Flashback to Friday Harbor

So your beautiful sister and her husband handed you an envelope with reservations and a map, and it's time to take your trip. First, drive toward Canada among mountains rising above green farmland. Park your car in a wooded lot and linger in the tiny gift shop, browsing through books and studying your fellow passengers.

Then it's an hour long ferry ride among the San Juan Islands. Stand at the prow of the ferry and watch the water churn away toward an expanse of blue water that laps at the banks of countless islands. Watch the water too long and when you look back at the table between you and your sweetheart, the mottled surface will move like waves.

Pull into Friday Harbor, where masts of sailboats rise like a white forest in the docks. There's a lovely little used bookshop run by a British woman up the street--remember, you're on foot and without a car--and after that you can wander over to the coffee shop that overlooks the harbor. The woman pouring your latte will tell you how she and her husband sold everything to live on a boat. They spend the summers sailing to Alaska. But she doesn't have kids, she adds. You can't have everything.

You have three children who are home with their grandparents, and today you feel like you have everything: your feet to take you up and down streets and down to the docks, into shadowy restaurants and little shops, back to a cozy room with a fireplace and hot tub where you can eat gingersnaps and drink champagne.
But for now, it's time to scope out a good restaurant for dinner. You'd like seafood since you're by the sea, and you'd like a place with candles and a good beer list since you're childless for the night. You settle on a little place that serves buttery mussels in the shell. Then there's fish and chips and another pint of local beer,

and you're happy enough to feel as though you're sailing, not walking, up the street to your little room, your little room with the chocolates and tea waiting for you. When you awaken tomorrow, there will be a gourmet breakfast followed by creme brulet for dessert, and then it's a fast run to the ferry (you've lingered too long at breakfast), and back among the islands and maybe you'll get a glimpse of a whale but probably not at this time of year.

Then off the warmth of the ferry--you notice the mainland, so close to Canada, is much colder than Friday Harbor. Pull your carry-on down a path to your car, and when you sit down behind the wheel, you feel as though you drove a car in your past life; is there a need for a car now? You feel as though you've been gone a week because it was so lovely but later, in your cold office in the middle of a gray February with the snow blowing outside your window, the San Juan Islands will be a dream of warmth, of sunshine in sails, of foaming ferry water, of the islands that seemed to move past you like whales.