Spiderversary

Whelp, I just read through my last post and am now cry-laughing because we are officially vacation-cursed. If any of the rest of you are vacation cursed as well, solidarity dude. Sol. i. darity. 

I think I've mentioned this before, but every time we plan a vacation we schedule out 2-3 nights for it. The number of times we have made it past the first night is . . . maybe once? Maybe not even once. At the moment I really can't think of a single time we made it past the first night. Not to spoil the end of this story or anything. 

Ok, so we had our anniversary "trip" last week. You'll recall I was a little bummed that it wasn't going to be a weeklong cruise like I'd saved 3 years for it to be, but I made a really solid go at having a good attitude and being excited to stay in a cute tiny cabin on Whidbey Island we found on AirBNB. It started out great. Jared brought me home some roses, and I took myself back to my flower shop days by foraging for greenery and arranging them in a pitcher in the rental home we're staying at.

^^Very pleased with this work. Then we dropped Jack and Savvy off at Grandma's house and we drove/ferried up to Whidbey Island. It was so quaint and gorgeous with farmland/mountains/tall trees/ocean views all at the same time. 

We got to the cabin (I didn't get any pictures because, spoiler, we ended up having to make a speedy escape when I thought we'd have several more slow days to get pics). It was extremely tiny and rustic, but also cozy and with a cute fountain/pond/hammock area out front. We were really excited to have some needed time to relax and reconnect. Upon arrival we collapsed into a deep post-moving-week nap and didn't wake up until 7:00. We rushed to the nearest town, Coupeville, to try and get a table for a nice anniversary dinner before all the restaurants closed. Restaurants close surprisingly early in this part of Washington. The only place that didn't turn us away was a little seafood restaurant (the one behind Jared in the below pic). The wait time was almost an hour, but we took it and explored the beach while we waited. 

^^The cliffside black PNW home of my dreams. Everything we were able to explore in Coupeville was seriously so cute. It's one of the oldest towns in Washington. Highly recommend checking it out. 

^^We got a call that our table was ready about half an hour earlier than we expected, so starving, we sprinted from the beach back to the restaurant before they could give our table away. 

I can't remember the name of the restaurant, but it looked out over the sound. The vibes were high. I got the spicy seafood pasta. Loved the mussels and oysters, but it was a bit too spicy and the sauce tasted like it only included 2 ingredients: cream and green curry paste. I love a curry paste, but I associate it with my cheap, easy asian soups I make at home. Jared got a mediterranean lamb burger with sweet potato fries. Amaaaazing. And then we split a peach cobbler for dessert. 9.5/10 anniversary dinner. Definitely beat our anniversary dinner when we first moved to Wyoming and had like $10 in our bank account. We split a burger with waters at a local diner with colicky baby Jack in tow, and then felt guilty afterward for "splurging." May that forever be the standard against which I compare our anniversary dinners.

After dinner we found a nearby beach and watched the end of the sunset. So pretty with the mountains off in the distance. Also weirdly deja-vu from the last time we lived close to the ocean in our Grenada days. Then we headed back to our cabin and played chess. S'cute. Jared won, but it was close. Here's a picture of the moment that I will not be enlarging.

Here's where we ran into trouble. After our chess game we climbed up into the sleeping loft to go to bed. There was about 2 feet of space between our heads and the top of the cabin. I looked up and saw spiderwebs. Nothing crazy for a cabin. Then I had the thought, "Haha I'm so glad there aren't any spiders in those webs 2 feet from my face." And then you guessed it, I looked at a different part of the web and there was an ENORMOUS BLACK WIDOW. Why. I called down the ladder to Jared to be like, "Nope. Nope nope nope." He googled it and assured me that black widows are extremely rare in this part of Washington. But lemme tell you my friends, after my numerous black widow encounters in Wyoming and the research I did on them there, I know black widows. This one didn't have an hourglass, but it was a textbook male black widow spider. Big, black, bulbous, shiny. Jared came up skeptically to take a look, and even he had to admit that it was definitely a black widow. And what's more, as he laid there looking at this web for several minutes to try and prove me wrong, several more black widow spiders, babies and adults, emerged from the crack in the ceiling above the web. WHY. 

Normal spiders wouldn't phase me too much, but we weren't going to chance anything with these. We climbed down from the loft and tried to get in touch with the airbnb hosts to see if they could bring us spider spray or anything. It was pretty late though and no response. Then Jared went back up to try and squish some of the bigger ones, but they receded back into the ceiling crack. It was really late and no hotels nearby, so we slept on the cold, hard kitchen floor all night so as not to be eaten by potential black widows. Happy anniversary. Super. 

What a rough night. It was worse than camping because we didn't have any kind of pad, and only one thin blanket to share between us. The ground was cold and we woke up in so much pain. The airbnb hosts got our messages in the morning and came by to try and make things right, but we had already made up our minds we would be cutting our trip short and heading home early. It was devastating. They wouldn't even give us a full refund, but after coming to a partial-refund agreement we cut our losses and headed back to the house we're staying in. 

We considered finding a new airbnb or hotel, but we were so exhausted and didn't have it in us to do any more logistical gymnastics to find a new place to stay. In this part of Washington there are so many people that you really need to book your vacations severallll months in advance. I was so sad that this was the post-medical-training vacation I had waited and saved and longed for over the past 7 years, instead of an Alaskan cruise. We stopped at a public park so I could use the bathroom on the way home and I just laid down on the ground and cried and cried big sleep-deprived tears for 10-15 minutes. Then we made a detour to visit our new house and got lunch in our new town. We also dropped off some forms at Jack's new preschool (yay!). That all helped a bit. Then we went home and spent one last evening without Jack, getting frozen yogurt and walking around Home Depot and going to bed early. 

Black widows aside, it could have been a nice anniversary trip. It was just the fact that this was also supposed to be our "big" post-training trip that made it such a bummer. Wish there was a happy ending to this story. On a whim we looked to see if any last-minute Alaskan cruises had opened back up that we could book for next month. They have, and they're actually pretty cheap, but I have a feeling we're too paranoid/cursed to get our hopes up and try for that again. Especially since we'll be feeling all snug in our new house by then. I'll keep you posted though! And on the whole, we are doing good and are happy. Especially because we'll be moving to our new house (fingers crossed) in one week. But if I find a single spider in our new home that first night, so help me !!