As promised in my post yesterday, here's a short and sweet synopsis of what we did on our last full day on San Juan Island. Mainly we drove around. I had woken up at 2:30 am (couldn't shut my brain off) so I got up and wrote, addressed, stamped and sealed our Christmas cards. Kathleen got up at a normal time and we had breakfast. When we were done with breakfast (see I told you this was short and sweet) we went out to see the rest of the island we hadn't seen yesterday.
Many of our drives and my walks/hikes are just about finding things to take pictures of so we headed out to find some subjects. First stop, an old resort named Roche Harbor. It's on the far side of the island from Friday Harbor but it only took about 20 minutes to get there. Has an old photogenic hotel and a nice marina but nothing photographically that made me jump for joy.
Then it was off to English Camp. This is a national historic park that has two locations, this and American Camp at the opposite end of the island. We have been there before but it is a really pretty place and this was the first time we had ever been there when we were totally alone. Above are pics of Roche Harbor and below one of English Camp.
There was only one other place I wanted to see (plus I was scouting for a place to take an afternoon hike) and that was American Camp, the other half of the National Historic Park. It is at the completely other end of the island and is almost a different ecosystem. Where most of the island is heavily wooded, the American Camp section is pretty much a wind-swept plain and nothing but grass. Sadly, when we got to the park, it was closed. They were doing some kind of construction.
Since we had driven all that way, we decided to continue on to the very southern tip of the island, a place I had never driven down to before. We always used to stop at American Camp and then head back. We are very glad we did as the views were amazing.
But even better than the views were the three wildlife shots I was able to get. First, after I took the panoramic photo above, we drove all the way to the end of the island where there was a turn around and found ourselves surrounded on two sides by deer. As if that wasn't enough as we drove back (not more than three minutes later) we saw what we thought was a dog running through a field. But it was an interesting dog. And as it got closer we could see that it was not a dog at all but a fox. Strangely enough, the fox came right at our car (we think someone in a red car must be feeding it), nonchalantly walked in front of the car and then calmly crossed the road. All the way it was as if he was posing for pictures. Kathleen identified it as a red fox.
Once we left our foxy friend behind and headed into some trees, we saw what we thought was a hawk fly down and land on the side of a tree. I slowed down as we passed the bird and it wasn't a hawk (we see hawks in the NW all the time) but an owl. Kathleen later identified it as a Barred Owl. As you can see from the photo, if the owl had not flown in just as we were passing, we never would have seen it because it blends in so well with the tree. In my opinion, the owl is one of the best animal pics I have taken.
The next morning (yesterday) we had a 10:30 am ferry to catch back to Anacortes and we struck gold. If you remember, I mentioned yesterday that on our way to the island we had been stuck on the car deck between two large trucks so we could see nothing. This time we got the very front of the boat so we had a totally clear view of everything on our way back. I have two photos from that morning I want to share. The first I took while waiting for the ferry. The sun was so perfect over the marina, I couldn't pass it up. The second I took through the windshield of our car of another ferry approaching us (it was too damn cold to get out of the car) but it came out just fine for me.
Yes, we are traveling. Not far and certainly as safely as possible, we promise. We had planned a trip to the San Juan Islands with my brother Steve and his wonderful bride Jamie back in October to celebrate Kathleen's birthday. Then Jamie had her unfortunate trip and fall and instead of spending four nights on San Juan Island, she ended up spending 10 nights in Evergreen Hospital (she is doing much better now).
But we had paid for the nights at the AirBnB-type suite we had reserved and it was non-refundable. My brother was able to get his money back from his credit card/travel insurer but since we had rented two separate suites and neither Kathleen nor I was an injured party, we could not. So it was either go when we had planned (and leave Steve alone at our place visiting Jamie during the days—we weren't going to do that) or ask the owners of the suites to let us move our dates, which they did. So that's why I find myself sitting here in front of the fireplace in Friday Harbor in one of the Web Suites, writing this post.
For those not familiar with the San Juan Islands, they are a beautiful archipelago of more than 100 islands located in the northern end of Puget Sound. Saying that there are more than 100 is kind of pushing it. In actuality I think there are less than 30 that are inhabitable, many that are just large rocks sticking out of the water, some only at low tide. There are only four large islands that have ferry service. For the rest you need a private boat.
