Canada Let Us In!

 Writing these blogs is a great chance for me to record this journey for my sake.  Every time I had a kid they grabbed a big chunk of my brain on the way out and now I have no memory left. The only things I can dependably remember are the words to Maui's rap in Moana and the names of about 37 dinosaurs. 

Unfortunately, I do not have my life together enough to write these blogs as I go. Usually, I wake up on a weekend and go "crap! I should make a post!" And scramble through my phone's pictures trying to piece together what we did that week. I do try to cobble together some sort of story arc with each post, but this week was kind of anticlimactic. Instead of one big adventure, we had lots of little ones. 

All of this is to say after we left San Juan Island, I have no idea where we went. It was a calm little anchorage off a calm little island. I took pictures of it. That's all I got. 

I could ask Justin what island this is, but it's 7:00am on Sunday and he deserves to sleep in. 

We stayed at that anchorage for a few days. Justin took the kids to a couple nearby islands to play, but as far as I remember (which again, is not very far, maybe a couple inches at best) I stayed on the boat and worked. 

I do remember the name of the next Island we went to (and only partially because I cheated and checked my phone's location). Stuart Island was a popular spot for summer boaters. It has tall, rocky cliffs that curve around a picturesque bay. Justin took Little Boat to shore with the kids to scope out the island first. 

One of these dinghies is not like the others. 

They followed the forest path to a rocky beach on the other side of the island. 

Morgan, look out! There's a wild snail behind you!

Whenever we go to shore, we take Little Boat because driving the honkingly enormous Mischief Managed in shallow water would be monumentally difficult, if not impossible in some areas. Technically, I have my boating license and am physically capable of driving both boats, but I'm not yet confident about driving either. (For anyone who knows me, I'm sure you're shocked. (In case one set of parentheses wasn't enough, that was sarcasm.)) But the way for me to get more confident driving boats is to get more experience driving boats. So I reluctantly offered to drive us to and from the island. Getting to the island was pretty uneventful. I docked Little Boat at the dinghy dock and kept my anxious expletives to a minimum. 

The island had plenty to explore and discover, so naturally the kids wanted to go to the exact same beach they had visited the other day with Justin. Once there though, we met a scaly new friend.

Everyone, meet Snakey! 

I valiantly offered to drive Little Boat home after our beach adventure. Like any other 3-and 4-year-old, Abigail and Morgan insist on bringing small and difficult-to-keep-track-of toys everywhere we go. We warn them they have to hold on to them, especially in Little Boat, and many toys have found their way to a new home at the bottom in the ocean. Normally, the kids know that when a toy goes overboard, that's it. It's gone. But while I was driving back, Abigail dropped Bingo. 

For those of you who don't know who Bingo is and haven't watched Bluey yet, shame on you. Go watch all three seasons. I'll wait. 

...

...

...

Done? Wasn't that amazing?? Anyway, now that you know who Bingo is, you understand that I can't abandon her to the ocean. So, despite this being my third time behind the wheel of Little Boat, I expertly navigated to the miraculously floating Bingo and after only a few tries, Justin managed to rescue her. 

After that, I was feeling pretty confident when we encountered someone's lost dinghy. Another boat that anchored nearby was tying up their dinghy when it slipped out of their grasp and drifted towards us. I was not about to pass up another opportunity to add to our pirate fleet, so with only minimal panicking and yelling I managed to drive alongside the dinghy so Justin could grab that too. And because we're disappointingly nice pirates, we returned the dinghy to its owners. 

 On my next day off, I decided to take the kids to nearby Roche Harbor. Unlike Stuart Island, which is populated by teenagers on camping trips and families too cheap to pay for a slip, Roche Island is where the rich people go. Every other boat in the marina was clearly owned by people who make so much money they don't have to pay taxes. 

So shiny! Can we add these to our pirate fleet?

I took the kids on-shore and did all of the free things in town. Roche Harbor got its start a few hundred years ago as a mining town for lyme and we got to check out the enormous lyme ovens that are still standing. 

