Spinning Yarns

Today’s our last day in Washington; we’re taking a red-eye out of Sea-Tac at some unholy hour this evening, arriving back in Boston on Monday morning. If all goes well, we might even be in time to take out the recycling before they come to pick it up, though to be perfectly honest, that is not really my top priority at the moment. What I anticipate will occupy most of my time on Monday and Tuesday is to get my notes together for the Software Design and Implementation course I am teaching this coming term, given that classes start on Wednesday. It should be an exciting way to get readjusted to Eastern Standard Time, though I suspect within a week or so, I am going to want another vacation.

Happily, we have gotten a number of important wedding plans settled: We will be wed on Monday, September 4th, 2006 at 10:00am PDT, in Suquamish, WA. Everyone coming will be driving within the speed limit to avoid arousing the wrath of the tribal police, and every detail will work just as we’ve planned. We hope. It’s true that we still need to decide what we are doing for wedding rings, and Sara is still looking at dresses for the occasion, but the hard stuff is out of the way. For me, clothing will be easy anyway: I’ll rent a nice black tuxedo with tails, vest, and bow-tie, and probably nobody will recognize me at all. I might even get my hair cut for the event; not cut short, mind you, but put into an arrangment that looks a little bit less wind blown and crazy. An amazing concept, n’est-çe pas?

Meanwhile, the results of our raids to the bookstores of the Olympic Peninsula need to be packed up and shipped off via media mail, and curse the fifty-pound weight limit per checked bag! On the bright side, media mail rates are cheap, and although our shared suitcase was three pounds over on the way out here, we bought another suitcase to take back, so we should be able to come in under the limit on the return trip, despite our bookish acquisitiveness. The woman who checked us in at the Continental ticket counter in Boston was kind enough not to hose us for being over the limit, but I’d rather not get tagged with a twenty-five dollar fee on this end, if the ticket agent at Sea-Tac happens to be grumpy.

My head is full of things I’d like to write about, but motivation defies me at the moment, so I will reserve any philosophical ramblings for another time.

Filed by Michael at 02:33 under Personal
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Generally speaking, if I have to choose between doing business with somebody over the phone or via e-mail, I prefer showing up in person every time. You can ignore e-mail, and you can easily blow somebody off over the phone—something I learned doing IT support some years ago. But somebody who shows up in person is hard to ignore, and almost everything is easier that way. Sure enough, although we had a devil of a time on Sunday getting a phone message through to the woman in charge of events at Kiana Lodge, we got an appointment to meet with her within about ten minutes of showing up in person on Sunday afternoon. Credit where credit’s due, however: Sara’s mom knows the events coordinator, and of course it never hurts your negotiating posture to be the Mother of the Bride.

At any rate, our meeting on Monday was brief, succinct, and pleasant, and resulted in pretty much exactly what we wanted. More on that in a moment. We spent the rest of the afternoon looking at wedding dresses, reading, playing Settlers of Catan, and doing a puzzle. All in all, a very relaxing way to consume a day. I read my way through about half of Robert Hazen’s book Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life’s Origins, which is a pretty good book. I finished the rest of it while we were waiting for and riding on the Washington State ferries.

Other than Kiana Lodge, Sara and I had one more place to look at, which was the Rosario Resort & Spa on Orcas Island. Keeping in mind the lesson about doing things in person, we reserved a room for Tuesday night, and drove up there on Tuesday morning. Now, it’s probably not even a hundred and fifty miles from Sara’s house to Rosario as the crow flies, but keep in mind that the land in this part of the world is cut up by several bodies of water, including Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Consequently, what might be a simple two hour driving proposition in other portions of the globe required a bit more planning in this case: Two ferries and about 118 miles of driving. We could have skipped one of the ferries, but that would have required going all the way down to the Tacoma Narrows bridge and back up through Seattle on I-5, which is pretty much never the right way to get anywhere as far as I can tell. Fortunately, the gods of ferry scheduling were with us, and we were able to get there without incident in about seven hours of travel. Along the way, we got to see some nice scenery, too, including the furious waters of Deception Pass between Whidbey Island and Fidalgo Island on the road from Keystone to Anacortes.

Although the sky was grey and overcast all day, I would say our luck in weather continued to hold, since we did not get much rained on during our travels. The wind came up quite a bit, but not enough to cancel the ferries, and apart from being a little chilly along the beach, we had no trouble getting some good outdoor views of the resort once we arrived. Rosario Resort is built around a mansion that used to belong to Robert Moran, who was the Mayor of Seattle around the turn of the 20th Century, and a very wealthy and successful man. These days, it’s owned by a company called Rock Resorts, which owns a number of successful hotel and spa combinations, including the Equinox Resort and Spa in Manchester, Vermont. This latter fact is mainly interesting to me because the Equinox is fairly close to where my parents live, so it was one of the fixtures of my youth.

The food and accommodations were superb, and the locale was quite beautiful. The food, in particular, was especially noteworthy: It’s not just that they had good items on their menu, but in fact every last detail of every item we ordered was excellent in flavour, colour, portion, and presentation. Their excellence was not limited to dinner either—their breakfast the next morning was equally delightful to both eyes and palate. It’s not a cheap place to stay or to eat, but as a vacation destination, we both found it top-notch.

