islandwood

What is Islandwood? A park? A meeting facility? A community center? I've been to Islandwood for a fancy auction dinner, my kid's summer camp, and the Japanese mochi-tsuki. It is a fabulous facility for all these varied activities. The architecture is interesting and green. The grounds are immaculate, and the trails through the woods are fabulous. This is a valuable resource on Bainbridge Island, a true hidden gem.

We visited Islandwood with several friends who were well acquainted with its many resources. Turns out it is a great and exciting place to visit to learn about this extraordinary outdoor environment. Great for school kids from the nearby metropolitan areas who see more concrete than true outdoor areas, it is also a learning area for graduate students who are in residence on the property doing research and teaching groups of kids as they spend time on campus (they have residential retreats for inner city kids to meet the real planet). It's a big property with lots of places for a quiet walk in a rain forest, plus venues for special events. A great way to spend a day!

Beautiful, miles of trails, frogs! butterflies, check out the veg garden, the living house, the water cistern, the tower, the rooms are gorgeous and efficient. If you don't want to go home and go solar and get a composting loo and take up wood carving and carve paths in the forest something is wrong with you.

A friend works at IslandWood, and I was fortunate to join her for a docent-led tour of the campus this summer. IslandWood is an educational center that focuses on education in a natural environment. The docent tours are open to the public, so if you find yourself on Bainbridge Island for a weekend, check out IslandWood. They're doing great work there.

This is a "camp" with that in mind, it is a very nice camp....but still a camp. We were recently there for a wedding weekend. The wedding was BEAUTIFUL, the camp is nice and the food was very, very good! However, we paid $180.00 per night for a camp room with bunk beds. We had no shampoo, soap, iron or hairdryer. The room was clean, but stark and "camplike". If we had known this before, maybe my expectations would have been much lower. Or, if the price reflected this, that would have been better too. Like I said, it was nice for a camp....as wedding guests, we didn't know beforehand it was so rustic. If you are looking at this venue for a wedding or event, just make sure you know that it is simple and like camping. All the kids at the wedding were having a great time and it was a wonderful place for young families to bring their kids (they could all stay in the same room). I do have to say again that the food was really, really good and the time with family and friends GREAT!

The IslandWood campus can be accessed by the public during public site tours, private/special tours, and community events. The docent-led public site tours are a fabulous way to see the campus! The quarterly event, Afternoon On the Trails, is a great way for families with younger children (and anyone) to enjoy the trails and field structures. Inspirational setting for meetings, retreats, weddings and more! The campus is used during the school year largely for the school overnight program.

We attended the graduation ceremonies for the Masters Program. The Institute put on a wonderful weekend program for visiting families of the grads with all kinds of nature walks, tracking walks, bird walks and creative arts activities. The woods are beautiful here with well-maintained trails running through temperate rain forests, marshes and bogs replete with tree houses and LED-certified buildings and water reclamation systems.The food served for the graduation brunch was really good and bounteous to boot.IslandWood is a real treasure!

I love Island Wood. A relative was a recent student at their year-long environmental ed program, but Island Wood does a fine job of reaching out to all members of the community. You can take wonderful walks on their extensive trail system, or bring your kids for a real outdoor adventure. The guest cabins were beautifully simple yet still warm and inviting. When I visited, we were treated to an excellent buffet lunch. Island Wood's menu is not cardboard and twigs health food, but ranks among the best conference meals I've ever had. If you have meetings or conferences to plan, I think this would be an excellent spot.

I'm pursuing an MBA with the Bainbridge Graduate Institute (www.bgi.edu), and this is the location for the monthly on-site weekends. It's not really a hotel, more of a retreat for organizations to use. It has outstanding nature trails, good signage, accessible walkways. On-site composting and a composting toilet. Food it outstanding and attentive, served family-style. Each building on the campus has a story of how it was lovingly crafted by local/regional materials, true to contemporary and historic notions of sustainability. The rooms are dorm-style, with bunk beds, a common room with fireplace and games, but not much else - social & class time happens in other buildings. This is a jewel of a location, with huge amounts of love and attention that went into building it. If you have the opportunity to attend an event there, I strongly recommend it. There are just a few things missing that you might expect: there's no exercise facility (jogging trails: yes. soccer, etc. if you bring a ball), no pool or spa or bathtubs. Be prepared to walk, since it's 1/4 mile or more from the central buildings to the further dormitories. There are no televisions in rooms or elsewhere. Food is abundant, but there are not a lot of options for any given mealtime. The main buildings are locked overnight, so you cannot find a late-nite tea or snack. There are no provided soap or shampoo in rooms, other than a liquid hand soap/wash: bring your own. Go, if you can: you'll enjoy it, and many of the events hosted there are intended to be transformational for your mind and spirit. It's a fantastic location for that purpose.