I don't think you put this lyme in the coconut and shake it all up. 

Next, we went to the San Juan Islands Sculpture Park. If you get the chance to visit the San Juan Islands, go to this sculpture park. It's enormous, I think they said 20 acres, and there is so much to see. There are trails through neatly manicured gardens, sparkling ponds, verdant woods and scattered throughout are all different kinds of sculptures and statues. And the best part is, you can touch most of them! 

This one moved when we touched it. Hopefully it was supposed to do that.

Crikey! Not sure if this is an alligator or crocodile. 

In the woods were all sorts of silly, unexpected art pieces. There were trees wearing knitted sweaters, mushroom houses for dolls, and these mysterious black circles the kids had never seen before. 

Nobody could remember what these historical artifacts were. 

There was an interactive exhibit with sheep sculptures designed to be used as footstools. And they were the perfect size for Morgan to ride. 

If we were to get a sheep, this is the kind I prefer. One that doesn't eat or poop. 

Morgan the Shrimp was also very excited to see her namesake immortalized in sculpture.

Which shrimp is more giant?

Because Roche Harbor is where the rich people go, there was an airport right next to the park. We got to watch a small plane land right next to us. I didn't get it on video, but it was pretty cool to get so close to the airplanes without having to drive to an airport. 

Justin is not allowed to buy a plane. 

After exploring the sculpture park and burning more energy at a playground, the kids earned an ice cream treat. It was priced for the fancy-shmancy rich people and somehow I spent $30 on three small cups of ice cream, but after our long day, it was worth it. 

I got to overhear some rich Karens complain to the 16-year old ice cream scooper while we ate.

Justin picked us up when we finished grabbing some groceries and drove Little Boat back to our anchorage at Stuart Island. Despite being sprayed with cold saltwater the whole way, Morgan was so worn out she fell asleep in the back of Little Boat. 

She played hard.

We spent a few more days at Stuart Island waiting for some wind to pass through. I convinced the kids to leave their favorite beach and do some hiking and explore the woods. 

Is it a snail or a squirrel?

Abigail and Morgan are just now getting old enough to do some real hikes. But they haven't entirely grasped the concept that hiking means going in one direction at a time: usually forwards. One kid goes off to the left to pick a flower, another goes off to the right to climb a tree, then the first kid needs to go find a bush to pee, meanwhile the second kid is running off to climb up a precarious boulder at the edge of a cliff. Somehow I managed to convince them to stay on the path for a while, and we all got a workout climbing up and down about a thousand stairs to the beach. 

My glutes were not pleased. 

And then, the day dawned bright and clear that we would leave this forsaken land, and cross over to the great and glorious country of Tim Hortons and maple syrup. 

That's right. The time had come to go into Canada. 

We had been preparing for this crossing for a long time. After all, there are logistics to entering a foreign country. We all had our passports, we had the documentation for the cats, we got rid of most of our produce. I even spend the day mopping in case the Canadian border patrol decided to board our boat and look around. We decided to check in to Canada at South Pender Island; a small, quiet island with a hotel and restaurant and a few Canadian border patrol agents and that's about it. Docking was tricky because Justin still hadn't finished installing the thrusters, but we managed to dock our boat without making Americans look too incapable. 

Two Canadian border patrol guys came out to meet us. I was nervous, even though I knew we weren't doing anything wrong. If anything, I was scared I would make a mistake. What if I said the wrong thing? What if I forgot where our coast guard registration number was? Or where all of the passports were? Or how many children I have? 

All my worrying was for nothing. It turned out they usually don't bother coming to meet Americans checking in at the border, but they happened to be on their way out and one of the guys recognized the name of our boat and wanted to talk to fellow Harry Potter fans. They did make sure to ask all the routine questions though: were we carrying any fruits with pits or cores? Did we have any firearms? Where was our home port? Are we sure we don't have any firearms? How long were we planning on staying in Canada? No, really, any types of weapons? Anything that you point and goes bang? Are we sure we don't have any guns?

After we had finally convinced them we weren't that kind of American, they let us into Canada. 

