A week at Marrowstone with trips to Port Townsend. Rub it in!! The spelling... Our daughter spent a week in Port Townsend - twice - because she was a star student - at Centrum. What a contrast!

It WAS nice, especially Chetzemoka Park, at the north edge of Uptown, in Port Townsend...what an idyllic spot. Very friendly locals there, too. Uptown Port Townsend (the residential part) is so much more appealing than downtown. I'd rather walk about looking at the old homes, or loll in a local park overlooking the water than squeeze into one more narrow, ticky-tacky shop full of touristas.

I might be a bit naive on the spelling thing, but was surprised because Port Townsend is more refined, culturally, than your average big city. Apparently some kids there are still getting an atrocious education, if this little episode is any indication.

Just goes to show that even in a nice place like Port Townsend (where we, too, were 'touristas' a few years ago) not everyone has the memory power to conquer our quirky spelling.
But then why should they need a brilliant visual memory for an ordinary, everyday chore such as spelling? If spelling was logical, just a little memory of the basic rules would be all that was needed to confidently code and decode our written language.