Monday Memory: The Mausoleum

This Monday Memory takes us on another anniversary trip, this one in the summer of 2005. Jer and I decided to go to Seattle, then up the San Juan Islands, just for fun. I highly recommend going to the San Juans, and I love love love Seattle. We want to live there someday. The trip was awesome, minus the kayaking incident. Some of you know what I'm talking about...let's not go there.

While on the San Juan's, we stayed at a lovely little bed and breakfast called Honey Lane Farms, run by a fun older woman named Marjorie Puckett. It was very quaint and homey. She raised alpacas, which grazed right outside the guest room window. Jeremy loved this because they reminded him of his days in Peru on his mission. She made us the yummiest breakfasts each day, including lavender scones, gooey bearclaws, and fruit salad that I swear was marinated in some kind of alcohol, but I never got up the nerve to ask her.

One of the biggest tourist attractions on the island was whale watching. Pods of orca whales migrated near the island, so we borrowed blankets from Marjorie and spent a whole afternoon one day camped out on the rocky shore, listening and watching for whales. Later, when we went sea kayaking, one of our tour guides, who had lived on the island his whole life, mind you, said he had only seen the whales once. Ha! (Side note: here's a quote from comedian Demetri Martin: "I went whale watching once. It was very similar to watching people on a boat become disappointed." Too true.)

We did a lot of hiking all over the island. It was gorgeous. One day we hiked to the McMillin family mausoleum near Roche Harbor. Here's a brief description I found online:

Afterglow Vista, as it’s called, is not your run-of-the-mill mausoleum. As you approach the forested monument, you’ll think you stumbled on a misplaced bit of Rome. A circle of pillars rises high over a limestone table around which sit seven stone chairs. Everything at Afterglow is symbolic from the winding stairs leading to the table—that represents the winding path of one’s life--to the broken column on the memorial’s west side. That’s an ode to the "unfinished state of man’s work when the string of life is broken." A proud Methodist, Republican and Mason, McMillin turned to the Masonic Order when he designed the mausoleum. One chair is conspicuously missing-—the one in front of the broken pillar--and local rumor has is that that’s symbolic of one of McMillin’s sons who married out of the Methodist religion.

After I had recovered from my mysterious island illness (which first manifested itself on the aforemention sea kayaking trip, which I do not want to talk about), we decided to hike back to the mausoleum again since it was our last night there and we wanted to take more pictures. The problem was, it was dusk. Hiking through the woods when it is nearing dark: creepy. Hiking through old graveyards to a lonely mausoleum in the middle of nowhere at dusk: UBER creepy. Jeremy had a field day playing on my heightened nerves.

I'm not one to be superstitious or believe in hauntings or ghosts, but I'm here to tell you we nearly RAN out of those woods to our rental car.

Here are some pictures from the trip. If you ever go to San Juan Island, do hike to Afterglow Vista. Just do it in the middle of the day.

The mausoleum during the daytime.

The mausoleum at dusk. Spooky, no?

At Honey Lane Farms.

Jeremy playing fetch with Marjorie's collie, "Josh".

The alpacas.

Sea kayaking.

The shoreline where we whale-watched.