Our trip isn’t over; Joe and Kate still need to catch a train in Seattle and I need to go to California. We have help in this last leg; my parents are driving up to meet us in Seattle to celebrate and possibly SAG some of our gear into the city.

Now, though, we’re in Anacortes, the largest town on Fidalgo Island. Their annual arts festival is this weekend so we have had plenty to do. It was rainy and cold on the night of the thirty-first, but a cyclist we got in contact with over the internet, Art, took us in. We can’t thank him enough, it would have been a miserable night in the park. He and his wife, Lexie, couldn’t host us the following night, but that morning the weather was clear and he told us the rains would likely stay away for a few days.

We spent that afternoon at the arts festival which consumes eight or more blocks of Commercial Ave. We walked through and around the booths and tents, ducked into cafes, listened to live music, lounged and read in bookshops. As it grew darker, we took our bikes to a pavillion in a city park and set out on foot to discover the bars in town. On the way, among all the white tents in the road, we heard singing. We followed it to a computer service and sales store where a woman was singing and playing guitar to an audience that spilled out onto the sidewalk. A man in a worn cowboy hat and a flannel shirt directed us in for wine and we slipped in after she finished a song. The crowd thinned just enough that we all found chairs and we sat and listened to the end of her first set and by the end of her second the only occupied chairs were ours. We helped the man in the cowboy hat, Jay, clean up. Jay owned and ran the shop. He gave us a brief tour after I mentioned I had done some IT work. In the course of the tour, we told him about our trip and he invited us to stay with him and told us that his house was only a block from the park. So again we were rescued from the damp northwestern night. We agreed to meet later, after he had finished closing the shop and we had settled in the house, at a bar down the street, The Brown Lantern. There we were again treated to live music and bought Jay a drink as a token of our thanks.