Original draft November 2015. Added photo.

Every November since Clare moved to Olympia, I have accompanied my husband to Seattle when he has his annual meeting at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Each year we’ve stayed a few days post meeting and done some traveling with Clare. The first year we mostly stuck around the area and stayed in a lovely Bed and Breakfast not too far away from Olympia. The second year we stayed there again, but also spent a few days on the Olympic Peninsula at Kalaloch Lodge. This year Clare wished to visit the San Juan Islands, so we did…

Andrew was with us this time (yay!) and after looking at lots of rental possibilities I settled on what was advertised on vacation rental sites as “Most Premier Whale Watching Vacation Home on San Juan Island.” I could not figure out the name of the actual house and assumed the owners were making a play on “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” movies. It turns out the house is actually called the San Juan Waterhouse.

You could say I obsessed a bit the in the weeks before the trip. So much so that I pretty much knew the drive from the ferry to the house by heart. We got there after dark so the drive was a little scary — no lights on the roads after you are out of the town of Friday Harbor. We picked up a pizza and salad at Van Go’s Pizza so we could eat when we got to the house.

The house has everything you could possibly need. We watched a little television after the pizza meal. Andrew found a video called “Terminal Velocity” and placed it in the DVD player just when I was chatting with the owner about our arrival. Andrew heard me mention the names of the owners of the house (Ken and Suzanne) and called to me, “Mom! We are watching them on TV!” It turned out that the owners were subjects of a couple videos (one National Geographic and one Disney) about peregrine falcons.

The house is amazing. We were impressed with it at night, but even moreso when we awoke in the morning. One thing I noted on Facebook that night was that I could see the lights of Canadians over the Haro Straight from my bed.