Island Life: What We Did on Our Autumn Vacation

Since the start of the pandemic, we haven’t left the island much. This was not a huge hardship for us; we work at home, where we are comfortably situated and have plenty of room; we love it here. It’s all good.

In June, after we’d been vaccinated and things seemed to be opening up a bit, we did take a trip to California for my brother’s fiftieth birthday, and then a few weeks later we attended a wedding outside of Everett, Washington. But then the delta variant came roaring along, so we canceled most of the houseguests we’d optimistically scheduled and hunkered down again.

When we got a “save the date” notice for the California wedding of a very important friend in the middle of all this canceling-of-things, we figured it would soon be followed by a “change the date” notice, just like that July wedding had been.

Nope. Weeks and then months passed, and the wedding was still on.

There was much debate in this household, but we eventually decided it was too important to miss. So we made very careful, very thorough plans. We would drive (we far prefer to drive anyway, for a whole host of reasons), though we would not do the whole visiting-folks-and-shopping-everywhere extravaganza we like to do on driving trips; we would barely get out of the car. It helped that the happy couple was very serious about pandemic safety, requiring proof of vaccination or a negative test for all attendees, and planning for as much of the event as possible to be held outside.

All right, we thought. We can do this.

The first thing that happened was that the Washington State ferry system continued to fall completely apart. I’ve written about this before; the situation hasn’t improved. In fact just before we were to leave for the wedding, a “temporary” schedule was implemented, a boat was removed from our route, and all reservations were canceled. Including, of course, the reservations we’d made weeks and weeks in advance, after carefully calibrating driving times and making hotel reservations and all that.

So we set an excruciatingly early alarm, scrambled off in the Thursday morning pre-dawn darkness, and got to the boat we needed to take two hours before sailing. The terminal check-in fellow nearly laughed at us and sent us down to get in line, where we were the fifth car. (This boat has a 144-car capacity.) That was fine; we know how to wait. And when we finally drove on, we ended up being given the best seat in the house: front row center.

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That position, in addition to providing spectacular views, also meant that we were the first car off the ferry in Anacortes.

So far so good!

There’s a hotel chain we like, sort of a mid-range, economical-but-not-overly-so option. Not to use any names; oh let’s call it ‘MostExcellent Regional’. (A notch or two up from ‘CheapRoom SmallNumber’ or ‘Spiffy OtherNumber’.) Our first night, we made for Grants Pass, Oregon—a long but doable drive. We encountered some weather along the way, but hey, it’s Washington and Oregon, of course it’s going to rain. Particularly in late October.

I love the Grants Pass MostExcellent Regional hotel. Decent rooms, great beds with four nice pillows, cheerful staff—when we checked in, the purple-haired clerk called me “girlfriend.” We’ve stayed there many times, always happily, and this time was no exception.

We were off bright and early Friday morning (and it was bright, a gloriously sunny day) for the rest of the drive, where we would be staying in Grass Valley, California. The wedding was to be in Nevada City, a couple miles up the highway, but the official wedding hotel was the ‘Grand Elegant Historical FancyPants SpendyPalace’, which cost more than my first car. Per night.

During our drive there, Mark got a call from a friend of his in Southern California, who had heard there was a “bomb cyclone” coming. “Oh dude,” Mark told him, “we don’t get cyclones here.” After he hung up, we looked out at the beautiful sunny landscape and chuckled. But later, Mark googled the claim, just to be sure, and learned that there was indeed a “bomb cyclone” forecast, but just way out in the ocean. We would probably see some rain.

Hey, no problem. We’re Pacific Northwesterners. We’re fine with rain.

We pulled up to our Grass Valley MostExcellent Regional hotel in the late afternoon. It looked cute, if a bit…dated. We checked into our room. Hmm. A little shopworn. The ceiling had been repaired around the fire sprinklers with somewhat similar plaster, then painted in the same general color family as the rest of the ceiling; the bed had only two pillows, looking lost and lonely across its great expanse; the sink drain stopper was disconnected and lying on the counter, there was no Kleenex in the dispenser, and the bathroom towel rack hung down from one bolt.

But hey! There were three towels, which I, as a long-haired person, appreciate. Even if they were crammed onto the windowsill in lieu of the broken towel rack.

We’re rugged frontier people, so we shrugged all this off, got spiffied up and headed out to try to find our friends, who were supposedly holding a couple of cocktail gatherings, both before and after the rehearsal dinner. A comedy of errors left us having a delightful dinner a deux at the Grand Elegant’s sister hotel, outside under powerful heat lamps, because although we were in California, for some reason it had become rather chilly.

After dinner (and after a completely serendipitous encounter with an old friend of Mark’s from decades ago who just happens to live in Grass Valley and just happened to be dining with his wife at the very next table), we did find our friends and the rest of the gang, and followed them to cocktails at the Grand Elegant Historical FancyPants SpendyPalace’s bar…indoors, unmasked, packed with strangers.

Gosh, hope those vaccinations do their job, we thought.

Later, in our hotel room, Mark googled the coming storm again, and began reading me rather dire forecasts about “historical amounts of rain,” flash floods and mudslides expected later in the weekend—most severely in the central and northern California Sierra foothills—which was exactly where we were. Not until after the wedding though, so no problem. Perfect timing!  

We passed an unremarkable night in our LeastExcellent Regional, had breakfast with Mark’s old friend and his wife, and soon it was time to get spiffied up for the wedding. It had started to rain in earnest by now, so all the wedding events were going to be moved indoors.

The wedding was lovely.