I have been coming here since the mid-1980s (my first life) when the family used to drive up from Eugene and rent a place on Lopez Island, the most rural of the four with ferry service. Later the islands were part of my yearbook sales territory so I would come out on a regular basis. But when I started cutting back that part of my yearbook job, the islands were the first schools to go. Just too much time and expense (round trip ferry for two seniors and a car is more than $60) to get out here on a regular basis. Since I met Kathleen we have only been up here a couple of times and we can't even remember when we were here last.
Getting to the San Juans from our place entails a drive of a little more than an hour and half and then a ferry ride of about the same amount of time. We drove up Tuesday and it just poured rain most of the way. The ferry leaves from a cute little town called Anacortes. We have a favorite deli in town where we have stopped for lunch before, so we thought we would grab take-out sandwiches and eat them in the ferry line.
Usually I love the ferry ride through the islands but with Covid, the ferry system is asking those who are driving to stay in their cars and not go up to the passenger deck except to use the restrooms. Sadly we were also stuck into a space on the car deck right between two big trucks so from our car we could not see out in any direction. Hopefully we will have a better view on the way home Friday.
We got in here around 3:30 and headed to our rental. It's really nice with a few faults that I won't mention here. We like it just fine, but it would not be our first choice on a return trip. Just little things.
As usual on our first morning I was out and about doing my pre-dawn walking with camera in hand. Here's some of the pics I got on that walk. Don't forget that clicking them in a web browser lets you see them enlarged. They look a lot better that way.
After my walk it was back for breakfast and then Kathleen and I headed out to tour some of the island we had not seen before. One of the things we wanted to see first was the Lime Kiln Lighthouse on the west side of the island. I had been by the state park where it is located but never stopped. This time we had a reason to go. Just last week we finished our 18th jigsaw puzzle since this all started in March. This one was a bunch of posters of lighthouses around the USA. One of them was Lime Kiln so we wanted to see it.
We got really lucky that the weather had cleared and we had wonderful sunshine for most of the day. This led to pics of the lighthouse and the area around it that I am very happy with.
After our visit to the lighthouse, we headed back to the suite for a quick bite of lunch and then I went back to Lime Kiln State Park to hike some of the more challenging trails that Kathleen would have had a problem with. I had a really great time and met lots of locals out for a hike on an unusually gorgeous late autumn day. I got to see the lime kiln and climb to the top of the highest hill and get an awesome view. A few pics so you can see what I mean.
That was it for the first full day. The weather was awesome. After my hike I headed back to the suite where we ordered takeout (I think we tried every decent place that had takeout that were open mid-week) and ate in. It is sad to see so many restaurants closed or operating on takeout only. We hope to come back soon after the pandemic is over to eat inside these places. One more post on Saturday after we get home will wind up this short trip.
I feel we are all islands - in a common sea. —Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Here’s the second of my posts about our most memorable food experiences during our travel together. Since we started with breakfast last time, I thought we might try lunch this time. And if there is a memorable lunch, it’s the one we had at a marvelous restaurant in Barcelona, Spain—La Rita.
Part of the reason this experience was so good was the contrast to what had happened the day before, during our first full day in Barcelona. We had done a lot of touring and after we finished touring Gaudi’s Casa Mila, Kathleen decided it was time to eat. We had previously decided that lunch would be our big meal of each day as Barcelonians don’t eat dinner until well after 9:00 pm and that is just too late for us. It also seems that on every trip we have one really bad food experience and this lunch was to be that experience.
Poor planning on my part had put us in a part of the city that I had not done my research on any restaurants (which I usually do). So we wandered looking for something on a menu that not only looked good but that we could fathom what it was. As most of you know, I am a pretty adventurous eater but my lovely bride isn’t as much. Especially when it comes to fish that we don’t know (she has shellfish allergies).
