Chuckanut Drive, a winding coastal ride on the way to Bellingham, WA, is a gem.  It is Washington State’s equivalent of California’s Big Sur with jaw-dropping glimpses of the sea and mountains along the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

The coastal drive to Bellingham and Fairhaven is one of my favorite field trips in WA State.  Evergreens ascend along the twisting road with glimpses of sea, sky, mountains and — what’s this? — a solitary and quaint old house perched on a cliff on the southern part of Chuckanut Drive.

The house belonged to the family of Edward R. Murrow, a WWII radio broadcaster and war correspondent (a predecessor to Walter Cronkite and the like).

Further north there’s Chuckanut Gallery, which allures with local art and a fantastic garden.

 

Bellingham  is the last city in WA before reaching Vancouver, Canada.  When we moved to Seattle twenty-something years ago, we were intrigued by travel articles about this historical border city which in the mid-1800’s vied with Seattle for becoming the prominent port city.  Seattle, of course, won the title and is NOT subdued in its excitement.

(In fact Seattle’s excitement is more annoyance over crowded highways  and overdevelopment of real estate and Amazon drones and what happened to the Seattle we moved to? …  I could go on but I shall subdue.)

Bellingham, I sure hope you can maintain “subdued,” and keep your charm.

I reminisce…

It was a dark and stormy day — a Sunday — when we first visited you in the 1990’s.  We were on our way to your soup festival.  Hubby had been wise-cracking about the Strait of Juan de Fuca along Chuckanut Drive:  If there were a university here, would it be called  Fuca U?

Hahaha.  I turned to my friend Llana, also a soup fancier, who in fact was a former student at Western Washington University in Bellingham.  Was that the joke when you were here?  Did students call the place Fuca U?

But maybe I didn’t ask her that.  Maybe instead I was distracted by the thick, slanting rain, the charcoal clouds as we climbed Chuckanut Drive.

As we rocked down to Electric Avenue in search of the soup festival, we spotted the sign:  Bellingham.  City of Subdued Excitement.

We could see why.   Other than the community center where we had our soup, not many places were open that Sunday.  The only roadside attraction open was the Whatcom Museum.

They had…are you ready?…an exhibit displaying bicycle reflector art.  We strolled inside and the museum attendant handed us flashlights.

“What are these for,” I asked.

“You shine them on the bike reflectors,” she said.

That was trippy.

It’s not often that I get to Bellingham these days.  Nor the Fairhaven district in Bellingham, which was a popular hippie enclave in the 1960’s.

Here’s more about the city of “subdued excitement” on Bellingham’s Fish & Bicycles site.

Our rainy, Sunday coastal drive and the soup festival and museum seem sweet now.  I think I need a field trip.