It was an odd set of circumstances that led me to Washington State the week of July 4, 2006.  The company I worked for ended their fiscal year just prior to July 4, so they traditionally shut down the company over July 4 week.  This both saved money and offered the hapless minions a chance to get away without the worry of returning to a boxload of E-Mails.  I had originally booked a hiking tour to Glacier and Waterton National Parks for that week, hoping to see what was left of the glaciers before global warming sent them the way of the dodo.  But the touring company, the same one I used for the Canyons trip in 2005, couldn't manage to find three people in the entire U.S. who wanted to go to Glacier with me, and all of their other tours for July 4 week were to places that I'd seen recently.

I had never taken a trip through Backroads before, but Brian had been on several of their tours and had recommended them highly.  I'm not sure what it was about the San Juan Islands / Olympic National Park tour that caught my eye.  I guess it just seemed like something altogether different from last year's desert tour.  And with Austin in the grip of a La Nina drought and temperatures soaring into the triple digits, I was really in the mood to go someplace cool and wet.

Neither Backroads nor Washington State disappointed in the least.  Backroads lived up to its reputation as the Cadillac of eco-tourism companies:  preparing or buying gourmet meals for us all week, schlepping our luggage, and generally freeing us from having to think about anything (as someone who thinks for a living, it's the last thing I want to do on vacation.)  The tour group consisted of myself and four couples: Bob & Rebecca from Philly, Lewis & Gilly from Richmond, Jonathan & Susan from Miami, and Eric & Sue from San Diego.  Being the only single in the group made for an interesting dynamic, to be sure, but I got a free single room out of the deal, so I can't complain.  It also gave me a chance to really get to know the guides (Abby, Paul, and Rob.)  Even serving as a volunteer trip leader for Austin's largest outdoors club, it's not often that I run into people who have the kind of street cred in the outdoors that these three have, and it was great to be able to talk shop with them.

Due to the nature of the itinerary, there was not as much real hiking as I would generally do on my own, but we saw a lot of things that I wouldn't have seen on my own either.  On the whole, the tour offered a perfect overview of the region and gave me a short list of places to explore in more detail at a later date.

How to describe the San Juan Islands ...  My best attempt would be to imagine that some alien spacecraft picked up a little chunk of Western Colorado and dropped it into a crystal blue, ice-cold ocean.  Mountains rise literally straight out of the water to thousands of feet of prominence.  And standing on the top of one of these peaks, the same sorts of peaks that one would expect to be surrounded by open rangeland, one experiences a visceral feeling of shock at looking down on water in all directions.  The wetter islands diverge a bit from the Colorado analogy, often providing an enchanted forest canopy of old growth cedar, alder, hemlock, and fir that hints of the nearby Olympic Peninsula.  The drier islands feature open grasslands and sparser pine and juniper forests more typical of the Intermountain West.

Our trip would circumnavigate the far northwest corner of Washington:  beginning in Seattle, island hopping to the San Juans and Victoria, crossing the Strait back to the Olympic Peninsula, and crossing Puget Sound back to Seattle again.  We'd spend most of our travel time on ferries, which offered a welcome respite from the hours and hours of van time that one logs on most ecotours.  I think the longest driving stint we had was a mere 2 hours.