After turning down a number of places due to their limited menu we finally found a small Italian place who had items on their menu (pastas, etc.) that we recognized. But after we were seated we found that those items weren’t available at lunch when only a fixed-price menu (two course for 8 euro) was served. We had a choice of four appetizers and four entrees. We both went with the simple side salad as our appetizer and I had the calamari as my entree while Kathleen chose what the menu called “beef higado.” The waiter mimed to us that this was a part of the cow that came from somewhere near the flank. We kind of assumed (you know the saying) that it would be flank steak or something close.
After the waiter had brought our salad I suddenly realized that where he had been pointing on his body to indicate the part of the cow the meat came from was a little higher than the flank. So I got out my iPhone and did a quick Google search that revealed (just as the entrees arrived) that higado is LIVER. Now Kathleen likes most beef but not liver and since she doesn’t eat calamari, swapping was out of the question. Besides the liver problem, my calamari was awful–over-breaded with no sauces or even lemon and served over a bunch of poorly cooked french fries. Needless to say we got the check and got the heck out of there with most of our lunch consisting of our appetizer salad and a fairly decent roll. (Looking back on it, this was OK as we got PLENTY to eat for the rest of the week.) So that was our not-awesome lunch experience that brought us to the next day.
Since we had such a bad experience the day before, I tried really hard to wind up in a part of Barcelona that had one of my well-researched restaurants nearby. It is important to note (that I kind of mentioned above) that even though we had experienced late dinners in Italy and France on prior European trips, Spanish restaurants serve dinner latest of all. Many don’t open until 9:00 pm for dinner. That means we would be eating at 10:00 and that’s something we just can’t do. So we had previously decided that we would eat our main meal at lunch and just snack for dinner. Today we promised ourselves we would lunch in one of the restaurants we had previously found online—La Rita. Now, websites promise a bunch but seldom deliver on it. La Rita and it’s sister restaurant (where we ate lunch the next day) came through for us big time.
We arrived as they opened at 1:00 pm (lunch time in Barcelona is 1:00 to 3:30). If we had been even 10 minutes later we would have had to wait at least 20-30 minutes. The place filled up in minutes and mostly with what looked like locals. Lunch exceeded our expectations on every level. The food was outstanding. The service cordial and quick. The menu (available in English) excellent.
Kathleen started with an appetizer vegetable pie with mushroom sauce. I got to taste and it was wonderful. I had a “vegetable stack” of red peppers, mushrooms and eggplant that was topped with melted manchego cheese. Ooooh la la!
For our main course, Kathleen had the a lamb tangine with couscous, raisins and pine nuts. I went for one of the best pieces of duck I have ever had in my life with mango and raspberry. I wish I had kept taking photos of the food but I just got too busy eating to shoot pics.
For dessert Kathleen can’t remember what she had but I struck it rich with one of the most outstanding desserts of my lifetime, the Catalunyan national dessert. I am still not sure what it is called but it consists of a coffee/nougat ice cream, floating in a wonderful dark chocolate sauce covered with custard. I did some Googling and found that it might be Mato de Peralbes.
People, believe me when I tell you, you have never had anything like this. A few years later we went to a San Francisco restaurant that had a similar dessert called “Slap Your Mama.” It was so named because if you ate it for the first time you wanted to “Slap your mama” for not every having served it to you before. This was the same kind of experience. If I was from Barcelona and had never eaten this dessert, I would have slapped my mama.
Can you tell Kathleen enjoyed her lunch?
So from a lunch of some of the worst calamari and liver to this one at La Rita it made a huge difference in our feelings about Catalan cuisine. I truly believe that this lunch ranks in the top ten meals I have eaten in my lifetime. It was scrumptious. Or maybe it was the contrast to the day before.
And I should mention that the service and the ambience were outstanding. And here’s the good news, unlike our breakfast place (The Elbow Room in Vancouver, BC) that has since closed, you can still eat at La Rita. We plan on going there again the next time we are in Barcelona (in 2022).
I should add that La Rita is part of a restaurant group. A group is different than a chain—a chain is a bunch of identical restaurants but a group is owned by one set of owners but they are all different. The next day we ate at another of their restaurants, La Fonda. Food was on the same par but the experience was better at La Rita.
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what’s for lunch.—Orson Welles
If you saw my post from a few days ago you will know that I am going to start writing about our best food experiences over the 23 years that Kathleen and I have been together. Most of them have taken place all around the world so they kind of relate to travel.
