By Thursday, we were sufficiently acclimated to island life. Apparently sleeping in past 9 was not acceptable to my brother, though, because we received a text message at 9:20 asking if we wanted to go to the state park.
A mere 20 minutes later, we were all set to go, but he was MIA. 20 minutes after we were ready, he showed up freshly showered and raring to go. (I like how he made it seem like we were the slow ones?)
The state park actually has a beautiful drive up to the summit of Mt. Constitution; it seemed literally like an enchanted forest road with fences covered in deep green moss and the sunlight streaming through the trees.
And at the top? Breathtaking.
I'd just like to point out that I summited Mt. Constitution while holding a baby. I'm super hard core like that.
...but then Hubs stole her from me.
She was happy to have someone new to point at things with.
Aaahh!! Those pigtails! They get me every time!
At the top of the summit, they had a stone/wood building with 360 degree views of Orcas.
We were definitely "in" the clouds.
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| There go those pigtails AGAIN! |
Later that day, Hubs and I went with Mark and Aki on a 3 hour whale watching tour. It took over an hour to get out to where the whales currently were, but it was a beautiful ride.
And the whales? HUGE. I would not want to be in the alone in the water facing one of these things.
At that point, we were actually dotting in and out of Canadian waters, so we saw a lot of Canadian tour boats as well. They were quite a bit smaller than ours, and by the looks of things, a lot more rough. Take, for example, the chick puking off the side of this boat:
Hubs took over the camera shooting for most of the tour...and unfortunately, some hotshot photographer kept on running from side to side on the boat every time we spotted a whale...and effectively got in about 90% of our pictures.
Ah, well. Next time, we'll use more zoom.
When we got back home, we discovered that Peesh and Scott had been hard at work entertaining all 3 kids AND cooking our dinner. Unfortunately, the kids had gotten their sneakers pretty wet at the beach while we were gone. The next thing I knew, I walked in on my brother microwaving (???) them dry.
Peesh and Scott's dinner consisted of Cuban-inspired cilantro shrimp, pork shoulder, and some fancy rice with a lemon chocolate tart for dessert. I'm telling you, we ate like kings!
Also by this time in the trip, the boys knew that Hubs would build a big fire on the beach at night if they asked him enough times. So down the lonnngggg boardwalk we'd trek to the beach where Hubs would spend time magically making a fire on a windy night (he's pretty amazing).
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| Looking back at the house. |
In the meantime, Callie would play frisbee,
I would take even MORE pictures of Emi,
the rest of the fam would chillax on a driftwood log,
and the boys would continuously throw things in the fire. For hours.
I'd attempt to get a family portrait,
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| Love Marky's walking stick. BAHAHA! |
annnddd kind of fail after 30 attempts (no joke. either Benton would look mad, Cole would be doing his "funny" smile, or Emi would be flailing around. ah, kids.).
But, of course, I took some time to show my man some lovin' for all his hard work building fires every night.
And, of course, Callie needed lovin' too.
Marky was able to spend some time teaching the boys about charcoal (or fire? there was some sort of lesson going on.).
But to these boys, there's nothing better that poking at stuff in a fire.
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| Not even the heat from the fire could deter Benton from poking at it. |
Except for s'mores. Nothing beats s'mores.
And before we knew it, our last night on Orcas was coming to an end.
