San Juan Island Vacation

We're all still pretty busy here in the Anderson house. Holiday just got her costume for her dance recital coming up. It's very flashy, black and gold with lots of gold glitter. The photo shoot for her dance class is this weekend. Her after school art club program will be wrapping up soon for the year and the last day of school is June 16th. So she has a couple of field trips, school carnival, class picnic, and field day to look forward to before school's out. May and June are simply busy months for us, especially when birthdays start up in April. I've signed both the kids up for swim lessons this summer at our local community center so that will be a good change for them. We just did a short family vacation over Memorial Day weekend on San Juan island. We stayed in a little cabin that's privately owned so we were basically by ourselves with beach access and everything. The kids slept in built-in bunk beds which was exciting for them. Holiday referred to her bunk as her bedroom. It had a stocked kitchen (except for food of course), towels, linens, books, dvds and games.  We fired up the wood stove the first night, it was pretty cloudy that day. The next day was way nice. We did lots of tidepooling and driving around. We had several meals in the city part of Friday Harbor which were all really good. Naturally we checked out both toy stores in town and the used book store. We saw the lavender farm, the alpaca farm and spent quite a bit of time at the sculpture park. I would be remiss if I did not mention we got ice cream down by the ferry terminal. The kids liked that part a lot. They really enjoyed the ferry ride too. Although the next time we go to the San Juans we getting reservations, because...yikes! That was a long wait to go home. Not a hardship though since there was plenty to do in town. Since we were there on Memorial Day we got to see the local parade which is not much of a parade but more of a ceremony. All the vets were dressed up. The Auxiliary was represented as well as the local boy scout troop. They had a group of 8 eight men (various ages) dressed up as union soldiers. Old guys, young guys and in between. That was pretty cool. Then bringing up the rear was a middle-aged women in black period dress carrying an American flag folded up. I have to guess she was depicting Betsey Ross. There was the usual singing of the Star Spangled Banner, lots of bag pipes, an address from the military rep and the auxiliary rep, reading of names of local vets, fallen and widows, poems, prayers, boy scout troops setting flowers in the harbor, singing of God Bless America, 21 gun salute (that made Holiday jump), taps and a single cannon blast. They had warned us about the cannon blast before things got going. Holiday was really worried about that. David and Johnny had left before it started to stay with the car in case we got on an earlier ferry. In hind sight, that was the best decision because there would have been no way Johnny would have been able to stick that out. But it was an educational experience for Holiday, she asked a lot of questions about what was going on.

So...whew! That was a busy but fun weekend that I'm trying to catch up on while we're gearing up for all the other stuff coming up soon.