Tour: Ferndale, Birch Bay, Blaine, Lynden, Washington

Even though we are moving tomorrow, we decided not to waste today. After outwitting the cable company - surprisingly easy for Drake, we took off for the area just north of Bellingham. There are a series of small towns between Bellingham and the Canadian border, and this area is the truck gardening, dairy farming, grass fed beef, organic farming area just north of Bellingham. It's a large valley (Nooksack Valley) at the base of the short mountains that lead up to Mount Baker which is a jewel in the Cascades Chain. We didn't get that far today - that will be another tour.

First, we stopped at Pioneer Village in Ferndale which was a bit of a let down after just being in Mississippi where American history goes back to the late 18th/early 19th century. "History" up here (not counting the Native Americans) only goes back to the late 19th century/early 20th century. However, you have to applaud the Ferndale businessman who moved a large number of early pioneer buildings to create this village in a park like atmosphere. Drake actually talked to a guy who confided that one of the buildings was his grandmother's house. I thought the flower balls which line Main Street in Ferndale were much more interesting than Pioneer Village.

Ferndale also had another attraction - Hovender Fragrance Garden. This is a small park outside of town which was at one point a working farm. It's now a labor of love by a small group of gardeners who are growing amazing, amazing flowers. They claim that this area is the most conducive to flower gardening in the entire country. Well, I don't know about that, but the flowers were spectacular. Here's one picture, but I'll be sharing an entire album of flower pictures I took at this garden with selected friends who will be interested. I did discover what makes this place 'fragrant' is that there are extensive herbs grown. I'd never seen horseradish growing before - and the large lettuce like leaves smell intensely like the freshest horseradish imaginable. I thought of the cooking afficianados I know when I was wandering this portion of the garden.

Moving on - we decided to wander around the back country roads as we wound our way to Birch Bay. Boy, am I glad we did. We stumbled on the Pleasant Valley Dairy which was selling cheese! That was a first for me. I thought you could only get it at the grocery store. We met Jenny who, with her husband and two small daughters, own a family farm of registered dairy cattle. Her grandmother-in-law first started selling cheese she made in the 1970's, and she passed down her recipes. The cheese is outstanding. Jenny makes several different kinds (including feta - one of Sarah's favorites), gouda, farmstead, and mutschli. She flavors the gouda and we bought two flavors - Herbe (onion, parsley, celery and garlic), and wait for it.......jalapeno! The plain gouda is also so good we bought a bit of that too. She confided that she even has some cheese that has aged for 3 years. She called it "stinky cheese" and admits it's a better cooking cheese. I took her word for it. She does 'ship', and if you want to try it email her at cheese98248@yahoo.com. The web site is coming on line soon. The cheese was a welcome addition to our lunch, and we are planning a dinner tonight of cheese/crackers and fresh strawberries we bought at a roadside stand. The berries (Barb's Berries) came right out of the fields.

Our next stop, Birch Bay, was the first time I've ever seen 'mud flats' in person. It is created by low tide in a protected bay like this one. What really, really excited me was that the beach is PEBBLES. Wow. Is that right up my alley, or what? And, yes, I did get a few rocks. They are so cool. Some are two types of rock fused together. Oh, I'll quit - you all know how I am about rocks. Drake says he's going to start calling me "Lucy" because of my habit of picking up rocks just like Lucy did in the movie The Long, Long Trailer that she made with Desi in the early 1950's. This movie was the impetus for the I Love Lucy series on TV. If you haven't seen it, it's a quaint hoot. I do want to stress that I'm collecting pebbles, not big ROCKS. There's a difference.

