Life on an Island

This morning I was stomped on by 9 cats, because Mr. V slept in and didn't have to go to work at 5:30am. However, he usually feeds the cats at 5:30 when he wakes up, so needless to say, by 5:45 the cats were pretty ticked off that they hadn't been fed yet and they chose to take it out on me. Why they didn't stomp all over him is beyond me. That coupled with the fact that Mr. V snored all night long, while I laid there wide awake, has made me a pretty cranky Brooklet today. For those of you who don't know me. You don't want to be around me if I haven't had a good night's sleep - trust me.

Being cranky gives me a good excuse to vent about random things today...mainly life on a small island.

There are definitely some downsides to living on an island in the middle of the Puget Sound. The biggest downside being that there is only one way off the island, in the form of a really old bridge, that while pretty with a nice view, looks like it can crumble to pieces at any second. That's the only "normal" way to get off the island. The other 2 ways are via 2 ferries. One at the south end of the island and one sort of in the middle of the island.

Problem #1 is the Port Townsend-Keystone ferry. Its small. Very small. But its the only way to get yourself to the Olympic Peninsula (big thumb-like part of Washington on the coast) without spending 5 hours on the road. Reservations are a must because getting a spot on the ferry without reservations is hit or miss. I've managed to get on it without reserving a spot before, but that's never guaranteed. In fact, once I was the very last car that they let on. So if you want to take a trip to the Peninsula, you can't do it spontaneously. Even if you get on the ferry with no reservations going TO Port Townsend, there's no guarantee that you're going to get on the ferry coming back.

Aside from the reservation issue, this is the smallest ferry in the area, and Whidbey is prone to some horrible windstorms, which also shuts the ferry down (this happened to my friend about a week ago as she was trying to come back from Port Townsend). The larger ferries run fine in the wind. This tiny one, not so much.

It also shuts down if the tides are too low too.

I've heard stories about the ferry shutting down for various reasons, but I never experienced it for myself until a few weeks ago. Mr. V and I took a weekend trip to Forks and the Olympic National Park (pictures to follow in another post). Everything went smoothly on the way over there. The way back, however, did not go well. We had everything planned. We had our reservations. We even got to Port Townsend early enough to possibly get onto an earlier ferry if their were spots available. But when we got to the ticket window, a very bored looking man told us "Sorry no ferry." That took a second to process. What did he mean "no ferry"? We could see the ferry sitting right there. He seemed bored and annoyed as he explained to us that the ferry was broken and he had no idea when it would be working again. Fantastic. Mr. V asked him what we were supposed to do. He told us to go to Kingston. For the record, I had no idea that there was even a town called Kingston in Washington. It turns out that Kingston is about an hour south of Port Townsend, on the Puget Sound side of the Peninsula. From there you can take a 45 minute ferry to Mukilteo, and then hop on the ferry there, land on the south end of Whidbey Island and then drive for 45 minutes home. All together this put us back home 3 hours later than we originally planned. I suppose thats better than the 5 hours it would have taken if we had driven down the whole Peninsula, through Seattle and then back up to Whidbey. The kicker of this all was when I got a phone call as we were halfway to Kingston from a woman who told me "I am just calling everyone with ferry reservations to tell them that the ferry is broken." Well thanks lady. You were about an hour too late. That phone call would have been helpful before we got to Port Townsend! Needless to say, I never knew how much I appreciated bridges before that day.

Problem #2 is the lack of stuff on the island. I'm sure many, many people can argue that living in a quaint area, without lots of suburban development is just grand. I would agree to a point. However, I think I would function better in an undeveloped area, that had a well developed area close enough so I could get to it without wasting an entire day in the process.

This past Friday Mr. V and I went to Mt. Vernon, a good 45 minutes to an hour away, depending on traffic. The road leading off of Whidbey is a 2 lane road so getting stuck behind an 18 wheeler is basically my worst nightmare as I drive off. So what's in Mt. Vernon? Everything. Whidbey has a Walmart. A very small Walmart. Walmarts that aren't Supercenters are typically 5 times the size of the Walmart here. Mt. Vernon has every restaurant you can imagine and every major retailer. However, it just seems like such a hassle to get there all the time. Whenever we go into town we have to arm ourselves with a list of stores we need to go to because it never fails that we end up back home, having forgotten something important.

Usually we spend an entire day in Mt. Vernon, but on Friday we actually made great time! I wanted to go to Joann's and Michael's for some crafting needs, and for the first time ever we made it back home before 4pm. But then I looked in our bags and realized that we didn't have one of our bags. It turns out that the lady at Joann's had actually given us 2 bags. But she only handed us one. I guess its partly our fault for not noticing that she had put our stuff in 2 bags, but in the end, she did forget to hand us one. Thankfully, we called and they still had our bag of stuff. Mt. V wanted to just return the stuff in the bag so we didn't have to go back, but out of our 2 bags, that was the bag that had everything we went in there for in the first place. The bag we took home had random stuff that we bought on a whim. So yesterday, we drove back to Mt. Vernon, got our bag and came back home, feeling like we wasted a few good hours of the day.

So thats my random venting for the moment. I miss living somewhere that had roads connected to it in all directions. I miss living somewhere where I can have all of my necessities met without needing to spend my entire day getting to those necessities. I like being in a smaller town, but you have no idea how much I wish a larger town was at least close to us. That would be my ideal living situation.

On that note, I'm going to go take a nap, if the cats will let me. Maybe I can manage to lose this crankiness for the remainder of the day.