Maple Rock Farm

One of the vendors visitors to the Farmer’s Market are likely to meet is John Steward of Maple Rock Farm. The farm has four acres of organic produce which is used at many of the Island’s restaurants. John runs his farm based on the principles of planned rotation of crops and grows everything from strawberries and tomatoes to squash, green beans, carrots, and turnips, among others. The goal of the farm is to provide fresh, pesticide-free and locally grown produce to the Island. John is a believer in eating locally, organically, and seasonally and this can be seen in the quality of the produce.

Coffelt Farm

Coffelt Farm is situated on the far northern reach of Orcas Island in Crow Valley. For over 60 years the farm was run by Vern and Sidney Coffelt, but the farm was recently transferred to the San Juan County Land Bank. The Land Bank strives to preserve working agricultural lands and demonstrate sustainable, Island-scalable agricultural practices and promote environmental stewardship. This is also accomplished through educational programs and research on the farm. The Coffelt Farm is an excellent learning excursion for those interested in learning about environmental issues and farming.

Bullock’s Permaculture Homestead

Bullock’s Permaculture Homestead is the work of the Bullock family as well as extended family and friends who have developed their land as a permaculture project. Permaculture is defined broadly as a way for people to integrate themselves into the natural environment. It focuses on integrating by observing the natural patterns to design systems that work with nature instead of against it. At Bullock’s Homestead, this is how the farm is run. The Homestead practices sustainable farming methods and also offers hands-on courses, workshops, and skill building.

One of the great things about Orcas Island is the diversity of the peoples and lifestyles found there. These three very different farms provide a look into how farming can be done in sustainable and environmentally friendly ways. A tour of any of these farms is a fun and educational way to spend some vacation time on Orcas Island.

Travel by Ferry

Your Orcas Island adventure can begin on the ferry ride to the island. Ferries are available every day of the week, including weekends, and there are up to three ferries running at any one time. The ferry service recommends that passengers arrive at least 10 minutes early and vehicle traffic arrive at least 60 minutes early. In addition, vehicles are subject to security screenings, so be prepared. It’s important to be ticketed well in advance of embarking and be ready to load. Children younger than 5 years old travel for free and there are discounted rates for children 6 to 18 years of age. Senior citizens, persons with disabilities, and those with Medicare cards travel at half the regular price.

Of course, the best part of arriving by ferry is getting a chance to observe the beautiful scenery of Puget Sound and Orcas Island. The ferry gives passengers a chance to experience the Sound in a unique way that can’t be experienced from land. There are a wide variety of ocean animals such as whales and dolphins that might be around as well as birds of all kinds that inhabit the region. For many people, the experience of riding a ferry is a new adventure as well.

Fly to Orcas Island

If you’re considering flying to Orcas Island, then you could be in for a treat: a one hour adventure from Seattle Lake Union airport to Orcas Island on a seaplane. While there is regular plane service to Eastsound and other Island locations, why not arrive in a seaplane? The seaplane departs from Lake Union and arrives at several different locations around Orcas Island, so planning ahead is crucial. The seaplane makes stops in Deer Harbor, Rosario, and West Sound, so the scheduled arrival and departure times can vary up to 15 minutes at any of the locations on Orcas Island. In addition, there is shuttle service from Lake Union to Sea-Tac Airport.

Why not start your vacation on Orcas Island with an adventure? A ferry or seaplane ride to the Island can be an amazing new experience for the entire family.

What You Can Find at the Market

Everything at the Farmer’s Market is made or produced by Orcas Island’s locals. The skill of the artisans and crafters at the Market is clearly evident in the large variety of items available for sale including crafts, art, jewelry, clothing, and pottery among others. In addition, local growers bring a wide variety of seasonal produce, much of it organic, and there are also various food and drink vendors as well. In addition, many local services organizations also have booths at the Market including the historical museum and the master gardeners. All of the vendors and artisans at the Market are friendly and love to chat with visitors.

A Family Friendly Event

Farmer’s Markets naturally lend themselves to the needs of families and provide wholesome fun for everyone, including Fido (who needs to stay on a leash). Besides experiencing the wonderful foods and drink, exploring the wares of the local artisans, and meeting the locals, the Farmer’s Market provides a location to sit and relax is a family-friendly atmosphere. One highly recommended activity is to stop by and visit the master gardeners. These volunteers are trained by Washington State University Master Gardener Program and provide up-to-date free information on horticulture and environmentally responsible gardening. This could be a great opportunity to learn a little something about horticulture in a relaxed atmosphere for children.

