Exit, Talking About the Weather

The meteorological shortcomings of the Pacific Northwest are very real, and much of our trip featured grey, gloomy weather like this (although with temperatures that never broke 75 the whole week, it was a nice relief from the East Coast heatwave):


But the last day of our trip yielded two astonishingly beautiful moments. First, a rainbow arched over Seattle as we approached on the Bainbridge Island ferry:


And then, a few hours later, came a glorious sunset over the Olympic Mountains:


And suddenly the whole trip was worth it.

Until next time, thanks for reading.

Nights of the Weird

There is no better way to begin my review of Seattle gay nightlife than at the beginning, when we walked into our first bar of the weekend to be greeted by a flash-mob brass band.

That set the tone for what has to be the quirkiest big city I've ever visited.

We all know Seattle as the place of coffee, salmon, Microsoft and grunge. But as a major American city with a well-known gayborhood (Capitol Hill, just northeast of downtown), I figured its nightlife would be pretty standard.

Not a chance.

From two different sources we heard that there were three places worth visiting: The Lobby and Purr, for drinks, and The Cuff, for dancing.

We walked into The Lobby at about 10:30 on a Friday night. The place was packed, with a mix of gay men, lesbians and straight people, most of whom seemed to have been there since the happy hour ended at 7 p.m. It's a storefront bar, the main level decorated in vaguely 19th-century style, with a mezzanine balcony on three sides that is equally vaguely South Beach-modern. We got our beers -- one nice thing about Seattle is that every bar has a good selection of local craft brews, usually priced in increments of a quarter -- and had barely settled in to take in the scene when a group of people descended from the balcony, pulled trumpets and trombones out of their clothing and proceeded to cavort wildly around, through the crowd and on the bar, for a good ten minutes.

What that was about, I have no idea, but it seemed that much of the crowd expected it -- when the band left, so did they, and the place emptied out. Ears ringing, we decided to try our luck at Purr, just around the corner.

And were greeted by more local character, in the form of the Seattle chapter of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence ...

... a person carrying his, um, companion around with him ...

... and also an amusing sign above one of the bars ...

But at Purr we also had one of the best evenings we've ever had in a bar, falling easily into conversation with many different people: Seattleites are friendly and nice, and it seemed they just wanted to be friendly, without having an ulterior motive.

This was a youngish crowd, almost all white, and generally quite attractive. Capitol Hill seems also to be a center of straight nightlife, and in the streets around Purr, spilling out of the straight bars, were many examples of the stereotypical Seattle look (flannel shirts, shaggy hair, poor shaving habits), but the gay people looked much more conventional, at least when they weren't in drag or carrying dolls around.

We could have stayed all night, but your intrepid reporter wanted to check out The Cuff as well. Big mistake -- the place was empty on a Friday night. But with a local friend in the lead, we gave it another chance the next night.

Yet more weirdness ensued. The Cuff clearly wants, at some level, to be a leather bar, but it isn't happening. The club has essentially two rooms, a big barroom where you enter that contains people who look like they belong in a leather bar, but aren't wearing leather; and beyond that, a half-set of stairs down, a dance floor filled with people who wouldn't look out of place at New York's Club 57, or the Sip 'n Twirl on Fire Island. We naturally gravitated to the latter, despite what I'd delicately describe as music for people with a short attention span, and were having fun dancing with old acquaintances from New York and our new friends from Purr when, at 1:20a, they announced last call at the bar.

And then, at 1:35, announced that the bar had closed and that you had 15 minutes to finish your drinks.

And then, at 1:50, sent a burly barback through the dance floor, taking drinks right out of people's hands.

Our visit to Seattle had concluded as weirdly as it had begun.

A Temple to Books, and Not the E- Kind

Seattle is an odd mixture of progressive and not. In the "not" column definitely falls the transportation system, which is seriously inadequate to a city of its stature -- not only is the city automobile-bound (a rail transit system is just now being constructed), but the highways aren't engineered to the standards common in a true car city like Los Angeles. Blocked roads, unexpected one-way streets, can't-turns and must-turns are common, and not always reflected clearly in the iPhone's Maps app, to our chagrin.

