San Juan Island:
Friday Harbor is the main the town on San Juan Island and it's probably the most rocking joint out of all the islands. There's restaurants, bars, and the Whale Museum. The best part of the island is that it's so pedestrian friendly--you could very well just walk onto the ferry and get off in Friday Harbor and be totally fine without a car.
Jack and I decided to drive onto the ferry once--just so we could drive around San Juan Island and holy cow is that one expensive ferry ride (I think it was about $56, round trip, for a car and two passengers). It was fun driving around the island; they have a sculpture park (think SAM's Olympic Sculpture Park, but with smaller pieces and a denser collection) near Roche Harbor, a wine tasting room, and an alpaca farm!
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| Silly alpaca. |
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| Nothing! |
Orcas Island:
While San Juan Island seems like a bustling town, Orcas Island is a sleepy little place. Sleepy and dark (there seem to be no street lights, just whatever light is on the front porch or from your car). Jack and I went to Orcas Island for a stay at the Otters Pond Bed and Breakfast--it's a cute little place run by a husband-wife team, kind of reminds me of staying at your grandparents.
One of the highlights was our hike to Mt. Constitution in Moran State Park. While there is a road that allows you to drive straight up to the top, Jack and I decided to hike it instead--even with the threat of rain on that day--because it's easy to be hard, but hard to be smart. The hike went as good as it could get considering that it started snowing once we made it to the top, we didn't plan for any emergencies, there was only one water bottle and we drank all of it. It's important to note that the hike was fairly difficult--just in terms of elevation gain--the first third of the hike was more or less switchbacks as you gain about 1,000 feet on the way up.
But the view on the top is amazing (well, what we could see anyways): Anacortes, Guemes Island, Mt. Erie, the base of the Casades, and the beautiful Puget Sound.
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| Check out my awesome collage skillz. |
Another highlight (though probably more for me than Jack) was dinner at Allium. I'd like to pretend that I'm a snobby foodie and I heard of the restaurant because the chef and owner, Lisa Nakamura, used to be the chef de cuisine at Woodinville's Herbfarm, but I only found out about it through my old work's annual dinner event. It was delicious though--a bit pricey, but well worth the price. They have these tiny little biscuits, which I'd like to call butter squares, and they were just so, so delicious (especially with their caramelized onion jam--it sounds weird, but trust them on this one).
After dinner and feeling a bit lazy, we went to the grocery store for some beers in classy 22 oz bottles, but it was very nearly dead at 8pm. It felt more like shopping at 1:00am when the sots are leaving the bars and hitting up the grocery stores before they stop selling booze. It was an entertaining weekend on Orcas although it's definitely not a place to go for the night life, unless you enjoy walking around in the darkness.
The San Juans are fun for a weekend, although it boggles my mind when I think about what it's like to live there. I mean, if Anacortes seems dead on the weekends, the islands seem like a ghost town outside of tourist season. While that means that we get to have much of the outdoors to ourselves, it also means that we have to suffer through dinner sitting next to the only other couple at the restaurant where the guy is discussing loudly how some craft beer or another is a sipping beer, meant to last through the whole night. Dude. It's beer. Just drink it.