When and Where

The Farmer’s Market runs every Saturday from the first weekend in May until the last weekend of September and is held on the Village Green in the heart of Eastsound from  10am to 3pm. In October and part of November, the Market is held in the Oddfellows Hall from 11am to 2pm. Parking is available wherever you can find it, and walking or riding a bike to the Farmer’s Market is a great idea too.

Orcas Center – Something for Everyone

The Orcas Center is the cultural center for the Island. It provides a wide variety of arts and cultural experiences including music, dance, theater and visual arts programs throughout the year. If your vacation includes a rainy day, why not stop by the Center for some great entertainment? Upcoming events include an all-girl band, the Orcas Choral Society’s presentation of Water Music, and a dance experiment from 10 choreographers staged on a 4’ by 4’ platform. The Center’s tagline, Something for Everyone, really does reflect the offerings.

Orcas Island Historical Museum

The goal of the Orcas Island Historical Museum is to educate visitors about the unique history that has formed Orcas Island. The Museum features a wide range of exhibits and provides new events and exhibitions often, but the theme is centered on the history and stories of the Island and its people. One of the unique offerings of the Museum is a historical tour of the lodgings in the local community. This tour brings together history and the buildings of the community in a unique perspective.

Sea View Theater

If museums and cultural centers aren’t your thing, the Sea View Theater is known for its great value and good service. Many people note that it is one of the few movie theaters that still uses real butter on its popcorn, which is reasonably priced and always hot and delicious. Though the theater is small, it provides good seating and the screen appears quite large. Locals like to say that it’s the best theater on any island anywhere.

Just because it’s raining doesn’t mean you have to spend your vacation in your lodging. Orcas Island offers a wide variety of indoor activities to keep a family occupied when the weather turns grey and rainy. The family can enjoy cultural activities, visit a museum, or even see a movie in an intimate setting.

The possibilities don’t stop there though as there is always something to do on your Orcas Island vacation.

Everyone desires to travel, because who doesn’t want to explore the world and, as the Salon writer Pico Iyer would put it, “bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed?” Who doesn’t want to simply be suffused with awe by the paintings of Michelangelo, or sit at the exact place where David Foster Wallace wrote? Everyone does, but unfortunately not all can afford it. Good thing there’s Orcas Island in the corner.

To travel is to experience new, which doesn’t necessarily mean you have to spend half your life savings just to feel redeemed from your mundane everyday living. Even a simple gathering by the beach with your family can make an ordinary Sunday fantastic. All you need to have is a good island and a nice play to stay. If this is what you want then why not explore an Orcas Island vacation?

Orcas Island: Your Unforgettable Get-Away

Your Orcas Island vacation experience may consist of a cultural trip or simply a nice stay by the beach. With the Orcas Island Historical Museum in Eastsound, you can be sure that your stay won’t be something you can easily forget. You can visit the museum and bask in its history springing from the explorations of Francisco de Eliza to the naming of Orcas Island by Henry Kellett in 1847. The three historic camps named Camp Orkila, Four Winds Westward Ho and Camp Indralaya can also tour you to the exciting heritage the island holds.

Orcas Island: Your Tour, Your Fun

If an educational tour isn’t your thing, Orcas Island is also replete with tourists spots that a good traveler shouldn’t miss. The adventure you can have is endless, especially if you’re into water sports and hiking, which are two of the most popular adventure treks you can take on the island.

Of course an Orcas Island vacation wouldn’t be complete if you don’t experience what its lodging offers. There’s a lot to choose from, but if a great place with rooms overlooking the sea is what you’re after, then by all means explore the amenities of The Orcas Ohana Vacation Home. This Orcas Island home takes pride in its affordable low-season and high-season rates. It’s also very known for its welcoming pet-friendly accommodation and its credibility as one of the best valuable places in the entire San Juan Islands. To book your vacation today, visit www.theorcasohana.com.

We try not to play favorites at The Orcas Ohana, but Haku, is certainly one of our top guests. You might even remember her from our Winter 2010 FIDO Photo Contest.

Thank you to Tanya and James for sending us these wonderful photos of Haku. She even wrote a note about her trip to Orcas Island!

Take it away Haku!

