The Plan (the whole Plan)
Day #18 : Mon 26 May : Seattle
There is exactly one boat that goes from Victoria to Port Angeles -
the M.V. Coho. It's departures this morning were at six and half past ten.
Since the ferry docks about 100 yards from our hotel, we thought the 10:30
would be do-able. Today was the last day of a long weekend, and we expected
the ferry to be full. So Rupert, who has woken up first every day so far,
was instructed to make himself useful and get Fred in the queue while the
others enjoyed a lie-in. What we hadn't counted on was the inordinate length
of time it takes to get 100 cars full of people through U.S. Immigration,
particularly when they are looking for illegals in engine compartments.
Rupert rushed back to the hotel, and then accounts of the story start to
diverge.
We had lunch on a convenient dock in Sequim bay. As befits the last lunch
of an extended road trip, we ate lots of chilli cheese, spring onions,
garlic bread and other delicious comestibles designed to make life as unpleasant
for our travelling companions as possible.
By the end of today we were roughly back on plan. Loaned items were returned to their owners, and a huge quantity of rubbish was removed from Fred's every orifice. We felt in fine shape for tomorrow's trips to the airport.
That was until we rounded the event off in style. We found out that hotel accommodation in Tacoma is ruinously expensive. Not to worry, we thought: we'll just find a place on the outskirts and meander into the evening's chosen venue (yes, another brewpub) gently in a taxi.
Now the fact that the pub buggered up the steaks we ordered was a minor mishap, compared to the homicidal attempts of both taxi drivers we used that night. The first showed her calibre when, as she hammered down a slip road onto the freeway, she took both her hands off the wheel and her eyes off the road for the best part of a minute as she fished in her handbag to take a call on her mobile. As she left us at the pub, she offered us her business card should we wish to call her for the return journey. We took the card, and filed it carefully in one of the pub's ashtrays.
Her performance was surpassed by the driver for the return journey, who took us through three stop signs in a residential area at 75 mph and came within a couple of inches of a collision at an even greater speed. Rupert thanked him for his labours by ostentatiously kissing the tarmac on the road once he let us out.
And so to a boringly early night (preceded by the consumption of the
van der Heyden late vintage, which is astonishingly good, and at the best
part of five bucks a sip it ought to be.
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