How did that happen?

Somehow, we're suddenly back in the United States this afternoon. What happened?

Of course, if you don't have a a real itinerary, it's reasonable to ask, how can you ever really be surprised by where you end up, or rather, shouldn't you always be surprised at where you end up? While it may be a reasonable question, I don't really have an answer. I just thought we were going to be in Canada for another week, and now we're not.

We stayed too long in Ganges, was part of the problem, and the place just seems to have a bad vibe. The weather was pretty crummy, and Mandy demanded that if it were going to rain, she at least wanted a coffee shop she could go to. I had wanted to go to Montague Harbour for a couple of days next, but had to admit it didn't sound like much fun in the rain... trees and water in a fine mist look pretty much the same no matter where you are, and a convenient grocery store and shops to browse didn't seem like a bad alternative.

But by yesterday we were pretty well ready to be done with the place. My thought for this week had been to get down to Sidney, where we have a reciprocal moorage agreement with a yacht club and could stay for a few nights quite cheaply. We've never really spent much time there and the place is reputed to have a lot of excellent bookstores and a good grocery store. We didn't stock up on much in Ganges, since island prices for food are generally higher than elsewhere.

Unfortunately, when we got to Sidney, we found that the yacht club was sponsoring a regatta that weekend, and the guest moorage was restricted to vessels taking part in the event. Since we didn't think we could quickly disguise Insegrevious as a racer, we were out of luck.

There are a number of other places to stay in Sidney but Mandy vetoed that, and they were going to cost more anyway. The non-stop rain has really kept us from getting the boat dried out decently, and we needed a couple solid days of heat and ventilation to drop the humidity. So, we decided to just go ahead and cross back into the US. As it happens, there is no real advantage to our having done this, since we are now at Roche Harbor, which costs as much or more than those places in Sidney we might have spent the night, and it's still an island grocery store, and a small, fancy one at that (there is no real town here, just a resort). And since the cost is greater, we still can only stay one night and will be out anchoring someplace through most of the rest of the week instead of tied up somewhere with electricity and coffee shops. Hasty decisions are generally poor ones, particularly when you've already been up since six motoring through heavy fog when you have to make them. But on the plus side, it was perfect weather for crossing Haro Strait, since we got there right after the fog had cleared off, and a good fifteen knot southerly zipped us straight across. With the fog being as it has been, we might have gotten stuck over in Canada for longer than planned if we had waited.

The weather is, however, supposed to clear up a bit by Tuesday, so we might be able to at least enjoy some of the fine marine parks up here in the San Juans that we have been missing. The real issues now are groceries, Internet access, and reading material. I'd planned to have all three things taken care of sufficiently in Sidney, but now there is no bookstore to be had (and I am absolutely out of stuff to read), the groceries are probably going to be excessively expensive, and I have only one night to catch up on work with the Internet access here at the marina. I won't even have time to enjoy the pool here at the resort (access to which is complimentary with moorage, which is at least part of why the moorage is so expensive).

If there is a bright spot, it is that our experience clearing Customs back in to the US was actually quite pleasant this time. We have encountered the kinder, gentler Customs and Border Protection service. On our other trips back to the US this summer, we had been pretty impressed at the hospitable, courteous, and welcoming nature of the agents we had dealt with, but those crossings were all by means of conventional transportation. We've never had good luck on the boat.

But this time, we were cleared through quickly, with a minimum of questions, some basic respect and decency, and the golden ticket to a good Customs experience: the agents we talked to both said "Welcome home." It's not so hard to say, and it makes a world of difference to a citizen returning to his or her country to hear it, instead of the uniform suspicion and snide remarks that have characterized our return in years past.