The Island You Can Drive To
You got an island like ours, not much here, you need major creative minds in the Chamber of Commerce to promote its possibilities for tourism. We don’t have a charming little seaport town. We don’t have cute little gift shops or seafood restaurants. We don’t even have, on 60 or 70 miles of waterfront, a public wharf or a dock or a marina. No, you pretty much need to drive to this island. Our old motto ‘The Island You Can Drive To’ was really a real estate pitch. More truthfully, it should’ve been ‘The Island You Have To Drive To’.
We have two really nice state parks side by side on the west coast. Only about twenty miles from the freeway. One is the old Cama Beach Resort, restored now and its cabins usually rented, making it one of the few state parks that runs a profit, which, in these fiscally challenged days, is pretty amazing.
When folks ask what there is to do on Camano Island, I say Not Much, Just Living. I’m happy as a free range clam, but I’ve got a beach to walk and a woods to hike and plenty to keep me busy. A visitor to our fair island, well, a couple of rainy days and the suburbs they left behind start looking mighty inviting.
No malls, no movie theaters, no taverns, no night life, not much of anything but inaccessible beaches and summer houses and us year rounders. Probably seems like a vacation in a desert, only one with water, not sand. No, it’s a hard sell when the San Juans beckon and Whidbey next door has quaint 150 year old villages and tourist trap and ferries going hither and yon. We got a few Mom and Pop grocery stores, plenty of real estate offices, speed traps and miles with nothing but scenery. People don’t yearn for that anymore, I guess. It’s why they carry phones and I-pads and laptops wherever they go. ‘The Place To Do Nothing’, our now abandoned ad slogan, just isn’t going to draw a crowd. Okay by most all of us. Except maybe the realtors….
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