Tonight, a refrigerated bottle of fine Costco red wine is ready to celebrate Corey and Lisa Stottlemyre’s eighth consecutive summer of almost taking an adventurous-sounding voyage to Victoria, B.C., but then not.
“So many times when we were walking along the Seattle waterfront, I’d see the pier for the Victoria Clipper and think ‘Damn, wouldn’t seeing those Butchart Gardens be sweet?’” said Corey. “Why haven’t I hooked us up with that yet?”
Foreign territory was tempting to Lisa too.
“Sometimes I just thought, how romantic would it be to ride the peninsula’s big Black Ball Ferry into the Strait of Juan de Fuca?” said Lisa. “Just to try something new, you know?”
Despite both desiring the escape since they first met in 2011, neither one has acted on it — yet.
“We think about it, but then so many excuses come up — in 2014 it was moving in together, then a friend’s summer wedding in 2015, we got obsessed with Crossfit in 2016 and wildfires killed the summers of 2017 and 2018,” Lisa said as Corey nodded in agreement. “After all that, we would just be so drained, it wasn’t even worth it.”
Asked about this year, the couple smiled and squeezed eachother’s hand.
“At some point, I think it just becomes this fantasy you never realize,” Corey said. “You discover you never needed to go to Victoria after all.”
