Island Life
Apr. 12th, 2007 09:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishOrcas Island has pretty much one main road, so we followed it to the place we were staying. It was further out than either of us had expected, I think; a good 30-45 minute drive. Eventually we drove straight past the orange mailbox, turned around, and pulled into the driveway of Joe Symons's Garden House.
Here I must digress briefly to gush (but not dance) about the architecture. The guest house is the second floor; the entire first floor appears to be a studio of some kind. The first floor has ridiculously high ceilings so that you can upend a 4x8 sheet of plywood and not tear up the plaster or light fixtures. This has the side effect of making the second floor kind of short. If you look at the picture, the second floor starts at about the level of the bottom part of the roof. Yeah. That means the actual "walls" are about three feet high.
It remains a viable living space by creative and perhaps excessive use of dormers. The bathroom is a real triumph of design: the sink is usable because Joe put a skylight in over it. This works amazingly well; my only complaints about the bathroom are a) the lack of a real mirror (there's a disconcerting one set into the frame of the skylight but the angle makes it difficult to use) and b) the use of a shower stall instead of a real bathtub (space reasons). Overall, it's a great house.
Onward. We arrived, collapsed briefly, said hello to Joe (he's a neat guy), and went back out to the town of Eastsound for dinner. Joe had left recommendations for three restaurants on the fridge: a seafood place whose name escapes me (Christina's?), the Cafe Olga in the town of Olga which isn't open for dinner, and a Mexican place called Bilbo's. We were in luck; they managed to squeeze us in (and I do mean squeeze, I've seen bedrooms bigger than this restaurant) almost immediately.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nixve had enchiladas that involved chicken and green sauce. Mine involved chicken, red sauce, and blue tortillas. Enchiladas azul. Both were /quite/ tasty indeed, and not even horribly overpriced. Definitely going back there should I find myself on Orcas again.
After dinner, a too-brief walk around downtown Eastsound, and then back to the house and its attendant hot tub. On my way out of said hot tub I managed to impale a two-inch splinter in the sole of my foot, causing some amount of pain and also impromptu surgery. Not recommended.
Satyrday we had lunch and art-browsing at Cafe Olga (decent but not spectacular, on either count), and a walk along the oyster bay at Crescent Beach. Lots of Bird Or Stick?, lots of sea gulls. No walruses. I suppose the couple who were carefully examining the driftwood may have been carpenters. Afterwards we walked around downtown Eastsound a bit more. Then between my foot, her cold, and the slightly chilly weather we more or less gave up for the day. We bought dinner from the local grocery store and headed home to eat it.
But first we decided to walk down to the view of the sound from near the house. The path is a bit overgrown with briars in places, and with downed pine trees in others. Still, though, the view and the sky and the quiet once we got down there were all worth it. We sat and not-quite-shivered for a good twenty minutes taking it all in.
Afterwards, soup, and _Slings and Arrows_ season two episodes three and four.
Sunday we got up, made sandwiches, got everything packed and out of there, talked to Joe a bit more, and drove out to Moran State Park. There we hiked around Mountain Lake. Huge moss, lots of beautiful evergreens (the forest felt positively embracing), and sharp sunlight and mist and water. We ate our sandwiches sitting on a bridge about two-thirds of the way around the lake. In the distance you hear the chirping of a songbird. There's a definitely different feel to that hike than to any of the hiking I've done in the Appalachians, and I'm not sure I can pin it down. A quality of the light, perhaps? Everything felt more in focus, somehow.
Afterwards we drove almost to the summit of Mt Constitution and then walked the rest of the way to the top. Gorgeous view, you can see all around the San Juan Islands from up there, but the wind and the cold conspired to drive us back to the shelter of the beetle. So we returned to the ferry and took our leave of the island.
. . . to be concluded . . .
Here I must digress briefly to gush (but not dance) about the architecture. The guest house is the second floor; the entire first floor appears to be a studio of some kind. The first floor has ridiculously high ceilings so that you can upend a 4x8 sheet of plywood and not tear up the plaster or light fixtures. This has the side effect of making the second floor kind of short. If you look at the picture, the second floor starts at about the level of the bottom part of the roof. Yeah. That means the actual "walls" are about three feet high.
It remains a viable living space by creative and perhaps excessive use of dormers. The bathroom is a real triumph of design: the sink is usable because Joe put a skylight in over it. This works amazingly well; my only complaints about the bathroom are a) the lack of a real mirror (there's a disconcerting one set into the frame of the skylight but the angle makes it difficult to use) and b) the use of a shower stall instead of a real bathtub (space reasons). Overall, it's a great house.
Onward. We arrived, collapsed briefly, said hello to Joe (he's a neat guy), and went back out to the town of Eastsound for dinner. Joe had left recommendations for three restaurants on the fridge: a seafood place whose name escapes me (Christina's?), the Cafe Olga in the town of Olga which isn't open for dinner, and a Mexican place called Bilbo's. We were in luck; they managed to squeeze us in (and I do mean squeeze, I've seen bedrooms bigger than this restaurant) almost immediately.
nixve had enchiladas that involved chicken and green sauce. Mine involved chicken, red sauce, and blue tortillas. Enchiladas azul. Both were /quite/ tasty indeed, and not even horribly overpriced. Definitely going back there should I find myself on Orcas again.After dinner, a too-brief walk around downtown Eastsound, and then back to the house and its attendant hot tub. On my way out of said hot tub I managed to impale a two-inch splinter in the sole of my foot, causing some amount of pain and also impromptu surgery. Not recommended.
Satyrday we had lunch and art-browsing at Cafe Olga (decent but not spectacular, on either count), and a walk along the oyster bay at Crescent Beach. Lots of Bird Or Stick?, lots of sea gulls. No walruses. I suppose the couple who were carefully examining the driftwood may have been carpenters. Afterwards we walked around downtown Eastsound a bit more. Then between my foot, her cold, and the slightly chilly weather we more or less gave up for the day. We bought dinner from the local grocery store and headed home to eat it.
But first we decided to walk down to the view of the sound from near the house. The path is a bit overgrown with briars in places, and with downed pine trees in others. Still, though, the view and the sky and the quiet once we got down there were all worth it. We sat and not-quite-shivered for a good twenty minutes taking it all in.
Afterwards, soup, and _Slings and Arrows_ season two episodes three and four.
Sunday we got up, made sandwiches, got everything packed and out of there, talked to Joe a bit more, and drove out to Moran State Park. There we hiked around Mountain Lake. Huge moss, lots of beautiful evergreens (the forest felt positively embracing), and sharp sunlight and mist and water. We ate our sandwiches sitting on a bridge about two-thirds of the way around the lake. In the distance you hear the chirping of a songbird. There's a definitely different feel to that hike than to any of the hiking I've done in the Appalachians, and I'm not sure I can pin it down. A quality of the light, perhaps? Everything felt more in focus, somehow.
Afterwards we drove almost to the summit of Mt Constitution and then walked the rest of the way to the top. Gorgeous view, you can see all around the San Juan Islands from up there, but the wind and the cold conspired to drive us back to the shelter of the beetle. So we returned to the ferry and took our leave of the island.
. . . to be concluded . . .