And finally, the epilogue.
I so badly wanted to title this post “Getaway from the getaway…” But a full weekend and several days have passed and the vitriol has mostly died down. Maybe now I can be a bit more clearheaded and objective. No promises though.
San Juan Island is not for everyone. The same way sushi makes some people excited but others queasy. It’s simply a matter of preference I guess.
Not going to play the blame game. Bob and I should have just trusted the travel instinct we have been trying to hone over the last decade.
- No one (even longtime Washington residents) we asked had either been to San Juan Island or been there more than once. Their responses about the place were, at best, lukewarm.
- The Youtube videos we watched usually included all of the San Juan Islands, not just San Juan Island itself (our home base for the stay). The footage of things to do on all the islands was sparse enough that the visitor probably couldn’t count the total number of San Juan Island attractions on more than one hand.
- There wasn’t much online about the best places to eat on the island. No local food blog gushing about the handmade wild boar sausage at so-and-so restaurant or the artisanal Danishes at the little café around the corner from the ferry dock.
- And there was also that unspoken consensus from what we had read, heard, and seen about the place; that is was where the well-off Seattleites, who could afford to buy a vacation home, went to get away from the city.
Common sense should have prevailed from the beginning. It could have very well been a side-effect of the year long isolation that caused us to threw it out of the window so carelessly. We had been diligent about socially-distancing for what seemed like an eternity. The sole reason we wanted to go on this trip was because we were utterly exhausted from the separation, starved of mundane everyday social interaction. The restrictions were easing and we could finally let up a little.
When you have been away from people for so long, the very last thing you should do is to hole yourself up in a Yurt somewhere.
Or maybe it was cosmic retribution for straying from what we truly enjoyed about travel: going from one unfamiliar place to another; savoring delicious food; experiencing new sights, sounds, and smells.
There are still some questions that remain and can probably be answered only in theory or with the passage of time. Is it fair to judge a place through the cracked, grimy lens of a worldwide epidemic? Probably not. Would our experience of the place have been the same had it not been for the pandemic? I suspect that it would; the underlying storyline and characters were already there, it just needed a little dusting off. Why had I allowed Bob to take the reins of such a critically important vacation? Why had I not been more vehement about going on the road trip around the Olympic Peninsula instead? Why did we not just take a day trip to San Juan Island? Only God knows.