Come and gone

Okay, so we did get to Victoria, Canada one day.   We took the 8:15 am ferry from Port Angeles, 15 miles from Sequim as foot passengers, spent the morning shopping: shoes and a camera for me.  And then lunch and beers at a pub.



We took a water taxi tour of the waterway into Victoria, seeing how people lived along the banks and hearing stories about how things have changed there over time.

The picture above is actually from later, when one of the many water taxis happened to be alongside a plane taking off, kinda strange to see..

Later we walked over to Fisherman's Wharf where we admired the floating homes.

On the way back, we saw this apartment building, with several buildings at ground level, surrounded by a lovely created waterway.

Above is the ferry we boarded at 7:30 to come back to Sequim.  It's about 1 1/2 hours and 22 miles across to Victoria from the US.   The ferry leaves both sides four times a day and in the season is pretty full.

A day or two later, Tom and I visited my former neighbors in Issaquah, Washington where my former husband and I lived for 5 years before we took an extended RV trip and ended up in Fayetteville, Arkansas where I've lived since 1984.   We all felt so much at home with each other, it was though we'd been gone just a  bit and now we were back.    But no.

Then Tom and I spend the next day in Seattle, visiting places I remembered: Pike Place Market, Ballard Locks with the salmon ladder.  It was so hectic and stressful, getting from place to place, that we probably won't try driving in a large city together again soon.    Great to leave by taking a ferry over to an island, have dinner, then drive back to our little trailer in Sequim.

Last Saturday the yacht club here had a race and I got back in time to use my new Zoom camera to capture the spinackers.

Near us, just down the road is a reestablished estuary.  Turns out the culvet was too small to let enough ocean to support the wildlife that depends on it.  When they turned the culvent into a bridge, all manner of wildlife has returned and this has become, once again, a place where young salmon stop for food on their way from the nearby Jimmycomelately stream to the Stait de Juan de Fuca.

One day, Tom and I stopped by the Audubon Center in Sequim which is alongside the Dungeness River.  For a while, this year, the water was too warm and not enough of it so that salmon were not entering it to come back to spawn and die, their normal life cycle.  When Tom and I visited, it had rained a bit so now we could see many salmon, gradually decomposing, coming up the stream: the way it's supposed to be.

We've been here in Sequim since about August 25.  We had planned on staying a month, while checking out the place for living here.  People tell us they love it.  They also say that there are a few months when it seems like spring will never come.  And it's a long way from both of our families and friends.   So, for how, we have given up on the idea of moving here and tomorrow we are starting a trip east and eventually back to Fayetteville.   It's always fun to hook up the trailer and start away again, somewhere, so we're looking forward to it.