I woke up in a lot of pain this morning; sleeping on a cold earth floor, with only a thin air mattress, isn’t that great for my back and so everything was aching or tensed up. Once I got up and started walking around, things were easier but it was a tough start.
I was planning for us to do a big hike today, but instead we took it easy: down to the beach for the kids to play with mud and my wife to photograph anenomes, and then up to the Port Townsend Farmers’ Market, which was filled with hipsters selling kombucha, organic garlic and Cornish pasties filled with curry (not as dreadful as that might sound).
There’s one cidery we haven’t visited in Port Townsend yet, the Alpenfire Cidery, which is down a gravel track in the middle of nowhere. The kids ran around in our sweaters, pretending to be ghosts, and we tested out a few different drinks, before going to the laundromat.
While my wife watched clothes spin around, I took the girls to the nearby Celtic Shop, where we bought … Penguins. Yes, apparently the delicious chocolate coated biscuit is somehow Celtic (is there a huge factory in Pontypridd? Are they a Glaswegian delicacy?) and happily my children told me they were the best thing ever. Otherwise I’d have thrown them out.
For dinner, we went to the Old Alcohol Plant. This prosaically named establishment was, for six years, some kind of booze factory run by Ansel Adams’ father, and then shut down and reopened as a hotel sixty years later. They really need a better name, but eh, whatever. The food was good, the kids ran around outside, and as they abbreviated the name to OAP there were great things on the menu like the OAP burger, which sounds to me like something you feed a Chelsea Pensioner, but is actually a luxury cheeseburger.
We got back to the tent, in high winds, and the kids were asleep before eight. Which I regret as that probably means they’ll be up at 5 tomorrow demanding entertainment…