Most of the time when I write a blog post, I write about myself and my experiences encountering other locations and cultures. In this post I want to reverse that. I thought I would share my experience as a sort of personal tour guide for someone from the African country of Malawi. In January of 2020 I went to Malawi for two weeks to teach pastors at a Bible school. That came about after meeting Bern the director of the…
Continue Reading “Being a Personal Tour Guide in Washington State”
After four days exploring Whidbey Island, it was time to go home. However, we didn’t want to just drive straight home. This was an opportunity to spend a little more time exploring some of the towns in this region. We would take the long way home. If you remember, we took the ferry coming over to Whidbey Island. For our return trip we would go around the north end to catch the freeway going south. People leave Whidbey Island when…
Continue Reading “Through Anacortes and La Conner, the Long Way Home”
Friday turned out to be a beautiful day on Whidbey Island. It was a great day for hiking which is what we spent most of the day doing. After getting ready in the morning, we headed back down to Fort Ebey State Park. While yesterday we spent time there on the beach, today we would spend most of our time in the woods. Fort Ebey was built in 1942 to help protect the Puget Sound region. Its purpose was to…
Continue Reading “Forts and Nature converge in North Whidbey Island”
Last week I mentioned that the central part of Whidbey Island was part of Ebey’s Landing National Historical Reserve. This is truly a unique situation in terms of the National Park System. 85% of the land within this reserve is privately owned. Nevertheless the national, state, county, and city of Coupeville have worked together to make this a place where the historical, cultural and geographic uniqueness of the region is preserved. Visitors won’t necessarily know they are in a national…
Continue Reading “Exploring the Unique Ebey’s Landing National Historical Reserve”
The weather forecast for Wednesday had predicted gloomy weather, but much to our surprise we woke up to mostly clear skies and a sunny outlook. After eating breakfast at our hotel, we were readyfor the day. We would travel back south, but be in more of the central part of the island ending up in Coupeville. Our first destination was South Whidbey State Park. While this park is on the water’s edge, the focus of the park is more hiking…
Continue Reading “From a Park, a Garden, and a Farm to Coupeville”
With summer finally arriving in the Northwest, we looked around for somewhere to go for a week of vacation. However, as everyone knows, travel during the summer of 2022 has been a challenge. Everyone seems ready to travel after two years of pandemic mode. The result has been high airline prices amid flight cancellations. We weren’t interested in that. So we considered a road trip, but with the price of gasoline, that didn’t seem very practical so we looked around…
Continue Reading “Relaxing in South Whidbey’s Tranquil Beaches and Woods”
Deception Pass State Park is one of the most used state parks in Washington. The park is on both sides of the narrow body of water between Fidalgo Island and Whidbey Island. It’s about an hour’s drive north of Seattle. Last week I shared about the north side of the park. Today we will look at Pass Island and the south side of the park. Let’s start with the bridges that cross over Deception Pass. The two bridges are high…
Continue Reading “Exploring the South Side of Deception Pass”
Deception Pass is the narrow strait between Fidalgo Island and Whidbey Island about an hour north of Seattle. It was named by George Vancouver after apparently neither he nor his crew noticed it on their first exploration to the area. Later, when they did discover it, they thought it had deceived them, thus the name. Today this strait is traversed by bridges. Between the two large islands is another small island, Pass Island, so there are actually two bridges. They…
Continue Reading “Exploring the North Side of Deception Pass”