No tour day would be complete for me without a museum, and we found a great lunch spot at Semiahmoo Park. This park included the Alaskan Pacific Association Musuem which is really all about early Washington State salmon fishermen and canners. (They moved up to Alaska from Washington after the salmon fishing methods changed. It was really a very interesting place. There was an actual salmon fishing boat - like an extended rowboat, really. The fisherman would lower gill nets, haul in salmon, load the fish into open compartments in his small boat, and when full then off load the fish onto pickup boats, and start all over again. They would stay out on the ocean for a week or more at a time during the 'season' in these small boats. I can't imagine the smell. Another interesting feature of this museum was that it sported a Semiahmoo totem pole called Salmon Woman out front. Now, this museum is about serious fishing and they have bronzed a 57 pound salmon (largest caught in this area), and it won a prize at the Pacific Exposition of 1915. I've included a picture just for you fisherfolk.

The prettiest town we saw today was Lynden. This town was settled by the Dutch and as we enjoyed ice cream, I noticed that all the natives seemed blond haired and round faced - facial and hair characteristics of most of the Dutch people I saw in Holland. They also have maintained that sense of precise order and cleanliness that seems a hallmark of the Dutch. I didn't see a single piece of trash much less a dead flower or unpruned tree, or peeling sign or even anything that wasn't at a 90 degree angle. This town also has a wonderful shaded street that goes on forever with overarching 40 foot trees lining both sides of the road. I include the picture of the windmill because another characteristic of the Dutch is that they have a wacko sense of humor which always seems at odds with their devotion to order and beauty.We'll be coming back here in August to enjoy the 100th anniversary of their county fair.

We meandered back to Bellingham, and if this day is any indication, we are going to have a splendid time up here. There is an amazing amount of stuff to do. I can hardly wait to get out on some of the hiking trails. There will be a blog hiatus as we get moved (tomorrow) to the new apartment, recover a bit, and then we leave for Oregon on Friday the 15th to attend a much anticipated family wedding.

We have a land address!

We rented an apartment today, and we finally have a land address after being without one for the past month. For those of you who care, our new address is: 128 Heritage Place #117, Burlington WA 98233. When we arrived, we drove into Bellingham to discover it full of people! Can you imagine? This is actually a city of 200,000 people. I'm afraid that Bastrop spoiled us to the small town life. Burlington is 25 miles south of Bellingham and is in a cluster of small towns. It's between Sedro Woolley (yes, that's really the name of a town), and Anacortes (where there's a ferry). Ferry access is rather important in this part of the country. Plus, we wanted to have relatively quick access to the Olympic Penninsula. Burlington has about 10,000 people, with another 10,000 scattered throughout the county.

We haven't let any grass grow under our feet. I already have a library card; they have a brand new 20,000 square foot library. Next, we found the Senior Center because Drake wants to get his bridge game set up. (They play every Friday.) Plus, we discovered they have a hot lunch every day for $3. I found a thrift store - remember, I said I wasn't eating on a card table anymore - well, I'm not. I bought a wooden table and two chairs ($60 - not quite St. Paul garage sale prices, but close). It will be so much better for sewing, and I can set up a computer permanently on the card table. I'll Craiglist the table and chairs when we get ready to leave. We even went to play blackjack for an hour today at the Indian casino 5 miles north of Burlington.

The new apartment is ground floor, 2/2 with covered parking, pool, hot tub, exercise room - pretty standard stuff, but Drake was happy to match the Bastrop apartment price. We arrived here on Monday evening and we will move into the apartment on Saturday. It took us 2 days to find a place that met most of our criteria, and 20 minutes for them to 'approve' us. Wasn't that a big surprise. I'm waiting an extra day to move in because they are cleaning the carpet today, and I want it to be thoroughly dry. Oddly, the fridge doesn't have an ice maker. I thought that was weird. However, they do have recycling at the apartment - recycling is mandatory in Washington.

Even stranger for us is that NOTHING up here is air conditioned. We didn't see a single place to live that had air conditioning. A lot of the small individually owned stores don't have AC either. There's been a lot of bitching up here today since it was 91. Everyone is very, very unhappy. The weather is going to moderate beginning tomorrow (83 for a high), and then for the next 10 days, the temperature is going to be 72/55 - and no rain at all. I know everyone in Texas is moaning or cursing. I'm going to enjoy every minute of it. I'm sure my autumn will also be a new experience weatherwise.

