The weather report was bad but a winter getaway called to celebrate our anniversary — a week early because everything was booked for our day which is Valentine’s Day. We decided to stay on the largest island in the town of Friday Harbor, the county seat of San Juan County made up of an archipelago of four lightly populated islands and a spray of others that adjoin those in Canada that continue up the Inside Passage.… Read more
Woody Guthrie’s famous song written in 1941 to extoll the virtues of dam building on the Columbia River and its tributaries is not the subject of this story although the effect of all that damn dam building (some eighty) is one of the causes of the demise of the salmon fishing and canning industry that once powered the booming economy of historic Astoria Oregon.
The small city sits a few miles from the mouth of the Columbia where the river empties into the Pacific Ocean in a roiling combination of swift and silty fresh water fighting the ocean tides and storms.… Read more
Tired, oh so tired by our semi-lockdown due to Covid, we decided to take a quick getaway to an island we can see from our living room. An island with almost no virus cases. Feeling secure, we joined the line at the ferry dock in the nearby town of Mukilteo for the twenty-minute cruise to the tiny town of Clinton on the south end of Whidbey Island.
Named for Joseph Whidbey, Master of HMS Discovery, who along with expedition leader Captain George Vancouver, explored the island in 1792.… Read more
I’ve always wanted to see the cranberry harvest on the Washington Coast. So, when it looked like the weather gods would smile for a few days on the usually rainy Long Beach Peninsula in the far southwest corner of the state, we decided to drive four hours from our home. In no hurry, we took secondary roads, more scenic than the freeway. They wind through logging country where we dodged the loaded trucks whipping down the road toward mills to add to the piles of logs (called cold decks around here) waiting to be turned into lumber.… Read more
After experiencing the wild exuberance of the Vigeland Sculpture complex, the Oslo City Hall is a model of sobriety with its red-brick exterior and rational layout, entrance courtyard with fountain and carvings from Norse myths, and long central hall flanked by two towers. Instead of naked writhing people, the artwork is reflective of the Norwegian character based on foundation myths and history.
While there are oil paintings and ceramic plaques, such as these honoring women,
much of the artwork in the interior of the grand building is in the form of fresco, a medium I particularly like.… Read more