I am Haku Nellies Princess Warrior, the only furry child of James and Tanya Nozawa. My photo won a nights stay at the Orcas Island Ohana. I had my Mom send in my picture because I love road trips and adventures! I liked the name of the Orcas Island Ohana, being my name is also Hawaiian…it means “master, overseer” or basically ruler…which I am of my human Mom and Dad.

We arrived on a chilly, gloomy Monday afternoon but the weather didn’t even matter. The Orcas Island Ohana home was warm, inviting and peaceful. I made myself right at home on the deck with my favorite blanket and bones. I was fascinated by the deer..there were two of them..and I paced back and forth on the deck trying to squeeze through the railing for a better look. They were very interesting and I never saw them so close before.

Suddenly, overhead there was a bird chirping..why it was a western nuthatch! I know this because I have some of those in my backyard. I watch them sometimes when I’m laying in the sunshine in my backyard.

My Mom and Dad made dinner and we enjoyed the beautiful view of the sound and sometimes the sun would peek through the clouds..it was so peaceful and quiet.

After we all ate dinner (and I hid my greenie in my blanket) we went for a walk to town which wasn’t very far away…we stopped at the little shops and they even had a doggie store for me where I picked out a few treats.

It started sprinkling so I had my Mom carry me cause I hate when my feet get wet. (remember what I said earlier? Master overseer?) So Mom carried me the rest of the way back to our home for the evening, she doesn’t mind I can tell.

While we were walking along the water in town a gorgeous rainbow appeared! All the people from in the restaurants and the shops took the time to come outside and look at it. They were all on the streets pointing at it and talking about it. What a nice place I thought, everyone took a moment to enjoy the beautiful rainbow.

We hurried back to the Orcas Island Ohana so we could get the camera and take some pictures…My Mom got some great pictures of it and we had quite the view from the Ohana home. The rainbow stretched across the sky and it looked incredible with the ocean below it and all the trees framing it.

I checked to see if my greenie was still there..phew…yep… we enjoyed a quiet evening just our Ohana..all you puppies out there..tell your humans to bring you here..it is so fun! It has stairs and everything and the porch overlooks the sound and you feel like a king…or a queen like me!

Mahalo Orcas Island Ohana for such a wonderful stay!

Enter here to win your chance at a FREE night stay at The Orcas Ohana.

Watch the video below to learn more about the contest and San Juan’s own crown jewel, Orcas Island!

Here is a sample FAQ from their website: OrcasMopeds.com

Melinda Bargreen, music critic for Seattle Times,
writes for American Record Guide, Nov-Dec 2006

The white ferry glides to Orcas Island through an assortment of smaller tree-covered islands that look like someone scattered a fistful of giant emeralds onto northern Puget Sound. On such late-August days, the water is as calm as glass, though there’s plenty of bustle at the departing ferry terminal in Anacortes, about a 90-minute drive north of Seattle.

Orcas Island, one of four ferry-served islands in Washington State’s San Juan Islands, has been home for the past nine years to the Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival. A cozy boutique event run by founding Artistic Director Aloysia Friedmann, it’s an outgrowth of some very serendipitous circumstances. Friedmann, a violist, met her husband, pianist Jon Kimura Parker, while performing at Toby Saks’s Seattle Chamber Music Society’s Summer Festival (now in it 25 th year). The couple wanted to create a junior version of the Seattle festival up on Orcas Island, where Friedmann’s parents (violinist Martin Friedmann and oboist Laila Storch) had a vacation house. They knew the arts-friendly environment of the island, which nurtures many writers, musicians, and artists. And they knew the spectacular scenery, which led to the fledgling festival’s subtitle, “Chamber Music with a View”.

Best, there were some excellent venues: the small but acoustically lively Orcas Center, whose 213 seats are perennially full, and the sanctuary of Emmanuel Episcopal Church, which is perched on the rocks overlooking vistas of islands, water, and mountains.

With advice from Saks, Friedmann and a cadre of Orcas friends set forth to create a festival where the ambience is almost as great an attraction as the music. Having Parker, a Leeds Competition winner and international soloist, as the house pianist is a draw in itself; his faculty colleagues at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, including the likes of cellist Lynn Harrell, have proved a rich trove of talent from which to draw an artist lineup. More artists have come from Friedmann’s wide circle of friends at the Juilliard School and summer music camps, including trumpeter Stephen Burns and violinist Stephanie Sant’Ambrogio.