We'll be here until November 30th. This silly apartment complex won't prorate the rent on the month you move out. We originally wanted to leave the first or second week of December, but we would have had to pay the entire month's rent for December. I don't think we'll be doing that, so after we eat turkey, we'll pack up and leave. This will give us a leisurely trip down the west coast and we'll turn left at Death Valley to get to Arizona in time for Christmas.

Stay tuned for a play by play description of Washington State and Canada. It's going to be a ball.

Up the Center of the USA and turning left at South Dakota

If cotton is King in the South, then corn is the Emperor of the Heartland. We drove through 500 miles of corn. Almost as soon as we crossed the Kansas border going up I-35, all we could see was corn. I felt like I finally understood the Omnivore's Dilemma, a book Sarah gave Drake for Christmas which is about the industrial food chain in the United States. One of the sections is how our entire food chain is based on corn - we are more dependent on corn than the Native Americans were. Think about it: Corn syrup is in EVERYTHING. We feed every animal we eat corn. And, it's not only food that we use corn for - but when the food bits are extracted from corn, then there are non-food uses for the byproducts. Plus, can anyone say ethanol? Well, anyone who raises food in this country from the corporate level to the family farm level knows a cash crop when they see it. It was truly awe inspiring to see the corn waving in the wind. One funny thing is that when the corn started in Kansas, it was 4 feet tall. The last small field we saw in Montana was virtually unrecognizable as corn because it was only 6 inches tall. One last thought: You think driving across West Texas is boring? Try driving across the corn fields of Kansas, Nebraska and South Dakota.

When we "turned left" on I-90, the corn fields pretty much disappeared. The central belly of South Dakota is cattle country, and it is also very boring to drive thru since it's mostly flat and monotonous. Scenery wise things picked up when we arrived at the Missouri Valley. This is Lewis and Clark country - they canoed up the Missouri in a northwesterly direction for a great part of the journey. The valley is lush and green and looks pretty much like every other big river valley that I've seen. However, once you passed this area, then a new type of landscape appeared: Soft rolling hills - Drake compared it to green ski moguls undulating across the land.

Then the first really interesting scenery popped up: The BADLANDS. This whole area reminded me of the Palo Duro Canyon. First, it's unexpected. There are these gently rolling green hills, and then next thing you know - up pops up these sand stone hills that are eroded like Bryce Canyon and colored like the Painted Dessert. It's rather like suddenly stumbling onto a moonscape in the middle of an oasis.

We couldn't leave South Dakota without a visit to its most famous attraction - yes, we went to Mount Rushmore. I actually expected to be diasappointed after watching North by Northwest. (For you movie challenged: this is a Cary Grant movie partially set at Mount Rushmore. In fact, he and Eva Marie Saint climb over the carved faces trying to escape the villain. FYI - the National Park people wouldn't let them actually climb on the mountain - so they built mock-ups of the carvings. You see the carvings as gigantic in this movie.) Therefore, I expected the real thing to be sort of small and insignificant. Wrong. It was impressive, and some smart person designed the lead up to the view of the carving very cleverly. They have a Walkway of States with each state flag flying and granite pillars with the date of each state's admission to the Union. I liked Mount Rushmore. I ate ice cream, took pix, and looked for Cary Grant.

Before we left South Dakota, we stayed overnight in Deadwood (the infamous town where Wild Bill Hickok was killed). We ate dinner at Saloon 10 where he was killed (actually we were upstairs in a wonderful restaurant). Drake was very, very happy to gamble for $2 stakes at Blackjack. Deadwood was really very quaint, and it also has a great bike trail - the George Mickelson - which is a 109 mile gravel/asphalt road laid down over over railroad tracks. It looks like excellent daytime fun. Overall though, South Dakota is a total drag until you get to the southwestern corner.

