Weekend trip to Birch Bay Washington

Birch Bay Washington ~ 2012 Willison Family Reunion | part I

clouds, planeAs most of you know, David and I went for a long weekend trip to Birch Bay Washington last week. Every other year the Kruger part hosts the ‘Willison family reunion’ in their vacation home right there on the beach of the Puget Sound. What a location! After being together with David for over eight years now, but always living overseas, this has been the first time I got to meet a lot of new, well, new to me, family members. And they got to meet… me! Oh my, was I nervous? No, of course not! Seriously, for some weird reason I wasn’t. Maybe because I subconsciously deducted from those I already knew that everything was going to be cool. Willison family reunion venue, Birch BayWhich it was. What a great family! By the way, because I have so many impressions and photos, this is only going to be the first part of our travel photo log.

Lets start at the beginning. Thursday. An almost normal workday for David, while I got all our things together and packed. I had to leave at 2.45 pm to pick him up and drive to the airport for our 5.30 pm flight to Seattle. For the first time we actually opted to park at the airport, well, off-airport, and shuttle to the departure terminal. Which went really smooth, however anything over four days we will be better off getting a home to airport shuttle, because of costs. Anyways, got to the airport, dropped off our suitcase, went through security – did I mention I had not eaten since the morning? – and finally found a bar at the gate where we ordered hummus with bread and veggies. Hummus and veggies were good, but the bread was soggy. How can they put it together with wet veggies on one tray? Duh! But, I ate the hummus and David enjoyed his beer until it was time to board, almost on time, and we were on our way to Seattle.

clouds, planeWe had opted to pay a some extra to get Economy Plus seats with United Airlines and, well, we did get extra leg room. A lot, because we were seated in the row behind the divider to business class. However, everything else – actually there was no ‘everything else’. Meals and drinks are the same as coach class. The one thing we were hoping for was power for David’s laptop. And sure thing, there was an outlet between our seats – which did not work. Again. On our flight back from Seattle last year we were upgraded to Economy Plus and the same thing happened – no power. The flight attendant made some elusive excuses as to it either being broken or switched off (presumably to save 50 cents worth of electricity). Sorry, United Airlines, but neither excuse is comforting! fire, planeObviously on our return flight we graciously declined to pay for an ‘upgrade’. But other than that we had a pleasant flight and I was able to take lots of cloud photos (most of which I will be sharing in a separate article), a fire and a spectacular sunset before we got into Seattle on time.

sunset, plane, mountainsOnce in Seattle we got our suitcase quickly enough and followed the signs to ‘rental cars’. New to us, they built a ‘rental car facility’ off-airport and now, actually since May, have regular shuttle buses to and from the airport. Which is pretty convenient, you just have to factor in that little more time. We got our car, headed north out of Seattle and got to Birch Bay Washington just before midnight. Which for us was 3 am – snooze – we were tired and basically collapsed into bed, but not before we got to sniff in the beautiful, salty ocean air… The next morning we realized that I forgot to bring the address of where David’s parents were staying and we were supposed to meet them for a late breakfast. sunset, plane, mountains, cloudssunset, plane, mountains, mount rainierSince they don’t have a cell phone we, or rather I was in trouble. Birch Bay Washington is small enough so I thought I would drive around and look out for one of their cars, which I kind of knew. But no such luck. Next, I called up all hotels that I could find online on my smartphone and called them to see if Bev and Dave Willison had checked in the previous evening. When I was about to give up, I finally got the desired answer ‘yes, they did’. Dumb thing is, they would not give me the apartment number, for obvious reasons. So, I drove back, picked up David and we drove together to the one car park that I had not checked before. And sure enough there was familiar looking red Explorer. But, was it really theirs? And which apartment? So, we parked sunset, plane, mountainsand walked around and suddenly I saw someone, who looked very sunset, plane, puget soundfamiliar, walking away from us. It was Dave, David’s dad. YEAH – we had found them!

They were just about to leave to meet with the Krugers at their beach house. No breakfast anymore, since it was noon by now. We were starving. But Judy Kruger took pity on us and started an early lunch consisting of delicious, cooked Dungeness crabs with bread – YUMMY! Very messy to eat, but fun, sitting on the deck, enjoying great weather while looking over the bay – nice. Unfortunately, since we did not expect to go directly to the Krugers, I did not have my camera with me, so Friday went by without any photos except for some with my phone. Somehow and most likely the irregular supply of food, lots of sun and excitement got the better of me, which meant that I had to excuse myself for Friday evening and spent it in bed to be fit and ready for Saturday and Sunday.

birch bay, beach, ocean, ebb tide, grasschildren, beach, willison, familymiashadowLulu, Boston TerrierBirch Bay, night, reflection, hdr, clouds, boats

These are a very few sneak peeks of the photos I took over the weekend to wet your appetite for the next part of our long weekend at the Willison Family Reunion in Birch Bay Washington with boating, crabbing and more.

5 thoughts on “Weekend trip to Birch Bay Washington”

  1. Hi Claudia,
    My name is Jane and I’m with Dwellable.
    I was looking for blogs about Birch Bay to share on our site and I came across your post…If you’re open to it, shoot me an email at jane(at)dwellable(dot)com.
    Hope to hear from you soon!
    Jane

    Reply

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