Late Summer Trip: Lynden and Bellingham, WA

 I've been putting so many pictures of our trip on Facebook, it felt like glut.  Then I remembered I could jam them all into a blog post, as I used to do.  We have friends who live in the country with the cows up in Lynden. Horses, wild bunnies, black squirrels, goats, frogs, donkeys and ponies, too.  A little boy's dream, if two-year olds knew they had dreams, which include tasting summer's last wilt.  Up close and oh-so-personal with the holly hocks--appreciated with a quick sniff and a tiny, almost imperceptible cherubic lick.

"mmmmm"

 It was a very pleasant and comfortable experience, almost a siren song, enticing us to sink into and rest deeply in the pastoral tranquility and lively stillness of a place that wants to be called home, (but won't be by us for now.)  A place with ice cream so fresh, you could almost taste the hay of it. With cheese in so many incarnations, you almost can't remember what dessert is.

But you really do remember what dessert is, because you know it was baked by a master.  And you've had his sponge-crumb rolls and shattery-crusted artisan bread before.  And anyway, apple pastries go so well with cheese, you can't imagine one without the other.  At least not in cow country.

And since it was Labor Day...

Stop the insanity!  Wild and raucous abandon down on the speedway! The Lynde 500 push cart races.

And as every trip must, this one had a weird little surprise for us.  We took a short  drive to see a ditch.  What do you see that might make this a special enough ditch that we all curled into a too-small car to ride out and look at it?  Oh, did you say one side of that highway looks like Canada and the other side looks like the USofA?  How did you guess?  It was the mail boxes, wasn't it?  A Canadian mail box and a US mail box.  Dead give-aways.

Before reaching Lynden, we had stopped in Bellingham where we frolicked "On the Grass at Boulevard Park."  Well, not so much frolic on as sachet across.

It was idyllic and simple and richly sunny.  Chess players, whiffle ball players, skaters, kayakers, beach combers, surf splashers, dog walkers, and sailors.

All these separate little worlds of activity occasionally brushing up against each other like so many pearlescent bubbles floating across our view.  And what a lovely view it was.  Even the sea bed at the shoreline seemed to break into sparkling song!

If we had walked further along the boardwalk than we did, we could have found ourselves in the middle of Historic Fairhaven.  As it was, we just planned to drive through a bit and lookee-loo from the car on our way out of town, and then we found parking a few feet from a Swing Connection concert in the plaza.

And blueberry ice cream.