It was pouring so heavily when we left the reception that we gave some new friends a ride one block across the highway overpass to the Grand Elegant Historical FancyPants SpendyPalace before we drove down the highway to our hotel, getting soaked in the process.

It is theoretically possible that the excess of excellent wedding food and good sparkling cheer in my belly had something to do with my poor night’s sleep. Or maybe I had an inkling of what was coming. In any event, I opened a bleary eye at five o’clock in the morning and saw that Mark was fully dressed and moving about in our darkened room, so I pulled out an earplug.

And then I heard a strange sound.

I asked, “Is that…water dripping…inside this room?”

“Yes,” he answered. “More than dripping. The carpet’s soaked, and I’ve moved our stuff out of the way.”

I sat up in bed and looked around. Water was quite nearly pouring through the ceiling by the front window, bringing chunks of plaster down with it to puddle on the sad carpeting. “I’ve already been to the front desk to tell them about this,” Mark told me. “They’re very sorry, and they also told me that this whole hotel is in a flood plain and they’ve been given a flash flood warning.”

“All right then,” I said, and scrambled out of bed. We made very short work of packing, checked out, and tried to figure out what to do now.

We were supposed to be meeting a dear friend of Mark’s for coffee an hour before the farewell wedding brunch at the Grand Elegant Historical FancyPants SpendyPalace. “Let’s just drive up there now,” Mark suggested. “They’ll be open, they’ll be warm and dry, we can wait in the restaurant till nine.”

Well, they weren’t open at five-thirty in the morning; we were fortunate that the night manager happened to notice us at the door and was kind enough to let us in, because we were now entirely saturated. The restaurant would not open till nine; the lobby was small and a little chilly, with stiff uncomfortable elegant furniture; the night manager seemed continuously baffled by our presence, though he didn’t kick us out, at least.

Outside, rain was bucketing down, trees were being blown nearly sideways, and we began to worry about our route out of there…down narrow mountain highways lined by many tall trees. Hmm. Maybe we should just do the coffee date and skip the brunch…

Eventually, around seven-thirty or eight, the day manager came in and took pity on us. She invited us to go upstairs to the second-floor lounge and help ourselves to coffee and scones which had been set out there for hotel guests.

Best. Coffee. Ever.

We had a great conversation with the bride’s dad, then met Mark’s dear friend at nine, had a lovely breakfast with her, and then hit the road. We altered our route, keeping to the bigger highways (relatively speaking), adding an hour or more to swing around by Sacramento rather than brave the low-lying country lanes surrounded by already-flooded rice fields we’d come down on. It just seemed…wiser.

That was some terrifying driving, let me tell you. Mark was behind the wheel, thank goodness—I’m not sure I could have managed it. The car was buffeted about by the winds. Limbs and branches and other tree-stuff was all over the road, as were sheets and sheets of water. Visibility was poor, sometimes gone altogether.

And it took forever. He was driving more slowly than usual, of course. The world outside the car windows was a saturated mess. It did make the recently burnt Shasta forests kind of eerily beautiful, though.

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We finally made Grants Pass (where the rain had by now stopped; we’d outrun it) at dinnertime. The purple-haired clerk greeted me warmly and said she’d given us the royal suite (a room like every other room there, but right over the office). We went out and picked up an absurd amount of excellent sushi, then brought it back to our room where we luxuriated in our functional towel rack, our four pillows, our working sink drain, our supply of Kleenex, oh and of course our entirely intact and dry ceiling, and spent a relieved, comfortable Sunday night.

One final leg of the journey back: Grants Pass to Anacortes, where we needed to make the six-thirty ferry Monday evening.

This, of course, means getting through both Portland and Seattle, where traffic can be epic. (I remember once, years ago, driving early one Sunday morning through Seattle, and being completely astonished to have gotten from the University District down past the West Seattle bridge in four minutes. In normal times, this can take an hour or more.)

We hit the road early, making it through Portland by eleven. That was intended get us to Seattle by two—the outer edge of “possibly not horrible” traffic.

Just past Olympia, however, there it was: the first slow-down. That’s okay, we told ourselves; we’ve got a little wiggle room. I pulled up the traffic app on my phone and saw that the holdup was only a half-mile or so ahead, then the way cleared.

We inched and inched closer to it, whatever it was…it was the just-cleared remains of a giant tree, which had fallen down across the freeway. Across Interstate 5—three lanes each side at that point.

“Whew,” we said. “Glad we missed that.”

Then we saw all the emergency lights on the other side of the freeway. Several other huge trees had fallen across that side, and were still there. We went by too fast to see what else had happened, but there were a lot of emergency vehicles and traffic was backed up behind it for miles and miles and miles and miles.

We got through Seattle. The rain had caught back up with us, though nothing like Sunday’s deluge. We even had time to do a little Costco shopping, and have dinner at the Fidalgo Drive-In before getting to the ferry line.

The boat was late, of course, and when it arrived, hardly anyone sailed on it. Our car got shunted off to a side deck, but that was fine—it was too dark for any views. It did ensure that we were the very last car off the boat at Orcas, though. A fitting end for our journey…

…except for the extremely last moment, where we drove up our road and saw evidence that not one but two trees had come down across the road here as well. Thankfully, our neighbor had chainsawed them out of the way, so we were able to make it all the way home and fall into our own sweet bed…promising ourselves that we would definitely keep Mark’s chainsaw in the car from now on.

The next day we went out and bought rapid home-testing kits for covid and took them over the next two days and they both showed negative so whew! We got away with it.

I think.

I hope.

I’m pretty sure.

Fingers crossed.

I’m ready to stop leaving the island again now.