Saturday, July 21

Saturday, July 21: Vancouver, WA to Port Townsend, WA. 196 Miles           

A beautiful day, and a beautiful drive up the east side of the Olympic Peninsula. At some point in the day, about 25 miles north of Olympia, Washington,  we reached the westernmost point of our round-the country trip. Toast us with champagne, if you must!

A Geoduck (eww!)

We left our Vancouver motel at 9:30 and headed north, first on I-5, full of cars, then on US 101, slightly less full of cars, and finally on WA-20, full of cars and motorcycles. But we bowled along, through tall stands of fir and tamarack (aka hackmatack), very different scenery from the day before. We followed the shore of the Hood Canal, a deep channel west of Puget Sound, and home of a large (and controversial) Trident nuclear submarine base. We stopped at the Geoduck Restaurant for lunch at about 2, where we sat on a deck overlooking the Canal and a broad mudflat (the tide was way out). We could see a clammer here and there (not gathering geoducks, we were told, which are plucked from deeper water. Geoducks -- pronounced “gooeyducks,” if you don’t know them -- are huge clams with alarmingly long and large necks. Ugly, but thought to be edible).  We had a salmonburger (Joy) and a Reuben (me).

At the Geoduck Café

Joy struck up a conversation with a pleasant woman busily sketching at the next table. She turned out to be a fellow artist, traveling with her photographer husband. Almost every other customer was a motorcyclist, clad in black leather festooned with patches proclaiming his or her warlike outlook (though dated; all the sentiments seemed to date from the Vietnam era, with a strong emphasis on gittin’ them POWs back again and declaring that “these colors don’t run”). Yet mixed with these macho messages were peace symbols. And the motorcycles, all mammoth Harleys, were impeccably maintained and glistened with chrome. A lifestyle experience we seem to have passed up.

View from the Aladdin

At 3:00 we checked into the Aladdin Motor Inn in Port Townsend,  a three-story motel right on the waterfront, with an unparalleled view: sailboats gliding in and out of the nearby marina; the Port Townsend-Whidbey Island Ferries chugging back and forth, and far off, beyond a green peninsula two miles away, and Puget Sound beyond that, the distant snow-capped peaks of the Cascades. Quite a sight. (But we waited in vain for Mts. Rainier and Baker to “come out”).

We took a walk on the beach, and then went out to a delicious but expensive dinner at “Fin’s,” an excellent seafood restaurant downtown. We sat out on the deck and shivered in the 65 degree temperature – astounding after all the days we’ve experienced in the 90s and even 100s. I went back to the car for a fleece vest; Joy managed without, and we enjoyed a delicious meal by the shores of Port Townsend Bay, accompanied by the shrill exclamations of dozens of screaming gulls whirling overhead – fussing about a nearby eagle, we were told by our waitress – as the day came to a close. We were both happy. And happier still when we were back in our warm motel room.