The idea for this vacation started with Derrick. About two years ago he watched the movie Free Willy and became obsessed with whales. He started asking about where we could go to see whales. I did a little googling and discovered that one of the best places in the US was the San Juan Islands in Washington State.
Previous to this I had never even heard of the San Juan Islands. But as I read about them I realized that they were incredible and that I really wanted to visit them. There are a collection of small islands in the north west part of Washington north of Seattle. They were close to Canada and only accessible by water. The largest island is San Juan Island. As I read some more I realized that I had a friend from Yellowstone who worked at Roche Harbor on San Juan Island. (Previous to this I hadn't realized where exactly she was working.)
This kicked off about a month of me trying to figure out how we could live/work at Roche Harbor after Brandon finished the maintenance program. In this dream scenario I'd do accounting for the Hotel de Haro and Brandon would work on airplanes at the Friday Harbor Airport. This dream was entirely possible except for one thing- or rather four people. I couldn't figure out how we could affordably live in the island with 4 kids. This wasn't like Yellowstone where there was an employee RV park. If I somehow did have a job at the resort they only provided accommodations for employees. No spouses or children could tag along on this crazy adventure.
So I filed away living on San Juan Island to the "one day when we are retired file" and went back to planning a vacation to the islands.
Ideally I would have liked to have done this vacation in 2019, but buying a house took precedence last year. So the vacation was bumped to 2020. Towards the end of 2019 my sister in law Shannon started talking about planning an extended family trip to the Washington Coast. She said there was a Pirate Festival in Westport that she thought we'd all enjoy attending that. That worked perfectly with our San Juan Island Trip so we planned to do the two trips at the same time. We'd go to the coast with Brandon's family for the weekend and then take off for the San Juan Islands afterward.
We had to wait for the dates of the pirate festival to be announced. It seemed like there was some sort of change of who was in charge of it. For a little bit it looked like no one would step up to take over the festival. But someone did and the dates were announced for the last weekend in June. Brandon's sister Melanie found an AirBNB in Ocean Shores that would hold the whole family. I started planning out the places we'd visit the week after Ocean Shores.
I booked two hotels for our drive to Washington and back. I also planned two nights at Olympic National Park. One night would be at Sol Duc Hot Springs and I was able to reserve that night. The other would be at the Hoh Rain Forest which was First Come, First Serve. Normally I'm afraid of FCFS sites, but I was willing to live dangerously with this one because it was so close to Ocean Shores. The County Park that I wanted to stay at on San Juan Island didn't open up for reservations until later, but I put the date that it opened into my phone so I could reserve our spot the first chance I had. As soon as the reservation system opened I booked us two nights.
And then things started to get unpredictable. COVID-19 was spreading. The country was shutting down. Everything was getting cancelled. But I had hope that by the end of June all this COVID nonsense would be far behind us.
HA HA HA HA HA
The Pirate Festival was the first to go. It had seemed on shaky legs before COVID so I honestly wasn't surprised that it was cancelled. Brandon's siblings talked about still going on the trip and staying at the beach house. But since the Pirate Festival had been the main reason for the trip they decided to cancel the trip. It was officially cancelled as of Memorial Day Weekend. Less than a month before we planned to be there in June.
None of the rest of my trip had been cancelled yet so I was still planning to go. But I had to do some rearranging to plug up the holes in our plan. The original plan had been for us to leave Twin Falls on Wednesday night after Brandon was done with work. We'd drive to Pendleton and stay the night in a Motel there. Then we'd continue driving and meet up with Brandon's siblings at the beach house on Thursday night. We'd spend Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights at the beach house before starting the camping part of our trip. Now that we didn't have the beach house reservation it didn't make sense to leave on Wednesday. I was able to move our night at the motel from Wednesday the 24th to Friday the 26th.
Washington State re-opened up camping reservations on June 1st so staying at State Parks became my camping back up plan. I still liked the idea of visiting the ocean before going up to the San Juans so I found us a spot at Ocean City State park which is next to the town of Ocean Shores. I booked that spot for two nights since I figured we wouldn't want to move the tent too much after driving all that way. That second camping night would have been the night in the Hoh Rainforest. So much for living dangerously with the FCFS site.
I realized that we'd never booked a hotel for the night we planned to be in Seattle. With COVID still spreading unpredictably I decided that maybe staying in a hotel in one of the original hot spots wasn't a good idea. I looked for a State Park near Seattle and Salt Water State Park right on the Puget Sound about halfway between Seattle and Tacoma. It would be perfect for a place to stay after we were done with the San Juans.
I felt pretty good about plugging up all those holes. Our trip was going to be great.
And then I got an email on June 5th that said our reservation at the San Juan County Park was cancelled.
The county had decided to delay opening the park until July 1. My reservations were for June 30 and July 1st. The county can't make changes to reservations so they had to cancel both nights. I immediately got back on the county website and re-reserved our July 1st night. But where were we going to stay on June 30? I went back to the state park site and found Moran State Park on Oracas Island. This would require moving the tent twice and taking an extra ferry ride, but hey, we'd still be on the San Juans so it would be worth it.
