Sail­ing to Canada

I just fin­ished my first day of work at the North­west Folk­life Fes­ti­val in Seat­tle. I flew up on Thurs­day, then took the Amtrak up to Belling­ham to visit my mom’s (and my) friends Mary and Jim. The train ride was absolutely won­der­ful. Trav­el­ling by train, you see lots of sights that you couldn’t see if jour­ney­ing via car or plane. For the first 45 min­utes or so, the tracks ran right along the water of the Puget Sound — the inter­state is miles inland. On top of the sights, the train is more com­fort­able than other modes of travel — lots of legroom, the abil­ity to get up and walk around, and both a full-service din­ing car and a bistro car. I wish that Amtrak went to more cities — namely Tal­la­has­see and Nashville. Come to think of it, a route between Tal­la­has­see and Mobile would be espe­cially use­ful to me in the near future…

Any­way, enough about the train. I had a great visit with Jim and Mary at their house on Lummi Island, which is part of the San Juan Islands. We dined on fresh wild salmon, and they took me out sail­ing on their 38′ boat, the Dan­Ran. That was a blast, espe­cially since I hadn’t been sail­ing in years. I took the train back down to Seat­tle last night. Much of the jour­ney was in dark­ness, so I spent most of the time reading.

Today was the first day of prep for the fes­ti­val, and our call was 7 am. We won’t start so early from here on out, but the days will only get longer. The fes­ti­val itself actu­ally starts on Fri­day, and runs through the Memo­r­ial Day holiday.

I hope to have time to take lots of pho­tos of the fes­ti­val, which I’ll post when I even­tu­ally get back to Tal­la­has­see. The thumb­nail above links to a few dig­i­tal pho­tos I took while vis­it­ing Jim and Mary. Film pic­tures of that trip will appear later as well.

I’m stay­ing with a friend I met through the fes­ti­val a cou­ple of years ago. Michael’s been kind enough to host me in his cool loft apartment/photography studio/art gallery for two years now. It’s con­ve­niently located near the Amtrak sta­tion, SafeCo Field (where the Mariners play) and most impor­tantly, the Pyra­mid Ale House.

Well, I’m tired from a long day of car­ry­ing stuff. Time to kick back and relax with a book…