Full disclosure: This post has nothing to do with aircraft. The title refers to the Peter, Paul and Mary song, “Leaving on a Jet Plane”, which begins: All my bags are packed and I’m ready to go.
This is exactly the situation that Mary Anne and I found ourselves in a few days ago. We were about to hop in the car and drive to Portland to visit friends when the phone rang. It was Wayne calling to say that the visit was going to have to be unavoidably postponed. There we were with bags packed and in the car…
We decided to take the opportunity to visit the one place we missed on our recent boat voyage: Alderbrook Resort and Spa. If you have a map handy, you can see that Alderbrook is at the very bottom of the Hood Canal. There’s nothing much of interest between it and Pleasant Harbor to the north, so we skipped it back in August. That was probably the right decision at the time when Alderbrook might have been overrun with other boaters. But now… perfect timing!
Consider: we have just come through a period when we had the worst air quality in the world thanks to a nasty collection of fires. Then we had several days of high winds with 35-40 knot gusts. Now – two perfect days. You gotta love Fall in the Pacific Northwest!
We began with an easy hike up the hill behind the resort.
In the afternoon, we took a two hour kayak trip along the Hood Canal (which is actually a fjord – just so you know).
We stopped for lunch in Olympia on our way to Alderbrook. I was delighted to find Tugzilla, a 26 foot tug boat built by Master Boatbuilder Sam Devlin.
