A Travel Day, Including on the Water...
Sunday, we left the North Cascades area agreeing that it would be nice to return when the air isn’t as smoky. To get to the Olympic Peninsula, we could either drive around the south end of Puget Sound (at a cost of over an hour more driving) or take a Ferry across the sound (at a cost of about $100). We opted for the ferry. Word to the wise…if you’re driving a large vehicle, make ferry reservations early. By the time we made ours, we were lucky to get one on our chosen day and had a choice of 7am (not gonna happen) or 6pm; we chose the latter. Since it was only a bit more than 2 hours driving time to the ferry, we decided to spend some of the time doing a boat tour of Deception Pass.
We got on the road at about 10:30am and made good time to the coast. Deception Pass is a beautiful area between the Anacortes land mass and Whidbey Island. The road crosses two bridges, the first to Pass Island and the second on to Whidbey. After crossing over to Whidbey Island we stopped at the Deception Pass Boat Tours office to pick up our tickets and then headed down to Cornet Bay to the boat dock.
The boat tour took us out on the bay and then under the larger Deception Pass bridge. We stopped to observe harbor seals and cormorants along the way. Eventually we headed out about two miles into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. From there you can see several of the San Juan Islands and Vancouver Island in Canada. We saw a few porpoises before heading back to the dock. A longer tour would have been nice and would have increased our chances of seeing some whales. Lots of fun in any case and good break in the drive.
Being out on the water made us want fish and chips for lunch. We headed into Oak Harbor, first to Safeway to restock groceries and then to Kraken’s Cove restaurant for the fish and chips; good but not the best we’ve had. It was about another half-hour drive to the ferry terminal. We got there at 4:55pm for our 6pm reservation and, fortunately, they were able to get us on the 5pm ferry. A first for us and our RV adventures, driving the RV and Jeep onto a ferry. It was less expensive to unhitch the Jeep and drive them separately onto the ferry. We thought the whole process was either going to be a crowded chaotic madhouse, or it was going to be super easy. Fortunately, it was all very well organized and easy to navigate.
The trip took a little over half an hour, and we ended up in Port Townsend. Another 90 minutes of driving took us to the Ewha Dam RV Park, our home for the next three nights.
This stop will let us explore some of the northern parts of Olympic National Park…
