Victoria Anarchist Bookfair and return home
ferry into Victoria, originally uploaded by artnoose.
As with many bookfairs like the Victoria one, they really should be just one-day events, since most of the people show up on only one of the days anyway (Saturdays in my experience). Saturday was a pretty good day. I was feeling like it was a bit of a bust because my handsome tablemate was steadily selling out of everything he brought over the course of the day. Still, when I added everything up after that 8-hour selling frenzy, I did okay financially. I also talked to a lot of people during the day. By then end, we were all pretty frazzled. I went out to dinner with moxie0 and thearagorn. There was supposed to be a bonfire later that night, so moxie0 and I went back to the house and picked up our bikes. We never did find this bonfire, but we had a surreal night just biking around in the dark, through places down by the water that had no street lighting whatsoever.
Sunday was a different story. Since moxie0 had sold out of his stuff, I went solo. Very few people came to the book fair the second day, and I sold almost nothing. The upside was that I talked to more people that day. In the mid-afternoon, just when I was starting to get pretty bummed out and wondering why I go to book fairs at all, I heard the words, "Do you want to go to the lake?" It was Joann.
"Yes," I said. "Yes, I definitely want to go to the lake." I packed up all my stuff, said some goodbyes, found moxie0, and met everyone out front. A few cars of us drove about 15 minutes north into a lightly residential area, then walked 15 minutes through blackberry bushes and woods to a secluded lake surrounded by trees. It was amazing to have something that beautiful so close to the town where we were staying. We swam in the lake and then dried off on a sunny rock.
I ended up driving the truck back into town and moxie0 and I met his dad for dinner. Afterwards, we headed over to one of the collective houses because moxie0 had challenged them to a high-kick contest. You can guess who won.
The next morning we caught the ferry back to Port Angeles. We immediately started hitchhiking and caught our first ride in like a minute. A rock climber and father or four gave us a ride to the junction where Hwy 20 goes off to Port Townsend. We picked blackberries and then were there for maybe 15 minutes before getting picked up by a guy with M.S. who bought us a gatorade and kept also trying to offer chicken tacos to us. He dropped us off in Poulsbo, where we immediately put our thumbs out and were spotted by a public bus driver in an empty bus who opened her door and told us to hop in. She explained that she wasn't technically allowed to pick up hitchhikers, but that in the Kitsap Transit district, if you just stand at the bus stop and tell the driver you have no money, they'll probably still give you a ride. She took us all the way to the ferry at Bainbridge Island, which was free in the direction we were going, and was waiting.
That particular ferry ride is a really beautiful one in my opinion, and short. In a half-hour we were back in Seattle. We ate some falafel and then popped into Left Bank Books to say hi. We spent a little time reading in the big space-age library before catching a bus to the airport. The flight was only half full, so we got to spread out while flying back to Oakland. I slept for nine hours last night.