Lopez Island

We had planned to explore two different islands in the San Juans, and we had figured it would take two days and two ferry tickets to get that done. But while we were on the west-bound ferry going to our first island, we found out that passengers can stop in at other islands for free on their east-bound ferries towards home. We just got a bonus island visit for free! The fact that we got an hour earlier start to our day now became more important since we're going to get to squeeze a stop to Lopez Island into our day's itinerary. So after exploring San Juan Island (as described in the last blog), we headed back to the ferry. Our plan worked because there was room for our car on an earlier ferry out of San Juan than we had reserved. So we boarded the 4:30 p.m. ferry out of Friday Harbor . . .

and about thirty minutes later found ourselves hiking through the forests on Lopez Island.

We had been given the advice to go to Shark Reef Sanctuary, and we are looking over the bright blue waters for any sea life this afternoon.

It's a beautiful place to be, but none of the orcas or sea lions are playing under the sea cliffs near us today.

But as we looked up, we saw that this is a bald eagle playground. We watched as two mature eagles flew through the air just over our heads. There are over 125 bald eagle breeding pairs in these islands--and one source proclaimed this the largest concentration in the lower 48 states.

Our original plan was to ride our bikes around Lopez Island, and spend one entire day here. Now that we have changed this to a late-afternoon exploration, we are glad to have the car to zip around. Lopez Island is only a few miles wide and 15 miles long. We saw lots of people biking on its narrow and winding roads. But we don't like biking with car traffic (just like we don't like driving a car with bike traffic). So now we are really glad that we are able to do two islands in one day. Far fewer people visit and live on Lopez island, so we saw more wildlife out in the open.

The other advice we got was to visit Spencer Spit State Park. We're still getting good use out of the Washington state park pass we bought several weeks ago. We parked and walked to the water to see this idyllic view right in front of the beach-front camping spots. These few tent sites are well sought after, and were all filled for this evening.

We haven't had any flowers for this blog, so Denisa just had to take a picture of the wild pink roses that seem to be everywhere on the islands. On Lopez, we see miles of wild roses as they are wound around most of the fences along the roads. They are in full bloom right now.

We were headed back to the harbor when we saw a group of birds gathered around something on the side of the road. We were surprised to see two vultures and two bald eagles fly up from the single carcass where the four birds were eating together. This young bald eagle flew up into the tree right beside us.

We were first in line at the ferry terminal. We need to catch the final boat of the evening, and we certainly didn't want to miss it. We had an extra long wait, since it was running 25 minutes behind schedule for some reason. Where this morning's ferry was packed full, the last ferry had less than a dozen cars on board.

The good news about stretching this day to include two islands were two-fold. We made best use of our expensive ferry boat ticket, and made great use of a beautiful weather day. We also got to finish our day on an island cruise, watching the sunset over the San Juan Islands. We have been blessed to wander into another of God's wonders today!