EDMONDS, WASHINGTON
Edmonds is a quiet suburb of Seattle with a nice beachfront on the Puget Sound and not much else. Regardless, I spent the first ten years of my life here and it’s strange to go back. This is the house I grew up in.

PORT ANGELES, WASHINGTON
Look at the size of this boat! It’s the Polar Discovery, a nine-hundred foot oil tanker that’s been moving up and down the West Coast. That’s 22 school buses! It weighs 140,320 tons, which is a third the weight of the Empire State Building, 23,386 bull elephants or four Midwesterners.

PORT ANGELES, WASHINGTON
With a population of 18,397, Port Angeles (that’s AN-juh-liss) is by far the largest city on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. You can catch the ferry to Victoria from here and I hear there’s some great hiking in the mountains, but there isn’t much else going on in town. I’d like to imagine some Desperate Housewives-style intrigue just under the surface, but we’ll probably never know.

Orcas live just about anywhere there’s saltwater, but they’re particularly concentrated in the Pacific Northwest. The ferries that travel through the Puget Sound and the waters around the San Juan Islands are a great place to see them – when a pod shows up, the captain hits the brakes (do boats have brakes?) and announces it on the PA.

VANCOUVER ISLAND, BRITISH COLUMBIA
The Pacific Northwest has a lot of water and not enough bridges, but the ferry system is so extensive that it’s not hard to get around. It’s also gorgeous and beats the hell out of an interstate.