Slow Boat Farm

Good morning, my friends! I’m back a day early. If you were hoping to have another day of peace and quiet without my blabbing on and on and on about nothing at all, then I’m sorry. But you know how it is…I get word overload, and then things just don’t go well at all. And don’t even get me started on all the pictures I have to show you. After giving it some thought, I decided to tell you about the trip in three installments. There’ll be this post. Then, I’ll write a post about our sight-seeing day on Thursday. Then, I’ll tell you about our journey home. And I can catch you up on current events while I’m at it.

Okay, so let’s back up to Wednesday morning, the day we left home. The flower pots needed watering, and I harvested five tomatoes and four medium-sized zucchini. Cool. It’s always nice to see the literal fruits of your labors. And what do you suppose I found outside the greenhouse? The first purple poppy! Yay!  

We had just a little last-minute packing to do, and then we were on our way. The traffic getting through downtown Portland was absolutely awful. It lightened up some when we were able to get across the Interstate Bridge on I-5 to the Washington side of the Columbia River. 

Happy to be here, Washington. We’re just here for a short visit this trip. We’ll be spending more time later this fall. 

The drive up I-5 is nothing special. Concrete freeway lined with Douglas fir trees as far as the eye can see. The scenic part of the drive doesn’t really get started until after you pass through Longview. That was where we turned off. We’d been driving alongside the Kalama River, and we crossed over just after leaving the interstate.

As we headed west, we paralleled the Cowlitz River.

By then, we’d already driven most of the way there. We could see the bridge that would take us across the Columbia channel to Puget Island.

We turned off at Cathlamet, Washington. What a fun little town…and historic. This is what Wikipedia tells us about Cathlamet:

Cathlamet was the largest, or one of the largest, villages of Columbia River Native Americans west of the Cascade Mountains, and the home of the Kathlamet people. Cathlamet was sighted in 1792 by Lt. W.R. Broughton, while verifying Capt. Robert Gray's reported exploration of the Columbia River. This village of cedar houses included 300-400 inhabitants when visited by Lewis and Clark.

In 1846, James Albion Birnie became the first permanent white settler at Cathlamet, moving there after a career with the Hudson's Bay Company. He set up a trading post, remnants of which were reported still standing in 1906. Birnie named the area Birnie's Retreat. The name was later changed to Cathlamet in 1851.

It only took about ten minutes to drive through town, and then we approached the Julia Butler Hansen Bridge. Julia Butler Hansen was a Congresswoman who represented Washington from 1960 to 1975. The bridge was built in 1938, and so it seems it must have been renamed at some point…or maybe it had no name before. 

Okay, here we go. It’s a pretty fancy bridge leading out to a small community.

We were crossing the Columbia channel.

And here we were on Puget Island, where I saw the first barn of the trip.

Here's what Wikipedia tells us about Puget Island:

The island was named for Peter Puget, a lieutenant in the Vancouver Expedition of exploration, which first mapped the island in 1792. 

Puget Island was settled in 1884 by the Ostervold family. In addition to running dairy farms, farmers on the island grew mint from 1917 to the late 1940s. The next major crop grown on Puget Island was cucumbers, primarily for pickling, until the crops were damaged by mosaic disease. In the 1990s, sheep, dairying, and cottonwood were the main agricultural pursuits.

Just about ten minutes later, we arrived at our final destination. Slow Boat Farm is kind of like an AirB&B for campers.  

We could see the kids and their new van as we drove up. We pretty much had the place to ourselves.

Looking in the other direction, the owner lives in one of those structures. There’s also a part-time tenant living here. Otherwise, they rent out their open field for camping.

Looking west, it looked like this:

This is how we arranged ourselves. It was very windy when we arrived. The weather would continue to get worse throughout the evening, unfortunately. On the positive side, we’d always planned to eat dinner at a restaurant in town this first night, and so it didn’t really interfere with our plans.

We had a few hours to spend before dinner, and so we sat and chatted and got ourselves set up. A family of deer visited off in the distance. There was a doe and her fawn.

The fawn still had its spots.

All around, these little buttercups were in bloom.

We enjoyed our dinner out. The rain started up as we drove into town. There’d been intermittent lightning and thunder all afternoon. By nightfall, we were into thunderstorms and drenching downpours. Happily, the forecast was for better weather by morning. 

The rain stopped overnight. When we awakened the sky was still gray, but it was considerably lighter than the previous afternoon. There are cattle ranches all around. The cattle were off in a distance the afternoon of our arrival. When we awakened on Thursday morning, they were right outside our back window.

Erik made us a delicious breakfast Thursday morning. This was bacon from their pork share.

It was delicious…possibly the best bacon I’ve ever eaten.

Also, pancakes.

And scrambled eggs.

Mae made fresh squeezed orange juice. I’m telling you…we were roughing it.

We’d been hearing the screech of an eagle, and I finally spotted them in a tree about 100 yards away.

I took picture after picture. It’s hard to get a good picture from so far away, and so I just take a lot of pictures. In one of them I captured the top eagle spreading his wings. I’m thinking the eagle below him is a little nervous about what’s got him so stirred up. If I were standing below him, I’d certainly be considering my options.

Okay, and from there we took off on our day of sight-seeing. I’ll save that for tomorrow’s post. I’ve done absolutely nothing since we got home, and so I have plenty to keep me occupied today. We realized we were out of cat food, and so, clearly, that will require an emergency trip into town. There’s not a lot of unpacking to do for such a short trip, but I need to hoe the garden too. I expect I’ll find time to sew at some point. I haven’t done any sewing…nothing at all…since the last Tiny Treasure. Honestly, I’m certain my pulse is getting weak and thready from lack of thread-based intervention. You may have experienced this affliction yourself a time or two. 

So, with that, I’ll leave you to your day.