We skirted the edge of Wyoming, and we actually were only 75 miles north of Yellowstone National Park, but we just couldn't see much fun in being in one of the most popular national parks over the 4th of July weekend. We really have raced up here because of the necessity of being in Oregon on July 15th for the big family wedding. As Drake put it: "We can only skim the cream" which means that I didn't get to go to any tacky souvenir shops or other whacko places that appealed to me - like the REPTILE GARDEN!!!!!

We drove completely across Montana. It has interesting scenery from one end to the other. We did get to go to the Little Big Horn Battle Field. Now, when I was in school it was called a Massacre - exactly as it was portrayed in 1876 in every newspaper across the United States. The National Park Service has really done an excellent job in telling the REAL history which was a battle won by the Sioux and the Cheyenne in a last gasp effort to continue living the nomadic life. While it's called "Custer's Last Stand", in reality it was the Last Stand of the Native Americans. The reaction to the battle by the whites was so ferocious thanks to the inflammatory journalism and the self promotion of George Custer, that the Indians had no chance of preserving their nomadic way of life after the battle with Custer's 7th Calvary. After Little Big Horn, Indians were hunted down mercilessly and forced onto reservations or killed - didn't matter whether they were men, women or children, and it didn't really matter to the soliders which choice they made. It was really fascinating to hear about how the Little Big Horn (or Greasy Grass Battle as the Indians called it) came about, the strategy employed by both the Calvary and the Indians while looking at the actual field of battle.

The battlefield is marked with white markers showing where each soldier was killed, and red granite markers mark the places where the Indians were killed. I think the most interesting thing I learned was that as a result of a forest fire in 1993, archeologists were able to recover over 5000 artifacts from the battle that had been hidden by the grasses and reconstruct a much more precise picture of the battle. There's a large monolith at the top of "Last Stand Hill" which lists the names of all the soldiers and civilians killed in the battle. Under it are buried the common soliders who died. (There's a marker for Custer, but he's actually buried at West Point). The Sioux and the Cheyenne have a monument which is a stone wall circle with a wire sculpture on one side.

During the Ranger talk, they called Little Big Horn one of the most important battles in American history, and after hearing the actual facts, I have to agree. It solidified the white opinion of what to do about "the Indian problem". After Little Big Horn, there was no more pretense of treaties with the Indians. The Indians were overwhelmed and forced onto land which they didn't have much if any say in choosing. History shows again and again that unfortunately when one culture is so overwhelming in numbers and weapons, the opposing culture loses everytime.

Montana was rolling hills covered with cattle. The 19th century cattlemen must have dropped to their knees thinking they had died and gone to heaven the first time they saw Eastern Montana. They did learn the hard way over the winters of 1886 and 1887 that you really can't raise cattle on open range in Montana. That's when Montana was finally fenced. The cattle look like raisins dotted on green muffins. There is so much water in Montana that the roadmap looks like the wrinkled skin of a really, really old person with the tracings of all the creeks and rivers on the map.

As you drive farther west, the landscape changes and the Rocky Mountains appear in various ranges. It was thrilling to go over Bozeman Pass - a famous immigrant pass over which wagon trains traveled. We joked that Drake was so concerned about the V-8 engine pulling the trailer over mountains when 150 years ago, oxen were pulling wagons over these passes. 20 mph then would have seemed miraculous - much less 50 mph. The evergreen trees were magnificent growing right up to the edge of the roadway towering over everything, and we started seeing our first aspen trees. I can't imagine ever getting tired of this scenery. Oh, and did I mention that the temperature has been hovering between 60 - 75 degrees? It's really tough to stand this weather - especially after Mississippi.

Tomorrow we roll into Bellingham. We've driven over 4000 miles since June 5th. I've never driven in this part of the country before. Not only is this country huge; it is magnificent. The resources are amazing. It is so obvious that people across this country work hard everywhere. We overheard a table of men in work clothes and boots casually say they were amazed at the number of people taking pictures of the landscape. One then said, "When I look out over this land, all I see is work." One person's playground is another person's work place.

We are both very excited about getting to see the place we've chosen to live for the next 5 months. We'll let you know how the great apartment/house/duplex/townhouse/condo search goes!