That said, we concluded upon reflection that it was probably not the best choice for a wedding venue. Although the locale is quite beautiful, we felt it was not sufficiently magical to justify the logistcal and financial burden of getting all our wedding guests out onto the San Juans in the tailings of the high season. So, after some discussion we concluded that we will book a spot at Kiana Lodge instead, which is no compromise in terms of attractiveness, and yet is much more easily accessible to the rest of the world. The Rosario resort might make a much more desirable honeymoon getaway, assuming we can afford it. Who knows! Our names were entered in a drawing for a couple free nights in their honeymoon suite, and maybe Lady Luck will smile upon us and make it so.

On the journey back, we took a detour into Moran State Park (named for the same Robert Moran—he donated some 5,000 acres of land to the state) and drove up to the top of Mt. Constitution, which is supposed to be the highest point in the San Juan islands. Despite the day still being rather overcast, the view out over the islands was really impressive. We did pass on the brief-yet-windy hike up to the true summit, as neither of us was really dressed properly for the weather, but I got a few nice pictures from the roadway near the trailhead, to complement the occasion. The rest of our journey was uneventful, consisting principally of driving and riding ferries. We punctuated the end of the day by stopping by Mr. B’s Bookery in Kingston, where we picked up a bunch of excellent new (used) books for a few bucks and a song. It’s always nice to round out a productive trip with a fresh infusion of books.

Filed by Michael at 04:57 under Personal
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Blessed with a bright and sunny Sunday, we drove with Sara’s parents up to the northern coast of the Olympic Peninsula, along the Strait of Juan de Fuca, for some recreational sightseeing. Our first destination was a stony spit called Tongue Point, out west of Port Angeles. At low tide, the spit has lots of small tide pools, filled with fascinating marine life such as starfish, hermit crabs, rock crabs, sea urchins, mussels, barnacles, and anemones. We tramped around on the rocks and looked at all the interesting flora and fauna, and wandered across to the sandy beach where the Salt Creek washes down into the Strait. The air was beautiful and clear, so that you could see both the Olympics and the Cascades on opposite sides of the world. I got some great pictures.

For lunch, we drove up into the hills above the beach, where there are some old concrete military bunkers, the former site of cannon emplacements used to defend the coast. I’m not sure what they’re supposed to have been defense against; invasion from Canada doesn’t really seem likely. Perhaps they were built as part of the general paranoia against the Japanese during World War II, but I don’t really know much about their history. In any case, the bluffs afforded us another great view out over the Strait, and a quiet spot to eat our sandwiches and plan our next moves.

On the return journey, we detoured up into the Olympic Mountains to the top of Hurricane Ridge, from which there is a positively gorgeous view of the northern faces of the snowy Olympics, and the deep furrow of the Elwha River valley. The lodge at the summit was mobbed with tourists armed with sleds, snowshoes, and skis, but we were able to get a few good looks out over the adjacent peaks. We concluded that the summit lodge at Hurricane Ridge would be a marvellous place to hold a wedding, if only we could close it to the general public for the day; alas, that does not appear to be a viable option.

There are lots of black-tailed deer at Hurricane Ridge, and despite a great deal of high-contrast signage enjoining visitors not to feed them, they show such a remarkable affinity for human food that one might suspect that a certain proportion of the people who come to the park have been disregarding said signage. We did not feed them ourselves, however. On the way back down, we also got a couple of nice views (and photographs) out over Port Angeles from above, and a long-distant profile of Mt. Rainier. As Sara pointed out, one of the Great Mysteries of life is how you can see Rainier just fine in the distance, and yet when you take a photograph, it simply doesn’t show up. My photographs do show Rainier a little bit, but it looks a lot more like a funny-shaped cloud than a mountain.

In the evening, Sara and I went out for Thai food with her old friends Andrew and Andrea, who just got engaged to be married. Since the two of them have been a devoted couple for more than six years now, this is both excellent and unsurprising news. I very much enjoyed getting to meet the two of them, since they are recurring characters in lots of stories that Sara has told me, and I like to be able to put faces and names together. So, good news and good company all around! I admit that I was a bit concerned about the quality of this restaurant when we first arrived, as it appeared that somebody had disgorged a large quantity of partly-digested food onto the asphalt of the parking lot next to where we were parked. But, our meal was tasty and nobody got sick, so happily those fears were unfounded.

With all the driving about we have been doing over the past several days, I feel as if I’m getting the whirlwind tour of the Olympic Peninsula. No complaints—it’s a beautiful place, and the weather has been warm and pleasant, even when it’s raining. Still, I’m awfully glad I brought the camera, because I think I would have a hard time keeping everything straight in my mind, if I couldn’t look back over the pictures at the end of the day, to figure out where we’ve gone and what we’ve done. Tomorrow, we are back to looking at wedding venues (and dresses), though I hope we will also find time to browse the local used bookstores and do some quiet reading. On Tuesday, we have a reservation for an overnight stay at a resort hotel on Orcas Island, which is another potential site for our wedding, and has been high on our list of desirable locations for some time now. I will report on our findings once we return from Orcas on Wednesday—it is likely that we will be offline during that trip.

Incidentally, for those of you following along at home, I have added a new photo album to the “Pictures” section of my home page, so if you would like to see a few selected visuals from our travels, feel free to browse.

Filed by Michael at 03:18 under Personal
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