To start organizing my memories, I made a list of my favorite dinner, lunch and breakfast experiences. So let’s start at the beginning of the day with breakfast. I love eating breakfast in a restaurant but we seldom do. Even on trips we often have breakfast someplace normal. For instance we spent five days in Barcelona and I am ashamed to say that we ate breakfast every day at a Starbucks a block from our hotel. I know, it’s sad. But in Barcelona there is so much great lunch and dinner food that we needed to watch our caloric intake.
Another reason we don’t have an amazing record with breakfast while on the road is that it is often hard to find a great breakfast place. If you Google “best breakfast in XXXXXX city” you really don’t get great places. I have actually seen Denny’s and IHOP show up as the best restaurant in random US cities. Now I have nothing against you grabbing a Moon over Mihami or a Rooti Tootie Fresh and Fruity, but that’s not for us.
To give you an idea of what I mean, my favorite thing to eat for breakfast is a dish called “Tom’s Favorite Breakfast” served at Lola, a Tom Douglas restaurant in downtown Seattle. The dish changes seasonally but always has octopus in it. So as you can see, I have strange taste when it comes to breakfast.
But this series is less about food than it is about eating experiences. And we have a doozy of a food and travel experience to start with. Sadly, this takes place in a restaurant that is no longer open, Vancouver BC’s Elbow Room. There is talk that it may be revived in another location someday but for now, it is closed.
Kathleen and I first discovered The Elbow Room on our second or third trip to Vancouver sometime in the late 90s. The restaurant first opened in 1983. I had read someplace that if you were looking for an unusual place to have breakfast in Vancouver you had to try The Elbow Room. We went and we loved it. Not because of the food (which was PLENTIFUL and also delicious) but because of the experience.
The Elbow Room was a one-of-a-kind place because just going in the front door, you needed a very thick skin. Let me give you an example. On our first visit, we walked in and the server we encountered pointed at a table. Didn’t seat us, just pointed. A few minutes later he came by with water and asked if we had seen the specials on the chalkboard before we came in. We said we hadn’t and his response was, “Then go back out and read them!” Then he walked away without saying anything else. At this point (because we had heard about the place in advance) we knew we were in for a bumpy but fun ride.
Sure enough when he finally returned to the table, he brought us coffee and took our order. And along the way we had overheard him insulting or being snarky to pretty much everyone else in the place. He was the king of snark. It was truly fun to watch people who came in after us and had no clue what the place was about get insulted and mocked. Some were aghast and others got it in a few minutes.
When our waiter came back with our food we asked for more coffee. He pointed at the pot across the room (almost behind the counter) and said, “Get it yourself!” We had a good laugh over that one…after I got us more coffee. BTW: Not that it matters but every waiter working there has been flamboyantly gay except the one time when we were “served” by one of the owners (he’s the fellow on the left in the linked video below) who was just cantankerous even though he called himself a flaming queen.
The photo at the top of this article (taken during our best experience there ) is proof. The restaurant itself was a huge supporter of the LGBTQ community and even had a musical written about it. I have searched the web to find a copy of the “rules” of The Elbow Room which were printed on the back of the menu. They all pretty much came down to this: if you are thin-skinned and can’t take a joke, you are in the wrong place. You can kind of read them in this shot of their big blackboard. *8 always cracks me up.
Besides the fun, the food was superb and this was our first of many visits to The Elbow Room. But the best experience didn’t come until June 2017. Our good friends Paul and Gail, from Leeds, England had flown in so that they, us and 14 other Martini Mates could take an Alaskan cruise together. P & G had flown in early and we had picked them up at YVR (airport designation for Vancouver) and went to tour Vancouver for a couple of days before doing the same in Seattle. On our second morning there we told them we had to have breakfast at The Elbow Room. Being the fun friends that they are, they loved it. Even when our waiter (you can see him in the photo above with Paul and I) started referring to Paul (who some may think of as vertically challenged) as Papa Smurf.
I cannot remember a single breakfast when the company has been so good, the service so snarky, funny and truly unique and the food so delicious. It’s one of those times I will remember. Especially since The Elbow Room is now gone. We will miss it.
