There are a lot of things to talk about, I realize, but we don't get internet very often so I end up writing about the most recent thing when we finally do get online. However, a few days ago was not something that will get swept under the rug, regardless of how long it would be between wifi-stops.
We were making our way through the Olympic peninsula and Olympic National Park in Washington. In the northeast corner of the peninsula is Port Townsend. This is the place where the previous owner of our van lived before Cleveland. We've been texting with her periodically throughout our journey, as she's a delight, and she suggested that we stop by the place where she used to live just for fun.
So we rolled into Port Townsend and swung right by the address.
We were greeted by a very angry woman who burst out of the house and accused us of all sorts of things and was just...none too pleased to see us. Without getting into details, it was just a very unpleasant interaction.
She warmed up a little by the time we were going to pull away, and even suggested a couple of places to go in town, but it really frazzled us. We started to wonder if everything we knew about Pegasus's previous owner (PPO for short, and to not name her in case she doesn't want to be named publicly...though it may have come up in a previous post? I don't know. Whatever.) was totally incorrect. Maybe she was a grifter. Maybe she was nuts. Maybe she was mean. We didn't know - we'd only known her sparingly over the last couple of months.
We went into the waterfront town and walked it off a little. We grabbed lunch and got a little froyo and started to reset ourselves and feel normal again, but we were just drained from long hikes the previous 2-3 days. So we did what anyone in a van might do: we found a beach, opened the back doors, and laid in bed looking at the water.
Van life is not always as cool as that sentence - there are plenty of times when it's peeing-in-jars or struggling to find a place to safely spend the night. But this was one of those times where it was heavenly. We spent most of the afternoon and into the evening just...sitting around at the beach.
On the other hand, by 5 or 6:00 we still hadn't figured out where we'd sleep that night. Another campervan showed up nearby around 6:00 and backed up to do the exact same thing we were doing, so Jenna hatched the plan to go ask them where they might be spending the night.
After several minutes of thinking about it, Jenna went and stood on the beach near their van, turned around, made eye contact, and sparked up a conversation.
One thing led to another and one of the two women in the van mentioned that she was a massage therapist - the very same profession PPO was in. Intrigued, Jenna had to ask if they knew each other.
They did! They loved her! They were all old friends! They even knew Pegasus!
Furthermore, Jenna asked if they had suggestions for where to park the van overnight and one of them, Sheryl, said "my house!" As luck would have it, the street sort of dead ends at her house and there's a little nook where two vehicles fit quite nicely. It's in a shaded area, and since there are only 2-3 houses on the rest of the street, it's incredibly quiet.
We followed her back to her house where she invited us in to use the restroom and share some muesli because she has an organic muesli company and wanted to offer us some. Between the parking lot at the beach and back at her house, we must have gabbed for 4 hours and just had a wonderful time. The only thing that stopped us was realizing that it was 10:30 p.m. and that's well past Jenna's bedtime.
So to summarize: we arrived in Port Townsend and went to the house of the previous owner where we were met with a very erratic and upset woman who wanted nothing to do with PPO. We then hung out for a bit in town and went to the beach, where we met two friends of PPO who had nothing but wonderful things to say about her. One of them invited us to her home to spend the night (she would've offered us to stay in the house but she AirBnBs it and the spare room(s) were occupied) and we proceeded to warmly chat for hours and are now informed of her delicious organic muesli.
It was quite a day.
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