Our Little Retreat: Orcas Island

Three days and three nights. No kids. Wonderful.

My in-laws were kind enough to watch Seth and Sam for us so that we could get-away and recharge our batteries a bit. The kids did great with their grandparents (sounds like they even slept better than they do with us, little stinkers!)

Here's some snippets of our trip. We started out spending one evening/night in Seattle. We checked out a couple of parks with great views of the city and then walked from our hotel to the Space Needle. We were able to score reservations at the rotating restaurant on the top of the Space Needle. The food and service was excellent and the views were priceless!

Classic Seattle picture

Wonderful dinner!

Sunset from the Space Needle

City view

The next morning we caught a ferry over to the San Juan Islands, specifically Orcas Island. I scored a deal through Living Social for a two night stay in a cottage that had a king sized bed, fireplace, our own hot tub, and a view for $212 (yes: total!) I was a little nervous that the place wouldn't be very nice, but it was amazing and exceeded expectations. Praise the Lord!

Our cottage is up on the hill and had a view of this harbor.

We spent the rest of the day touring Orcas Island, which is beautiful. It is a very calm, non-touristy place full of lush forests, curving roads, tucked away coves, picturesque valleys and places to explore. Even though we were enjoying our time without the kids, we couldn't help but talk about how fun it would be to bring them back to this island someday! It was that neat of a place.

Cascade waterfall: we crossed the creek on a fallen tree
and were able to walk right to the bottom

Sunset our 2nd night: note the kissing couple on the canoe.

 We slept in on day 3 and woke up to a day as beautiful as the previous ones. Another part of my spectacular Living Social Deal was a $20 credit for a whale watching tour. So, for the second time in the past year, I got to fulfill my dream of seeing whales. This time we saw orca whales (in Alaska was humpback). They were pretty awesome to see, especially because their black fins come so far out of the water. It was a pretty awesome three hours!

One of many pictures :)

Our view at dinner the last night

 Every night we were gone, there was an amazing sunset; yet none rivaled the final night we were there. The clouds were phenomenal. Praise God for a different set of clouds every night: what a great artist is He! (It was hard to pare down to these few photos...we took like 50!)