Orcas Island Vacation Slides, Part 3

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While most of our time on Orcas was spent toodling around, the cutie pie and I actually did go out and do stuff. Like take the island shuttle over to Cascade Lake...




ride the ferry over to Friday Harbor on San Juan Island...











and take ourselves halfway up Mount Constitution.




PS It was only halfway up Mount Constitution because I got blisters at that point. I had entirely forgotten how long four miles is when it's entirely uphill.

Orcas Island Vacation Slides, Part 2

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Day one, we make it into East Sound. Gorgeous views, now with restaurants.



East Sound's lovely pebble beach. More shiny driftwood than you can shake a stick at (hee). Not pictured is the little island a couple hundred feet from shore you can walk out to in low tide. One of the things they say in the guidebooks is Orcas' unfortunate lack of public beaches. It's true - in our roaming around, this was pretty much it.



Saw this on a walk around town - "Here we use all parts of the driftwood".



Orcas Island's famous Crow Valley pottery, named after the valley on the island of the same name. Neat stuff, especially the little sake bottles you can see in the picture above, bottom right.


View from the front yard of the Sunflower Cafe. Good food, not too pricey, nice atmosphere. Unfortunately, only open till three in the afternoon. Still a great place to wile away the time with an iced tea and a game of Carcassone.

Even nicer was The Kitchen. The setup is a moderately sized cooking area, tiny indoor eating space, decent sized backyard with picnic tables, and an acre's worth of garden next door. Seriously - the entire neighboring lot was their garden. Freshest Thai food I've ever had - you could tell they just picked the veggies and they just made the noodles.

Besides tasty foods, the main attraction was watching all the little kids beeline it straight to the tree in the middle of the yard. If they were under ten, they wanted up that tree like nobody's business.

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Orcas Island Vacation Slides, Part I

My S.O. and I went to Orcas Island last week for some R&R, and as it turned out, to beat the heat. Because this is my blog, I can inflict vacation slides on you, my faithful readers.

So, shuttle up to Anacorts, ferry to over to the San Juans til we get to Orcas Island and Orcas Village, where the ferry lands and where our B&B was located. The view from the ferry of Orcas Village looks something like this:


Picturesque, adorable, and you're seeing all of it. Deer Harbor, Olga - all the little people settlements are about this size. The only thing that can be properly called a town is West Sound. Little villages make me think little spaces. The thing is, Orcas Island is about the size of the Seattle Metro area, and it's in the shape of a horseshoe (see map below), which made it really big as the car drives.



This much space, that few people, this close to Seattle (less than an hour by Kenmore Air). Weird. Good. And a whole lot of gorgeous.



Yup, that was the view every morning - green cliffs, sparkling water, bright blue sky, adorable boyfriend. And it just gets prettier.

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