PacNW - Day 1

Since we covered over 2,000 miles and saw quite a few sites along the way I've decided to break out trip up in to different blog posts for each day.

So here is about what happened day one...

Woke up around 3 am, Sandy picked us up 4 am, airport by 4:30.

Get checked in, exit row (nice). We sit next to a dude, named Tony, who has just spent the last week in Fargo at a National Wrestling tournament coaching some high school boys. His voice shows he has been yelling each day. He's surprised by our whimsically planned trip, where we just plan to see how far we can go and how much we can see. So he draws us a map with high lights we must see in Washington and Oregon. Tony literally spent about 2 hours drawing the map, reading through out tour book and talking to us about where we needed to go. Here is the map he drew us:

Once the plane landed we gathered our luggage and headed off to get the rental car. We had reserved what was to be an 'intermediate' car. Evidently an intermediate car is a crappy Chevy Cobalt with over 42k in miles, no power windows, no power locks, no cruise.

But we took the car, checked it out and put our GPS up with Anacortes, WA as our destination. We got out on the open road to discover the the car once on the freeways shakes so bad the dome light and the steering wheel shook. FUN! Ok, I'll stop complaining about the car....

We arrived Anacortes around 11 am, plenty of time for the 11:55 ferry to the San Juan Islands - Friday Harbor.

Once at Friday harbor we grabbed some food at Friday's crab house and enjoyed our first taste of Dungeness crab in the PacNW. Once we finally had some food in us we finally crashed and were so tired we found a nice spot next to the water were we could catch a few zzzzz....

After we had our little nap in the park, we were off on our Whale Watching tour.

One the cruise we saw a few Orcas:

We also saw quite a few seals:

And we also saw what I like to refer to as the phantom Cruise ship:

Overall it was a great first day, it did however run a little long. Our ferry back wasn't until 10 pm and it didn't arrive back on the mainland until 12:30. Needless to say we sleep the 2.5 hours on the ferry and then when we got back to our car we slept there too :).