San Juan islands (part 4)
While I didn’t yell the expletive I was thinking, I wasn’t really happy. It hurt. It hurt a lot. I tried to walk a bit and hoped that it wasn’t a big deal. But trying to ignore it didn’t work. I was walking on it, so I know it wasn’t that bad. But it hurt. One of the group gave me some Advil and then I realized that I had to keep going up since going down wasn’t a good option either. So I gimped my way up the mountain. Trying to enjoy the amazing scenery around me, and not think about the pulsing pain that was my ankle. After about twenty minutes, Ashley came down the trail and whipped out her First Aid kit and wrapped my ankle up with some medicine tape. That helped a bit and I continued walking up the trail. The terrain leveled out and we walked in this lush green wonderland with tall soaring trees and moss covered rocks. I expected to see an elf wander by. ☺ When we got to the van, Ashley hooked me up with an ice pack which helped a lot. We then drove the rest of the way up to the summit of Mt. Constitution. I did hobble up the 50 feet to the summit from the parking lot and took in the just amazing view. It was sunny and clear and we had an amazing view of Mt. Baker, many of the islands, and even the top of Mt. Ranier far off in the distance. Then we all madeour way down to the lake again for another great picnic. Have I mentioned the food is good? Then I rode back to the Outlook Inn in the sag wagon. I had already scheduled a massage and once the lady looked at me, she pulled out this ultrasonic thing and used it on my ankle. It actually helped a lot. So did the massage. Afterwards, Dad had found the “locals” bar, which had a kick ass view of the bay, so we had a couple of burgers and then called it an early night.
My ankle wasn’t that swollen, so I decided to wrap it up and try to ride the bike in the AM. After breakfast, we checked out of the hotel and geared up for the ride back to Orcas Landing. We ended up taking a different route to start and it was “moderately slopey.” Translation: Yeah, there are hills. It wasn’t too bad and my ankle was holding up pretty well. We stopped at the Orcas IslandPottery for a bit. Some great pottery and an amazing view of the water, but I’ve got way too much pottery as it is. So it was back on the bike. We ended up going back along the road that hugged the side of the valley, so all of those ups were now downs, and those downs were now ups. And yet, they still sucked. But another gorgeous day and it’s nice just to ride and get into the zone and watch the country side go by. That worked for the first 7 miles or so, but then my foot started to throb. A lot. So I ended up taking the sag wagon to Orcas Landing where we had lunch and then caught a small boat for a wild life cruise.
Our wild life cruise was mainly for whale watching, mainly orcas, but we also saw some seals. The water was just glass smooth and we sailed out into the Haro Straits. We were incredibly lucky. Our captain positioned us close to the Orcas (by law you can’t approach them) and we had a couple come really close to our boat. It was really cool. We saw several different Orcas from the three different groups that visit the Sound, the J, K, and L Pods. The captain and his assistant could recognize the whales by their dorsal fins which I thought was kind of interesting. After about 3 three hours of great whale watching, we made our way to San Juan Island.
