Anacortes, WA, Cap Sante Marina

 

Our home for a few days is the Cap Sante Marina, where we are parked around the boat trailers in the RV parking area. $20/night, no hookups, free Wi-Fi. Water and dump two blocks away at the city water plant. Nice bathrooms but pay showers (25 cents for 1 3/4 minutes). Kim is parking on the street at night, where some other friends of ours stayed in their Lazy Daze but we just didn’t feel comfortable doing that.

Suzanne had been here a few days already when we arrived. There are 14 numbered sites, and she is in one of them.

Not wanting to be sandwiched in if it got more crowded, we opted for the “park anywhere you like around the perimeter” area. We have a big grassy yard behind the rusty scaffolding and broken concrete that makes for a great cat playground. Definitely one of our more unusual campsites.

We really like Anacortes so far. And our location is perfect for walking or biking around the marina and historic downtown, just a couple blocks away.

It’s a big, busy marina, full of boats.

On Friday evening we all walked to happy hour at the Rockfish Grill and Anacortes Brewery. We thought it was quite good. Now that Chuck and Carla left us, Jim is very much outnumbered. He is a good sport, though, and keeps us laughing.

Suzanne, Kim, Jim, me, Debbie. As you can see, Suzanne was very thirsty.

We’ve made a couple small purchases at the local downtown bike shop. Very nice and helpful folks.

Interesting concept.

On our short trip to town we pass the Cat’s Meow, a cat rescue and shelter. The feral cats live in the yard with small enclosures to escape the weather, so we stop and visit as we go by. I would definitely be volunteering here if we were staying awhile.

There are a lot of cute murals scattered around town.

Yesterday morning was the farmer’s market, just a block from here at the old depot, then laundry, which is next to the restroom building, just a short walk from our site. How very convenient.

In the afternoon we took a twenty mile bike ride after Jim put on his new riser handlebars and a mirror. He finally has his bike tweaked to fit him well and was pleasantly surprised at how comfortable he was for that many miles.

We rode the Tommy Thompson rail trail across Fidalgo Bay to March Point, crossing over a half mile trestle.

Then we backtracked and headed west to Washington Park, located on a peninsula on the west end of Fidalgo Island, passing by the ferry terminal to the San Juans and some beautiful neighborhoods.

The park has a lovely 2.2 mile paved trail through the woods, with viewpoints along the way. On a clear day you are supposed to be able to see the San Juan Islands and the Olympic Mountains.

One of the San Juan ferries.

There are a lot of things to do around here, including hiking, biking, ferry trips to one or all of the San Juan Islands, etc. If summer wasn’t getting away from us we could see hanging out here for a couple weeks or more, but we still have some other places we want to visit in Washington and Idaho before heading to southern Utah by mid October. Anacortes definitely goes on our list of places to return to some day.

So we’ll see what we can in the next couple days before moving east and photographing other things besides boats.