There are different kinds of humor, some is sarcastic, some introspective. Introspective fit my personality better.—Rita Rudner
One of our ten best dining experiences was when we took our (adult) kids to the world-famous Herb Farm.
While walking today I was listening to my favorite podcast, Armchair Expert. The interview I heard today was with author Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love). During the interview she talked about the fact that she loves to write. She loves writing more than doing just about anything else.
Well, I love to write. Not as much as Ms. Gilbert. Other things come before that for me: family, photography, cooking and travel. But since the pandemic started there has been nothing special to take photos of, only a few visits from the kids and of course no travel. I have been focusing on cooking. While cooking is fun, there are only so many dinners for two that stretch my creativity. And our freezer is BEYOND FULL of leftovers. I could stop cooking for three weeks and we would not go hungry.
So hearing Ms. Gilbert talk about writing with host Dax Shepherd (who is also a television/movie writer as well as an actor and host of one of the top podcasts) made me realize that I need to write more. But what to write about.
Then over on Instagram I met a fellow blogger who loves traveling and cruising as much as I do. He lives in Great Britain and we have been keeping up a correspondence on his blog, this blog and Instagram. He told me that I inspired him with my daily Instagram travel photo to start going back through his travel experiences and posting photos on Instagram. Which in turn has inspired me to think about how I could do the same thing with writing.
Stay with me here…I have a little bit further to go here…I am going to explain what you will see on this page in the weeks to come. Remember that podcast I mentioned? Well I listen to it every day. And two days before Ms. Gilbert was on, I heard an excellent interview with Samin Nosrat. She is a food columnist with The NY Times Magazine and the host of the Netflix show, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. She and Dax got into a discussion about dining experiences. Not just cooking or eating, but eating experiences.
I got that. I understand exactly what eating experiences are. How they are different than just food. They are about the entire experience which might include getting to the restaurant, why that particular restaurant, obviously the food and the service. Over the years so much of our travel has involved food. I spend more time researching restaurants than I do hotels. Maybe because on a city visit, you are in just one hotel, but you get to eat three times a day. In every one of those meals on the road and here in Seattle, we are always looking for great food but more than that we are looking for food experiences.
One of my favorite lunch experiences was marinated octopus in a taverna after we got lost in Rhodes, Greece.
So here is what this is all about. As I finished my walk (where I had listened to Ms. Nostrat) I begin to make a list in my mind of the greatest food/dining/lunch experiences we have had both here and on the road. You know how much I love my lists and this one just kept growing and growing. So my new goal is to write about those experiences in a series of short posts over the next few weeks. I hope to post twice a week with a new one. If you love travel and you love food, I hope you will like the stories.
I always encourage people to get out there, travel the world, see new things, experience new people, experience new food, experience new culture. What happens is that helps you to grow and be your best self.
—Karamo Brown
Here’s the second of my posts about our most memorable food experiences during our travel together. Since we started with 
Since we had such a bad experience the day before, I tried really hard to wind up in a part of Barcelona that had one of my well-researched restaurants nearby. It is important to note (that I kind of mentioned above) that even though we had experienced late dinners in Italy and France on prior European trips, Spanish restaurants serve dinner latest of all. Many don’t open until 9:00 pm for dinner. That means we would be eating at 10:00 and that’s something we just can’t do. So we had previously decided that we would eat our main meal at lunch and just snack for dinner. Today we promised ourselves we would lunch in one of the restaurants we had previously found online—La Rita. Now, websites promise a bunch but seldom deliver on it. La Rita and it’s sister restaurant (where we ate lunch the next day) came through for us big time.
Kathleen started with an appetizer vegetable pie with mushroom sauce. I got to taste and it was wonderful. I had a “vegetable stack” of red peppers, mushrooms and eggplant that was topped with melted manchego cheese. Ooooh la la!
But this series is less about food than it is about eating experiences. And we have a doozy of a food and travel experience to start with. Sadly, this takes place in a restaurant that is no longer open, Vancouver BC’s Elbow Room. There is talk that it may be revived in another location someday but for now, it is closed.
