Now With Pictures!

As an experiment, my first in-blog pictures should appear below. Enjoy!

So early yesterday morning, Liz and I drove over to Brook and Wendi's for a weekend of relaxing fun on Whidbey Island. We took the long way round, up through Skagit Valley and their Tulip Festival, which apparently happens all through the month of April. We missed the best times to go, but we still saw fields full of them. Even I had to admit it was pretty cool to see so many in one place, and in so many different colors and varieties.

Then we hit the town of LaConnor, which seemed like every other Northwest tourist trap (espresso at every store, the same Indian knick-knacks, the requisite kite shop, and so forth), before driving over Deception Pass to Whidbey. Deception Pass, according to our guides, was unnaturally calm, but even so you could see the currents forming little whirlpools. Not a place I'd practice kayaking. We tootled around the northern part of the island for a while, stopped in Coupeville to see both streets (lined with antique stores, and a pretty nifty bookstore, the kind you find in small tourist towns run by retired people who love books). After walking a bit, we pointed the car south and stopped at Fort Casey, an old Army / Navy fort from the turn of the 20th Century. During World War I, an attack on Seattle was not out of the question, so three forts on Whidbey and two other islands formed a "triangle" with 12-inch guns and 16-inch mortars that would tear any would-be attackers to shreds (in theory, at least, because they were never tested in a real battle). While we were there, we saw a Trident-class nuclear submarine cruising through the harbor (it's in the middle of the picture, low in the water). One of those subs carry enough nukes to kill a billion people. Cool, huh?

That night, we went to Brook's parents' house, which his dad built himself. It reminded me a lot of the cabins we used to go to back in Arkansas, except classier, and in a northwestern forest. The four of us played cards into the night; we gave Steve Jackson's new game Spooks a whirl, and all agreed it was fun. Easy to learn and not terribly complex, but the art is really cool.

The next morning, we slept in late, got started at our own pace (it involved a lot of reading and puttering around), and finally headed out to Useless Bay around 2:00. Useless Bay is useless as a harbor, since it's so shallow and the tides so extreme, but it makes for good tide pools and oyster beds. We saw many varieties of marine life, including starfish, hermit crabs, and some kind of tiny (less than half an inch long) fish. We made it home in time for The Simpsons tonight. That show disappoints me lately; the jokes are less subtle, and they seem awfully fixated on sex. Maybe it's because I'm such a square.