memorial day weekend down here in the US of A. On thursday when I arrived back home from frigid Montreal I got a birds eye view of the islands from a Dash 8 connecting Vancouver to Seattle. The weather in Seattle was 91 degrees and sunny from thursday through saturday, and then cooled off into the low 80's for the rest of the weekend. In short - it was perfect weather.

Friday was a busy day with Vicki having a class field trip to the beach to beach comb, then Vicki putting on a concert at school (she plays an instrument who's name eludes me at the moment - it has four bells on it and you play it with a drum stick). Friday was also Vicki's 10th Birthday! So, we didn't hit the highway until 3:10pm. The ferry to Orcas island is only 1.5 hours north of Seattle on a normal day but this day we arrived at 6:15. It was stop and go traffic pretty much the whole way. It reminded me of the 400 north bound to Muskoka on the May 2-4 weekend. We were lucky enough to get onto the 6:35 ferry - we were not nearly as lucky coming home (we had a 6 hour wait on Orcas island and watched 3 ferrys come and go before we got onto one.)

The ferry ride was fantastic. There are pictures of the whole weekend in chronological order on my website at http://al.lindsays.ca/Orcas/index.html We weren't lucky enough to see whales though there are 2 pods of them in the area. We passed on the whale watching excursions due to the gouging prices.

The island itself feels like a rural community. There is a small business area near the ferry (6 buildings or so;-) and another small town in the middle of the island (I'm guessing the population is <100). The park is large in acreage but didn't have many camp sites (<100) so we never felt crowded. In fact on most of our excursions we didn't see many people at all.

On Saturday we climbed ( in our car ;-) mount Constitution - the highest point in the San Juans, and only 5 miles from our camp site. From the top we could see Vancouver, Mount Baker, the Olympic mountain range and many islands. Check the pictures in the link above - it was really amazing. We also went swimming in Cascade lake. I was surprised to find swimmable water in Washington because of what the locals had told me. Vicki also managed to squeeze in some fishing though she didn't catch anything (the lake is stocked with trout).

Sunday we hiked into Obstruction Pass State Park which is also on Orcas. The is very rustic with only a hand full of hike in camp sites. We hiked .5 miles through what felt like a rain forest to an ocean inlet beach where we did some beach-combing. This was the coolest! We saw many Sea stars, crabs, jelly organisms and Sea Anemones. Check out the pictures!

Despite having to wait so long for the ferry we enjoyed ourselves hanging out in the sun overlooking the ocean and islands on Monday. The ferry ride back was just as beautiful as the ride out. If you are ever in the area I highly recommend heading out to the islands. This is the kind of vacation that would have been worth flying out for - but it is nice to be local. I wonder how expensive land is out there.......