From day one, innovation has been one of the festival’s hallmarks. Over the years, Friedmann has introduced the bandoneon, alphorn, cajon, organ, and sitar as well as more traditional chamber instruments and repertoire. Distinguished film director and photographer Otto Lang gave two seasons of inspired lecture –screenings before his death last January at 98. Composer and pianist Jake Heggie appeared with mezzo-soprano Zhen Cao in his own song cycles. Two San Francisco Ballet principal dancers, Muriel Maffre and Benjamin Pierce, have created two Stravinsky dance-music-video evenings (one of them this season) that would do credit to any festival on the planet. And the artist roster has included such icons as John Mack and Claude Frank alongside William Preucil, Jeffrey Kahane, and (in a nice quid pro quo) cellist and mentor Toby Saks. During the last two weeks of August this year, happy concertgoers pile in for the pre-concert lectures and lined up at the box office, where a wait list of substantial proportions usually formed. This is a festival that’s very good to it audiences; community donors underwrite a terrific little reception after each concert with big tables of catered hors d’oeuvres, fruits, cheese, and wines. (Donors, many of them individuals, also underwrite each performer, pre-concert lecture, and concert.) Rehearsals are open to the public; a youth-involvement program works with local school music programs through the school year and brings kids to the concerts. Children are admitted free to a Family Concert, which Parker hosted this year with horn player William VerMeulen, who performed on the garden hose and funnel, alongside excerpts from main stage programming.

The four main stage concerts, each presented twice, included a nod to Mozart in every program, with repertoire ranging from the standard to the startling. In the latter category was Michael Daugherty’s 1993 Dead Elvis, where “The King” ( Benjamin Kamins, very much alive) emerged from the wings clad in a white metal-studded jumpsuit and bearing a bassoon. Daugherty’s chamber piece is a tour-de-force for any bassoonist brave enough to handle its considerable technical challenges as well as hip-swiveling ones, and Kamins made it a personal triumph, losing no opportunity to kiss women in the audience and in the onstage chamber ensemble.

On the same program was an utterly fascinating version of Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat, created and choreographed by Muriel Maffre, whose concept included a nearly life-size puppet soldier cunningly manipulated by her and fellow dancer Benjamin Pierce. The seven-piece chamber ensemble (with Stephanie Sant’Ambrogio leading from the violinist’s chair) played with unanimous vigor and wit, and three narrators, Adam Stern, Owen Kotler, and John Clancy – gave voice to the major characters. The extraordinary pliancy of the dancing and the effective use of the puppet (underscoring the Soldier’s puppet-like manipulations by the Devil) were enhanced by Maffre’s video images on a small screen. It was both visually and musically mesmerizing, as fresh as new paint and as exciting as a newly minted classic.

When you realize that both Dead Elvis and L’Historie du Soldat shared the same program with Poulenc’s Sonata for Horn, Trumpet and Trombone, Mozart’s Flute Sonata No. 6, and Loeffler’s Two Rhapsodies for Oboe, Viola and Piano, not to mention a little hors d’oeuvre in the form of Adam Stern’s new chamber transcription of Ginaster’s final dance from Estancia, you begin to understand the extraordinary creativity of this festival. Of course, there were more conventional programs. The final one, “Mozart Meets Tchaikovsky”, offered a sparking Mozart E-flat Piano Quartet with two married couples performing: Parker and Friedmann, and Lynn Harrell and his violinist wife Helen Nightengale. The second half was a supercharged Piano Trio by Tchaikovsky with Parker, Friedmann, and Harrell (Harrell, by the way, won a Grammy Award for his recording of this work).

An even smaller-scale program put Parker and Harrell together for some dream repertoire: Schubert’s Arpeggione Sonata, Brahms’s Cello Sonata No. 2, and Beethoven’s Seven Variations on The Magic Flute. Here were two top-flight players at their best in a duo recital of true partners, with cellist powerful enough to let pianist play at full strength in music that showed the deep commitment of both artists.

Afterward, as the blissful audience wafted into the reception room for treats and some of the festival’s reserve-label wine (bottled by Mount Baker vineyards), one audience member happily murmured, “We’re so spoiled.” Three words said it all.

(This article is from http://www.oicmf.org/ !)

Check out this sweet video of The Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival (kid version)!

Orcas Island has so many great activities for families!