A grand day out

Despite staying up too late playing Blood Bowl last night, I managed to get in the car this morning and drive the family to the correct ferry terminal, and catch the 8:50 sailing, taking us over to the Olympic Peninsula. We were actually too early for a change; on the other side, we were driving through sleepy towns before they’d woken up.
We always drive through Port Gamble and don’t stop, and today we paused there. It’s a quaint little village, which we learned was once America’s longest continually operated sawmill (until 1995), built by men from Maine (so the architecture was very similar to Lunenberg in Nova Scotia) and for some reason used to have a hotel staffed by Chinese women. The things that are deemed relevant to put on signs for tourists.

La Serpiente and Destroyer got their bums wet sliding down a slide. (It was damp and foggy today, but the fog cooked off, leaving us with spectacular views of the mountains.) They complained for a while, until we happened on a wool shop that contained three whippets, the dogs lounging on sofas and allowing themselves to be petted. We wandered a little longer, picking up various knick-knacks in the shops, and then drove on to Chimacum, where the cidery is.

The cidery wasn’t open so we went for a walk around a big lake (filled with toxic algae, but you can’t have everything), then drove back and had lunch at the cidery. Then we drove to another cidery to buy more cider, and then finally headed to Port Townsend itself, to browse the bookshops, drink coffee and buy new frying pans. That last was to celebrate the new year, or something, I guess.

Then it was a quick drive back to the ferry, with me now fighting fatigue, and making the 4:40 boat with literally a minute to spare. Home by 5:40, to discover my personalised license plates had finally arrived. Now we really have a CUSHTIE car. Is it vanity, or the time saving of not having to learn the licence plate number when it’s just a string of letters and digits?

The kids went a bit crazy at bedtime, as is their wont. I put them to bed, then played a game of Blood Bowl, my first loss to a human being this year. That’s still a 75% success rate, I guess…