Over the course of the last week, we’ve been in Bellingham three times, looking at houses and getting the feel of the place. And we have discovered where they keep the oysters.

Yesterday, we had a fantastic boatload of them – on the half shell, fried, and in a stew – at a great restaurant on Chuckanut Drive, the Oyster Creek Inn.

After lunch, we headed down Oyster Creek to the shore to see where the boats come in with the harvest. It’s really beautiful along the shoreline here.

There’s a railroad track running right along the water’s edge.

And, according to our lunch-time waiter, an avid fisherman, the salmon run here and prawns and dungeness crabs can be caught just offshore. Sounds like fun!

On our way back to Seattle from Bellingham, we detoured to the little waterfront town of La Conner, passing through farm fields of the Skagit Valley on the way. Out in the fields, we kept seeing what looked like loaded cotton plants:

Turns out it’s not cotton. All those white specks are Snow Geese, wintering here in Washington after migrating from Siberia! Not something we would be likely to see in the Florida Keys.