We borrowed a friend’s car today and drove up to Deception Pass. This is one of the State Parks that isn’t closed for social distancing purposes at the moment; it’s 90 minutes north of Seattle, going up I-5. After a morning of assembling lego, we cajoled the girls into the car and set off, stopping off along the way at a bikini espresso bar.
Maybe we’re morally dissolute, because we’re recognising different bars now. We were visiting Do-si-do Espresso for the second time – the chocolate chip cookie we got was better than last time round, the coffee was much the same as normal, which is to say better than you’d expect when served by somebody wearing tattoos and a bikini.
We drove on, getting close to Deception Pass and noticing more bikini baristas. There are actual chains, because some people are buying into a franchise where you paint up a garden shed to look like a ladybird, put a woman in there who’s only wearing underwear, and rake in a fortune selling coffee. We ignored that, and trundled on to Deception Pass Park.
After driving around in circles for a little bit, we parked up. It was beautiful there, the mountains in the distance, the kelp strewn beach, the … jet fighters training overhead as LOUD AS THEY WERE ABLE. Our girls would have been content to stand on the first bit of beach and fill their pockets with pebbles, but we made them walk over and look at some tide pools, before walking round onto the main trail.
The trees there were beautiful – lots which were missing bark (I guess due to fires?) with a lovely brown wood exposed beneath. The girls were quite accepting of hiking around – it was only about an hour’s walk for them – and then I left them at the second car park and went back to fetch the car.
The sun even came out, but this was not enough to lift La Serpiente’s spirits after she got her foot wet in a tide pool, and so for a good half hour she howled and wailed and demanded to walk barefoot through mud. We remonstrated with her, drove her away from the beach, and stopped at a restaurant (it was 5:30) to get food because there was no way we’d get home in time to make a meal.
The restaurant was shut until June because of covid. Next door was the ladybird-themed bikini barista, which wasn’t shut, but which was not serving as good coffee as the other place. We drove away, and in Skagit came off the freeway to look for food.
I got some dreadful bread from a dreadful bakery. My wife picked up tacos and we fed the kids, and then Destroyer announced she needed the toilet. So we drove to the bus station, the only place with a convenience available, and while we were there a man who had missed his bus tried to pay us to drive him to Everett.
Well, on the best of days we wouldn’t want a strange man sat between our girls on the back seat, and in these times of covid, even less so. La Serpiente couldn’t understand this, and, bless her heart, suggested we give him some cheese and crackers, let him ride in the trunk, or be tied with some rope to the rear bumper. Or perhaps he could hire a plane to fly him to see some angels above Everett. Ah, my little one. We left him, looking hopelessly for a ride to Everett from Skagit (I wonder if the best thing to do, stuck in a one-horse town, would be to check in to the police station?) and drove back. I had to keep the girls away so I told them a terrible joke about purple people with a proper dad joke punchline, and that kept them awake until home, when it only took an hour for them to pass out. They had only had 90 minutes of exercise today, to be fair.
And on, and on to tomorrow…