Did I mention there were hills?

We're presently in the middle of taking our very first little family vacation, just me and the boy. It's partially to celebrate our upcoming first anniversary but also it's just a way to learn how we best vacation together for all the years to come when we will most surely be taking lots of family vacations together. We both worked Tuesday this week, then took the rest of the week off with plans of an overnight camping/biking trip to Lummi Island as our main adventure. We awoke to lots of rain on Wednesday, unfortunately, though, so Lummi was postponed as I was rather unexcited about traversing 20 miles through a dirge and then adventuring our way around an unknown island in search of a camping spot that would surely not protect us from said dirge. Thus, we moved Lummi to Thursday and headed out for a nice hike a few miles from the house. We have found through trial and error that we definitely enjoy our vacations more if we have adventures to go on where we can get out of the house and experience/accomplish things instead of just lying around watching the minutes pass by, so a hike sounded great. And while we weren't excited about a super long bike ride with gear in the rain, we're always down for a wet hike. Well, Isaac's always down for a wet hike, and I'm always down for one as long as it's relatively warm outside. Which it was. We chose a trail I'd never been on and set out the four and a half miles to the lakes it led to. It was beautiful, dark green everywhere, glistening water droplets on all the foliage, and at times, rain just pouring down onto us. We only passed two other hiking couples the whole trip, so we enjoyed the solitude and togetherness for adventure number one of our vacation. Here's me getting some bark out of my shoe proudly displaying the ever-so-fashionable drowned rat look. So attractive, I know. We got back around 7pm or so and I basically fell asleep for the night pretty soon thereafter, like the trooper I am. We awoke Thursday with plans to ride out to the island since it was forecast to be a perfect 70 degree next couple of days, but spent the morning first redoing our skimboards to add some cush rubber for better gripping. We went out again a few days ago and met a couple guys who skimboard all the time and, of course, have the way expensive boards and can do way cooler things than we can do on our little ones. So Isaac and his little inventor mind studied the material on their boards and concocted his own much less expensive version with some old wetsuits he procured. Pretty awesome. We'll try them out next weekend and let you know how it went.

Ah, we have finally arrived to the tale of the Lummi Island vacation extravaganza. Thursday early afternoon, we pack up our bikes with all the necessary camping gear, feeling quite outdoorsy and adventurous, and set off to catch the ferry to the island. I had no idea how long the bike ride would be, but I generally enjoy bike rides, so I wasn't too worried. Of course, Isaac is invincible and could probably ride to New York if need be without getting tired or giving up, so on trips like these, my stamina is the main concern. We were fine on this ride, though, pulling into the ferry dock in a little over an hour. Not bad for a twenty mile ride. Then comes the fun part. See, we have never been to this island before. Our dear friends, Jim and Peggy, used to live out there and were kind enough to give us some tips for our travels, but other than that, we were exploring a new place really having no idea what the island held for us. Our goal was to find a place to camp for the night, which we knew would prove rather difficult as most of the land is privately owned and there are no public campgrounds to be found. But there's lots of forest covering the small island, so really, we thought, how hard could it be?

We turned off the ferry dock and headed towards a bay at the end of the island that was our first potential camping ground. It was probably about 3pm or so at this point and yes, we had just ridden twenty miles with rather heavy packs on our bikes, but we were still energized and excited for our island exploration. So we rode, ooohing and ahhhing at the gorgeous countryside that we would be oh, so fortunate to ever get to possibly live on someday in the far future. And then we came to the hill. This same hill was later referred to us as that 'big a** hill that you feel like you're going to die riding up it as soon as it comes into your view' by a local who couldn't stop laughing in utter ridiculous awe that we had planned (and at that point accomplished) to bike around the island to this bay. I wish I had gotten a picture of it. I do hills fine on a bike, but I had already been biking for quite sometime and I most definitely do not do hills like this one. It was almost straight up, I swear. But with no option left to get to the bay another way, we pressed on and walked the bikes up once I could pedal no longer. Maybe that would be the only one, we thought. After all, it can't get worse than that, could it? Ha. The hills just kept coming, like we were headed up to Everest's summit or something. A local happened upon us walking our bikes up what turned out to be only about halfway up to the top of the hill and graciously offered to give us a ride to the top where we could from there continue onto the bay. Ahh, the bay, I thought, as he dropped us at the top of a logging road that would supposedly take us to our destination. Let me interject a quick thought here...the one that was constantly running through my exhausted body as we got further and further up this hill. We had planned to have dinner at the little cafe by the ferry dock - the only eatery on the island, mind you - which meant that once we got to our camping spot and set up our tent, we would have to turn around and ride back to the ferry for a much needed dinner, and then turn back around and make this unbelievable trek back to our campsite, without the help of the kind soul who gave us a lift. And in the dark, at that. It didn't even seem physically possible to me at that point. So we head down this logging road and discover that it indeed is going down, and down, and down until after a mile or so it clicked that in order to reach a bay, we would be traveling all the way down to sea level again. Yeah right. Not happening. Although it had mostly just happened, but we turned around right then and there to salvage any elevation we still had in order to make the trek back up to the main road we had been dropped on. So we pushed our bikes laden with camping gear up another hill way too steep for me to ride until I thought I was about to die. Highlight of the trip thus far - we got to ride down the monstrous bull of a hill on our way back toward the other side of the island in search of a more palatable camping spot. But that was about the only highlight my brain could register at that point because I was so tired. The short of the story is that we rode a few miles to the other side of the island which was thankfully not quite as hilly and found a field Jim had told us about...and after all that work, it really was a perfect field. We set up camp in a grove of deciduous trees that were felling their leaves around us in the most picturesque way and finally headed back toward the ferry for some well-earned dinner. And, thank the Lord, we found a shortcut -a nearly obscured back woods trail that got us back to the ferry dock in a third of the time the main road would have. Dinner eaten, we returned for our night in our pretty little tent in the middle of the woods on a beautiful island. Resting and contented, we went to sleep and awakened to this most beautiful view of the fog rolling in over the field looking oh, so perfect and welcoming us to another brilliant blue-sky, sunshiney, fall day. The ride to the ferry docks was rather easy this time, having had the last eight hours free from being atop a bicycle, so we made it in time to catch the 11 o'clock ferry back to the mainland and then proceeded to engage our muscles one last time for the twenty mile stretch home. It was invigorating! And tiring, of course, but once we were home, I definitely settled on invigorating as the best descriptor. A very adventurous camping experience, my love! Good choice, and happy (almost) first anniversary, Isaac.