Ferryboats of the Pacific Northwest

I am inordinately fond of public ferryboats and last week traveled on a trio of them in the Puget Sound.

Starting off from the downtown Seattle waterfront, there was a large car ferry to Bainbridge Island, which adjoins the Olympic Peninsula.

My younger sister Hilary left her lifelong Central California homestead for Port Townsend, Washington a couple of years ago, and it was time to visit her new world. The small town on the tippy-top northwest corner of the Olympic Peninsula is quite charming, and sister Hilary had managed to get us invited to stay at a friends' temporarily empty house which had a magical garden.

Fifty miles to the west, Port Angeles hosts the M.V. Coho, a huge ferryboat built in 1959 that travels north to Vancouver Island.

We passed through half a dozen microclimates crossing the Strait of Juan de Fuca into Canada.

The Inner Harbour of Victoria, British Columbia's provincial capital, was as strikingly beautiful as rumored...

...and from our hotel room we watched tiny water taxis nearly being run over by a constant succession of floatplanes.

We also took tour buses to the Burchart Gardens north of town but summer mass tourism, augmented by the arrival of three different cruise ships, made the 50 acres of gardens feel like Disneyland on a summer weekend.

We returned to the United States on the M.V. Coho...

...and took a detour to Lake Crescent in the Olympic National Forest.

Lake Townsend also hosts a 30-minute car ferry to the nearby Whidbey Island, which we intended to explore by vehicle. However, we arrived to discover that one of the vessels had broken down so a lineup of cars and trucks with prior reservations was backed up for hours. So we jumped on as pedestrians and had lunch in Coupeville at the one restaurant near the landing. It was ferry bliss.