Two Ports

Sunday, September 19, 2010

Having wireless access two days in a row must mean we are out of the woods. Port Angeles to Sequim to Port Townsend put us on the seashore and out of the drippy forest; today there may even be sun!

Sequim is a great little town, with only 14-17 inches of rain a year; a quarter of what we get in Nevada City. However, they don't advertise how many days of sun, but we're guessing 20 to 25. No rain today, but cloudy and foggy of course. Nonetheless it's a treat to be in a town with a good local market, Sunny Farms, where we bought among many other goodies a Juan Canary melon. And a Farmer's Market, coffee shop, bookstores, lavender shop. Yep, this area is the Lavender Capital of ??? the US, I guess. Surrounded by lovely lavender farms, there are myriad products available to cook with, bathe in and slather on. The area also has some lovely home developments, a couple of brand name motels, the Red Caboose B&B with several caboose of different bright colors, currently a Glass Art Festival going on...and miles of bike paths, walking paths and horse trails...22 miles to be exact from western edge of Sequim to the Spit. It would be a nice place to live if you didn't mind a little moss; the gardens are lovely with all the moisture.

One of the attractions other than lavender is the Railroad Bridge Park, where the oldest Audubon Society in the US is situated, and a railroad bridge preserved long after there was a railroad here. The area boasts an amazing habitat for birds, fish, and other wildlife. To count: 124 bird species, 22 critters who depend on the local environment, 7 kinds of salmon, or, more correctly, salmonids. And this is just a little picnic park on the edge of the Dungeness River. The Harvest Hosts includes the Purple Haze Lavender Farm where we could have stayed except they are closed during the week this time of year.

Heading for Hoodsport and Olympia, we took a detour to Port Townsend. Now spontaneity is sometimes lacking between the Driver, whom I am now renaming the Captain, and the Passenger, now renamed the Navigator. And confusion can reign when the gps and the maps and the Navigator are at odds. The Captain prefers to keep driving no matter in which direction; getting him to stop and reconnoiter is a major task and only successful when we are hopelessly lost in some out of the way neighborhood nowhere near the Historic Downtown or the uptown Victorians or the Port. We bumbled around grumbling as it was getting to stopping time (we hadn't left Sequim until after 3 p.m.) and finally found our way to the Fort Worden State Park. The signs leading to the campgrounds stopped well short of the destination, leaving us to more bumbling around until finding an open visitor's center. Campground in the trees was above a huge old hangar for blimps (not all wood) in which a local rock band was practicing for their concert that night, expecting as many as 1200 people. Not my idea of a restful night. The oceanside campground was full. The fairgrounds, hosting a quilt show, was an empty soggy grassy field of a campground with a few derelict trailers in it, not really appealing. A second run at the woodsy area at the Fort showed it completely full. By now we are snarling and snapping, with only two more options, one of which is another woodsy grassy Fort outside of town, and the other, portside downtown. Well, the port RV park had lots of appeal, including a short walk to town, a lovely restaurant/bar, a long beach walk, and lots of rvs side by side by side, crammed together for the weekend. One spot left...We cornered the camp host and he allowed as it wasn't really a regular spot, but he named it his emergency spot, it had water and electricity and a view of the ocean. We convinced him this was a true emergency as we were about to kill each other; he took our money and pointed out the way to the bar.

Least favorite things while traveling: signs to a destination you have in mind, only to leave you hanging with no more signs still blocks from where you want to be. Most favorite things: old cars/trucks planted with flowers; a sign on the back of a small rv...Past Tents.