So on Saturday night on Lopez Island...

...after putting the kids to bed I sat on the porch in my shorts under a wool blanket with a beer and watched the sun set and then watched it get inky dark. I watched ferries lit like Merry Freaking Christmas ply the San Juan Channel and I watched the lights of Friday Harbor — just behind the first headland here — reflect off the low clouds. Jenny joined me for a while and we talked about time, history, archaeology, imagination. It was two hours of entertainment in which nothing, absolutely nothing happened.

Travelling with small kids — scratch that, travelling with MY small kids, my energetic kids who sit still never and hate car seats and need ceaseless exploration and social interaction, geez they talk to themselves — kind of turns “vacation” into “24-hour daycare” and in many stressful minutes this past week I was ready for “vacation” to be OVER.

But if the actual minutes sometimes sucked the hours more than made up for it.