Things looked stable for a while. The ferry schedule was delayed because they were determining whether to go to the usual summer schedule or stay on their winter schedule. They decided to stay on the winter schedule. I booked our ferry rides on June 12th. We'd have a total of four rides. One from Fort Townsend to Coupville. One from Anacortes to Orcas. An inter-island ride from Orcas to San Juan (Reservations weren't available for the inter-island ferries). And one from San Juan Island back to Anacortes.
Everything was in place and even though new COVID hotspots were popping up around the county again I was feeling confident that our trip would happen.
And then on Monday June 22, five days before we were supposed to start our trip, I got an email that Sol Duc Hotsprings in Olympic National Park would be closed for a week starting June 26. Our reservation there would need to be cancelled.
This time I paused before hurrying to reserve something else. This reservation had been in place since the middle of February. The fact that I'd had this reservation in place for so long through all the COVID uncertainty had always encouraged me that this trip would happen. But now it was cancelled too. Were other parts of our trip going to be cancelled. Was San Juan County going to close it's park? What about all my reservations at the state parks? Were they going to be cancelled within a few days too?
So I called San Juan County. And I called Washing State Parks. And I asked if they had plans to cancel anything. San Juan County was waiting to hear what their health department recommended at a meeting on the 24th. State Parks didn't know. They said they wouldn't keep info from us and would let us know as soon as they knew anything. This was unsettling, but also encouraging. Things were still in place.
So I found us another place to stay. I decided to skip Olympic National Park all together. Instead we'd spend the night at Deception Pass State Park. My cousin Melissa talked about how pretty the area was and I'd actually been feeling like I should have planned for us to stay there. So I was actually fine with this new plan. I had to rearrange some of our ferry reservations to work better with the new plan. But by the end of Monday I had everything back in place.
I'd gone from having zero nights at the state parks to having five reserved with the state parks. I had two hotels booked. And one county park. Of all 8 nights only one - the one at the final hotel - hadn't been changed at all from the original plan. Vacation planning during a pandemic is not for the faint of heart.
It was time to start doing the usual vacation preparations. On Wednesday I went grocery shopping and bought the majority of the food we'd eat on our trip. (We had plans for stopping at grocery stores for fresh food two times on the trip.) On Thursday we packed the clothes and the car.
Brandon went to work on Friday and I stayed home and told the kids a million times that we would leave when Brandon got home from work. We stayed busy by doing the many little things left on my to-do list. Items included updating this blog, printing the reservation confirmation pages (and thumbing through them to make sure that I really did have every night reserved), checking the height restrictions for the ferries, packing a tape measure so we could make sure our roof top bag was within those height limits, making sandwiches for dinner, cutting up left over vegetables in our fridge to take with us, picking peas from the garden to take with us (Veronica took initiative and did this one), returning library DVDs and books, and making two masks to add to the 4 we already had.
The kids and I also walked to Smiths to pick out doughnuts for breakfast the next day. The motel we were staying at didn't do a breakfast so we decided that doughnuts would be a good alternative.
In the late afternoon I made sure all the kids and I all took baths and showers and changed into clothes that we'd already picked out to wear on the trip. We were planning to camp a lot, but I wanted to make sure we at least started out clean - especially when we were going to be squished together in the car.
Brandon came home a half hour early at 3:30. He took a shower too and then we got the last of our things in the car. We took Marcia over to Brandon's coworkers house. Hannah is a saint and had offered to watch Marcia any time we needed her too. She didn't even blink and eye when we asked if she'd want to watch her for 9 days. She had lots of fun things planned and it sounded like Marcia was going on a vacation of her own. The kids were sad that she couldn't come with us, but I was not interested in taking a dog on a super long car ride.
We were on the interstate by 4:30. We drove in basically a diagonal line from Twin Falls to Pendleton Oregon. In the past, I've navigated on our road trips, but we've finally upgraded to using the Google Map feature on our phones. We named her Georgina. She gave excellent directions and helped us out so much on the trip.
Most of the drive was pretty uneventful. We had to stop a couple times because the straps on our new roof bag were flapping around and Brandon had to figure out a better way to secure them. And of course we had to stop for a few potty breaks. But overall everything went well. We ate sandwiches in the car so we didn't have to stop and eat.
We stopped at a view point for an Arch Bridge. Which I'd assumed was a natural bridge, but turned out to be a historic bridge from the old Highway. It was pretty.
Here are Brandon and the kids
And me and Lydia. Look how tall she is getting.
In the past we've been able to lay all the kids long ways on the bed. But I guess we've out grown that. Charlotte and Lydia refused to share a bed with Derrick and Veronica. They said they'd rather sleep on the floor. So that's what they did. (We did offer to get the air mattress out of the hat, but they said the floor was fine.)
Read about Day 2 here
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