O Canada! Pretty neat, eh?

We set off to explore Canada, starting with one of the beaches at South Pender Island. Like many other places we've stayed on this trip, it was quiet and picturesque, but the beaches here in the Pacific Northwest are a little different than beaches other places in that...well, it's cold. Okay, maybe not cold. Global warming is definitely a thing. But it hasn't gotten very hot on this trip. I wake up in the morning and put on a sweater, and I think I only wore shorts once. The water temperature is rarely more than 60 degrees Farenheit. (Don't ask me what it is in Celsius. I literally just got to Canada. I haven't converted to metric yet.) So when Abigail decided to jump into the water, we knew she wouldn't last very long. She got pretty cold pretty quickly.

She warmed up on the couch with lots of towels and blankets right after this. 

We climbed up the nearby cliffs and got some nice views of Mischief Managed in the distance. 

Ours is the big blue one. 

We ended up spending a week at this anchorage. It was safe and quiet and mostly uninteresting. One afternoon, Justin was working on the rail on the poop deck, I was typing up a blog, and Justin suddenly yells for me to come outside. Fearing the Canadians had decided not to let us in after all and were attacking, I ran outside and saw an enormous gray body glide past the boat. A whale decided to pay our anchorage a visit. I spent the next hour glued to my phone, trying to spot the whale again and get a video of it. This was the best I could get. 

Morgan named her Collyjah.

The next day, I didn't feel like cooking so we decided to go out to dinner at a restaurant on North Pender Island that featured chicken tenders and fries for the kids and non-fried foods for me. At the restaurant, we ended up making friends with another family staying on the island for a week. They were nice enough to invite our kids to play with them at the campground pool, and we decided to return the favor by inviting them back to Mischief Managed and to a hike on the island. 

When I checked the weather that morning, it had said there was a 50% chance of rain and it would end early in the afternoon. So when we set off with some sprinkles, our spirits were high. Our new friends had come from southern California and were excited to see rain since they got rain at home so rarely. 

We're following the leader!

Our kids were the youngest in the bunch, but they kept up with the big kids really well. They scrambled up boulders and a trail that wound straight up the mountain. The trail itself quickly became slick as the rain, instead of letting up, came down harder and the dirt trail turned into mud. 

It's a big trail for little legs.

By the end, our intrepid hikers were feeling pretty bedraggled. The rain was no longer a novelty and everyone was cold and wet. Even some of the bigger kids were getting tired and Justin needed to provide a piggy back ride. 

Finally, we made it back to the beach where Justin had tied up Little Boat. Right as we started this adventure, the wind had suddenly picked up and Justin decided to put an anchor down to make sure Little Boat didn't get pushed into the rocky shore. Unfortunately, Justin didn't have quite as much rope as he had hoped. When we returned, Little Boat was safe and sound, but Justin had anchored too well and wasn't able to pull Little Boat into shore. So Justin, already wet and muddy, got to jump into the ocean and wade over to Little Boat to pull up the anchor. 

This was back when Justin's pants were partly dry. 

We all got back home safely. But that evening, the wind picked up again and a thunderstorm rolled through the anchorage. For those reading this on the East Coast, you're probably thinking, "Thunderstorm? What's the big deal? We get those once a week in the summer." Yeah, thunderstorms don't happen much in the Pacific Northwest, especially where we're anchored in Puget Sound. I think in the four years we've lived here, I've maybe heard thunder twice. 

But we made it through the storm without issue, and now the kids can officially say they've survived a thunderstorm on a boat in the ocean. 

We spent our last afternoon at the island playing on a beach and relaxing. 

Morgan was pointing at a plant. Don't worry, I can't find it either. 

We even found a cannon on shore. I wanted to take it, but I couldn't figure out how to get it in the dinghy. 

How am I supposed to have a pirate fleet without a cannon. 

In the end, our foray into Canada had a pretty solid start, and we were excited to explore these exotic, foreign waters further. 

tl;dr: We went to Roche Harbor and Canada.