Burke: Orcas Island’s Rosario ain’t New England, but who cares?
Published 1:30 am Monday, September 12, 2022
By Tom Burke / Herald columnist
As a late-comers to Washington state we continue to find “new” vacation places that everyone has known about for, forever.
This summer we extended our “discoveries” to include places such as Neah Bay, Mount Baker, Leavenworth, Camano Island State Park, Lake Chelan and Ocean Shores. And Rosario Resort, on Orcas Island for the annual Burke-family summer holiday tradition, continuing what my parents started back in the 1950s;at least seven days of whole-clan intergenerational fun and frolic.
Now for many years our family “resorted” at an idyllic getaway — Twin Lake Villa — on Little Lake Sunapee in New London, N.H. It’s a 125-year New England-style inn where meals are served and three dozen large rocking chairs gracing the building-long front porch. Plus there are 18 surrounding “cottages” (each with four to seven bedrooms, sleeping two to four and a pleasant helper visiting every morning to straighten up and refresh the linens). Add a lake, boats, beaches, tennis, bocci, a nine-hole golf course and evening activities, such as the Father/Daughter Dance, where a professional musician, who in our time was Aerosmith’s lead singer Steven Tyler’s dad, played for the gala. Tyler would occasionally show up with his daughter Liv, who I remember not as Arwen Undómiel from “Lord of the Rings,” but as a 5-or-so-year-old on the Villa porch, dressed in a blue tutu, and covered from head to toe in chocolate ice cream.
Since our family relocated, one-by-one-by-one, to Western Washington, we’ve been searching for a place like Twin Lakes, and now, with the Rosario Resort, we may have found it.
But, full disclosure, it wasn’t quite what I expected.
From my research I somehow got the (mis?) impression it was a Pacific Northwest version of the East Coast’s tony Nantucket Island. Now I didn’t think the streets would be paved with cobblestones brought to that famous whaling port in the 1800s as ship’s ballast; nor did I really think the uniform of the evening (for men) would be Nantucket Red slacks and a blue blazer from the Island’s famous Murray’s Toggery (madras shorts or anything with whales on it was standard issue for the beach during the day); or, for women, those little woven Lightship-basket handbags that signaled you weren’t a tourist or day-tripper. (Price Check: Basic “commercially-made” baskets start at around $250, while new or “used” handmade handbags run from $2,995 to $5,000.)
But it’s on an island, ya gotta take a ferry to get there, and it’s definitely upmarket, so I had my hopes.
Alas, I saw nary a single pair of Nantucket Reds and there wasn’t a lightship basket to be found anywhere.
There were, however, at least 30 big sailboats and bigger trawlers in the marina, two seaplanes a day ferrying folks in from Seattle, and prices were just high enough to indicate a bit more class than a Holiday Inn.
The pool was fun (the kids especially loved it, there’s no lifeguard blowing the whistle every three minutes), the service was impeccable, the food outstanding, but there wasn’t any beer on tap in the restaurant.
Rooms aren’t old-fashioned or as elegant as a Nantucket inn’s; mostly they were motel style bed-in-a-box or condos. But they were comfortable and clean and that counts for a lot these days.
There’s plenty to do on Orcas Island: shopping, hiking, birding and the “marina follies;” as people with a lot of boat but not a lot of experience maneuver in very confined spaces, which occasions my favorite seafaring spectacle/disaster-in-waiting when the skipper gives an order; the order is not understood by the “mate” (usually a wife or kid); and the skipper, nearing panic as boats get uncomfortably close at speed, tries to make the order clearer by raising his voice to a pitch and level discernible even in a Force 8 gale deep in the Roaring Forties.
Of course, it has precisely the opposite effect as further confusion reigns on deck and the marina staff nightmaring there’s gonna be a replay of the meeting between the Andrea Doria and Stockholm.
On the other hand, the onlookers are thoroughly entertained.
We’ll be going back to Rosario next summer. Maybe I’ll plunk down for some Nantucket Reds from Murray’s and try to be an “influencer,” or Santa may gift my wife a lightship basket and she’ll start a thing as well.
Overall, I gotta say, yeah, it was a decent summer, from an R&R perspective.
But the summer’s politics have been a train wreck so I’ll feel compelled to return to that next column.
For now I’m going to fill my pipe with some Frog Morton tobacco, take my very old and dog-eared copy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings,” outside, and dive deeply into the war against Sauron as men, elves, dwarfs and hobbits fight to save Middle Earth. (And I might even watch episode three of “The Rings of Power” and not get all tangled up in my jockey shorts ‘cause some people think it’s “woke.” I mean if you’re accepting magic rings, Mithrandir, and Mount Doom as “real,” why is it a stretch to envision a dark-skinned dwarf or an Hispanic elf?
And I echo Tolkien vis-à-vis the woke critics: “Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer.”
Slava Ukraini.
Tom Burke’s email address is t.burke.column@gmail.com.
