San Juan Ho!

My first travellogue on this blog was the one about my trip to San Diego. Now that I have tasted blood, er... tasted writing about trips, I have decided to put up further travellogues (or to put it more accurately, account of my travelling experiences with some tit-bits about the destination thrown in). This one is about my trip last weekend to Seattle. Given my tendency to ramble on and on, even though the trip lasted for exactly two days, I won't be surprised if the write-up about it spans more than one post. Here goes!

So, right after my trip to SD with A and S, they invited me over to Seattle to spend a weekend. The main attraction for me was the tulip festival which happens only once a year, in the month of April. Besides, I have a whole bunch of friends in Seattle whom I had not met in a very long time. It took very little convincing for me to book my tickets. As the days crept by, A came up with the idea that, when I visited Seattle, we could also go to San Juan (an island near Seattle) and spend sometime there.

Soon, a bunch of eight people, the guys, P, R and J and the girls, A, S, C, D and me were all set to go. The plan was to spend a night at San Juan and then visit the tulip festival and some other points of interest on the way back. Since I was the "guest", all I had to do in the trip-organizing was to arrive at the Seattle airport on the Friday night before the San Juan trip. The rest of them took care of booking the accomodation, planning the food, deciding the itinerary of places to visit, taking printout of the directions printout et al. - hehehehe!

So Friday at work was a breeze (doesn't time fly by when you are excitedly anticipating something?) and V dropped me off at the airport in the evening. The flight to Seattle with me (well-stuffed with the sandwich I ate at the airport - I always manage to over-eat before flights in the anxietly that I *might* die of starvation with just the measly pretzels they traditionally serve on the flight) on it was on time. S and A picked me up at the airport. We managed to visit some other friends and then crashed around 12.15am. We were supposed to be on the road by 6.15am the next morning, as J, who was in charge of finding details about the ferry to San Juan, reminded us in multiple emails.

The next day morning, miracle of miracles, eight people were actually good to go by 6.30am in the morning (yeah, my jaw dropped too). Two cars, four in each, and the fun had begun :-)! We had to drive up to Anacortes to board the ferry. From Anacortes, the San Juan ferries have a bunch of destinations - we were going to Friday Harbor. There was an option to take the cars on the ferry too - we chose it. We reached well before the ferry's departure time and hence had the luxury of coffee, breakfast and some souvenir-shopping before actually getting onto the boat. You can see the ferry to the left in the picture. In the background is the Olympic mountain range. The water itself is the Pacific Ocean backwaters.

The ferry journey took about an hour and a half. Oh yes, I forgot about the weather! It was bright and sunny - so much so that C decided that capris were the order of the day. C spent the rest of the morning (till she got the chance to change) cribbing about her cold shins and ankles. Darn - its so deceiving when you can see the sun and you step out in a t-shirt, only to be hit by a blast of cold wind! In Chennai, where I come from, when you see the sun, it's HOT. Guaranteed. Oh well, coming back to the story, so, in spite of the sun, it was *extremely* chilly and none of us could stand on the boat deck for more than a couple of minutes. So we all pretty much sat inside the huge, covered cabin and played games, chatted and did general timepass.

The ferry finally docked at San Juan - Friday Harbor and we rolled out in our cars. We had arrived!