The journey started Tuesday afternoon on the MV Coho, a Black Ball Line ferry that runs between Victoria, BC and Port Angeles, WA. I really like ferries, and it’s always a treat to get to ride on one. Bonus: the day was lovely and warm, at least on shore, so I was able to go out on deck, breath the sea air, and not freeze!

Victoria’s Inner Harbour is a pretty busy place, with little harbour sightseeing ferries (some of us call them bumbleboats because they remind us of bumblebees) bopping from point to point around the harbour, the huge new Hippo amphibious busses ploughing around between them, and floatplanes skimming across the surface like water striders, taking off and landing. Sailboats and yachts come and go from the many docks lining the harbour, and kayakers nose around the edges, investigating the strange lifeforms clinging to the pilings under the docks.

Once out in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, we headed into a wispy fogbank — I felt like I might be entering the Twilight Zone! For a while, we could have been somewhere far out to sea, for all the land that was visible — but soon we emerged on the far side of the foggy discontinuity. One minute we were on a featureless watery plain; the next, the Olympic Mountains loomed. The water’s surface was nearly glassy for most of the trip over, but the swells from the Pacific made for some interesting walking down the aisles of the ferry; it looked like a ship full of drunken landlubbers (including me). I tried to draw for a bit, but got seasick and decided to careen around the aisles and out on deck instead.

I found my way to my friend Annie’s (the writer of Spam and the Sasquatch) place in Port Townsend, and she took me on an evening tour of some of Spam’s favourite haunts, including Elevated Ice Cream. We fetched up at a beach facing Whidbey Island, from which emanated a sound like thunder. I asked a man on the beach what it was, and he said there was a new kind of military jet that was being tested over there, and that the locals were Not Amused. I could hear why.

But despite the man-made thunder, the sunset was lovely. My beach acquaintance asked where I was from, and when I told him Vancouver Island, he pointed at the sun and said, “oh, just about where the sun is setting now”. I aimed a mental salute at Old Sol and my home, and turned my thoughts south.