Travel Log: Fact-Finding in the San Juan Islands

Day One:

The flight out of Salt Lake didn’t leave until 5:30pm, so I figured that I’d have a lot of time to get a lot of last minute writing done –- finalize a list of things I need to investigate, places I need to see, and questions I need to ask while I’m in Washington. I also planned to pack and clean the house and do all sorts of other things.

My first task for the day was to play computer games. It wasn’t officially on the schedule, but I figured it was a good waste of my time – heaven forbid I actually accomplish something. If I was that type of go-getter, I wouldn’t be fifteen months into the writing this book with very little to show for it.

So, the mutant superhero El Taco Llama beat up trolls in Skyway City for about an hour, using nothing more than his wits and his ability to shoot fireballs.

But then I got down to business. Jennifer, my accounting counterpart at Weyerhaeuser, had lent me her digital camera for the trip, and I played with the software for a while, to make sure I could do what I wanted to do. I’m planning on taking pictures and pictures and pictures, of every nook and cranny of the island, walking block-by-block through Friday Harbor and taking pictures of everything. When the camera fills up, I’ll just download the pictures onto my laptop and start again. I’m estimating coming home with at least 300 shots or more.

Anyway, I checked the camera, and the camera worked, and there was much rejoicing.

I wrote a little bit, and made a few lists, and thought about some things, and read some other things, and then Erin came home. I would have thought, given her normal eagerness to get things done, that she would have kicked my lazy rear end into gear, but I wasn’t factoring for her pregnancy – we ended up watching TV (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) for an hour, and discussed packing in vague, theoretical terms. It was like one of those pre-meeting meetings, where you discuss what you’re going to discuss. All the topics we talked about pretty much ended with “well, we’ll have to figure it out.”

We eventually met my parents, and after a brief emergency trip to the grocery store (we forgot to pack diapers), we made it to the airport.

The first plane was fine (we had a layover in Denver). Holly did surprisingly well, and didn’t cry once. She didn’t get sick, and she didn’t complain about anything. Plus, since we had to get her car-seat installed on the plane, we were given early boarding.

The layover in Denver was short, but I still managed to get sucked into several gift shops, and seriously contemplated buying things that I would never ever need, including, but not limited to, a buffalo snow globe.

And then the fun started. We got early boarding again on the next flight, but shortly after we took our seats the flight attendants announced there had been a security breach somewhere in the airport, and everything was getting locked down. We never heard what the cause was, but we were delayed about twenty minutes. The three college guys sitting behind us used some colorful language.

And then, after the plane took off, but before the seatbelt lights had been turned off, an old man tried to get up and head to the bathroom. The flight attendant argued with him for a long time, though I couldn’t really hear what he said, other than “there’s nothing I can do –- you’re not allowed to use the bathroom while the seatbelt lights are turned on.”

However, someone said something persuasive, because they soon made the Is-There-A-Doctor-On-The-Plane announcement over the intercom. A doctor raised his hand, and he looked very tired and not exactly happy to be doing doctor things. And then they asked if anyone spoke Vietnamese, because the old man did. There were no takers this time, and eventually some guy said that he spoke Cantonese, which is kind of like Vietnamese, I guess. There was a long period where all the flight attendants were busily attending, and finding doctor’s kits, and calling hospitals.

Holly got a little restless, due to achy legs (she’s having growing pains), so I quit writing on my laptop and let her watch the Sleeping Beauty DVD. It lasted for about an hour, and then the battery died, and she threw a fit. That was fun.

The rest of flight continued without incident, except for a lot of turbulence, during which the seatbelt lights turned back on, and nobody cared –- they all kept going to the bathroom, or getting in the overhead bins. The flight attendants didn’t care anymore either, though –- I guess they didn’t want to interfere with anyone else’s bowel schedule and cause a medical emergency.

The flight ended safely, and there was no ambulance waiting, so I guess the Vietnamese guy must have been feeling better – or the Vietnamese word for really sick sounds a lot like the Cantonese word for feelin’ fine.

We went to pick up the rental car at Alamo, where my parents are part of the QuickSilver membership club. My dad stood in the special QuickSilver line, and the guy at the counter took someone from the other line instead. So my mom stood in the other line, to ensure that they would get helped eventually. This would be a normal course of action if there were a lot of people in line, but there wasn’t. You can see the picture of their aisle dualism here.

That picture was one among four that I took on Day One. 294 more to go.



All material on this site is copyrighted by Robison E. Wells, 2004.