On the other hand, there is something awesome about a city that just built this as its new public library:


It's even more impressive to find the printed book being cared for so lavishly in the home of Microsoft and Amazon.com.

Washington's Wine Suburb

Washington State is now the second-largest producer of wine in the United States, behind only California. And judging from the extensive sampling we did, most is of extremely high quality, even at the lower price points where California wine is sweet and jammy.

There are two drawbacks, if you can call them that, to Washington wines. First, the state is best at full-bodied reds like Syrah, Merlot and Cabernet, even though those don't go with the state's best-known foods like salmon. (You will often find Oregon pinot noir under the "local" section of Seattle wine lists, probably for that reason. British Columbia, meanwhile, makes a small amount of excellent white wine, which is widely available in Vancouver restaurants, though little if any is exported.)

Second, the wine is grown in the eastern part of the state, a high, dry area that gets very warm during the day and cools off significantly at night -- just what the doctor ordered for wine grapes.

Unfortunately, this wine country is three to four hours away from Seattle, across a high mountain pass and quite a bit of desert. Not ideal for tourism, in other words, even if you've always wanted to visit a place called Walla Walla.

So the ever-practical locals have created a wine trail in the Seattle suburb of Woodinville, about 30 minutes' drive from downtown.

The tasting rooms, in industrial parks and strip malls, are perhaps the least bucolic I've ever seen:






But it makes for a pleasant excursion from the city, at least if you're not the designated driver.

And to that point, there is a rusty train track running right down the middle of the valley where the tasting rooms are; someone really should turn it into a wine train ...

Summer (?) in the City

Seattle is a place that favors outdoor culture -- sports, hiking, camping and so forth. And it's a place where people seem to be in generally good physical shape, and some of them like to show it off:





What amazed me about this particular part of the local culture was that the outdoor temperature on the days I took these pictures was barely 65 degrees. And it wasn't sunny.

But in a climate like that, I guess you take what you can get.

No, It's Not Any Better in Seattle

Apologies for the lapse in blogging; I had to run off for the weekend ... anyway, when we got to Seattle of course one of the first things we had to do was visit the Very First Starbucks, across from Pike Street Market:


I am sorry to report that the coffee there tastes just like the coffee at every other Starbucks I have ever been to. The best coffee in Seattle is found, not surprisingly, at local one-off shops or two- to three-store chains, where you will also find artistry like this:


Coffee at these independents is as good as I've had anywhere in the world.

Good Night, and Good Eating

Edison, Wash., between Bellingham (the main town for the San Juans region) and Seattle, was at one time best known for being the home town of Edward R. Murrow, who is still remembered there:


It's a two-stop-sign town that, according to Murrow's biographer, Joseph Persico, was in Murrow's day little more than a logging camp. It doesn't look like much more today:


But it has now, strangely, become a foodie mecca even though it's pretty much in the middle of nowhere, with a renowned bakery, a deli serving local cheeses and fine wines, and more:


A few miles north are the oyster beds of Samish Bay, along the famous Chuckanut Drive, the local equivalent of Big Sur:



Taylor's, a local shellfish farm, even offers for sale the local Olympia oyster, tiny but strongly flavored. Olympias nearly vanished decades ago due to pollution and overfishing, but dedicated locals are trying to bring them back.


Persico describes Edison as being, in the 1920s, the last frontier, close to the end of the earth, but even then not unsophisticated -- the high school that Murrow attended had a debate club and an orchestra, and the senior-year dramatic production that Murrow starred in was the operetta "The Belles of Beaujolais," not a choice many schools would make today.

But I suspect Murrow, as worldly as he became, would be surprised by what has become of his hometown today.

Beam Up the Flames

No account of a trip to the San Juan Islands would be complete without mentioning the home appliance par excellence: the remote-controlled fireplace.


Our guesthouses featured this thing (in different versions) both in Friday Harbor and Lummi Island. It's gas-powered and controlled by a remote much like that of a TV. Click, and the fire goes on. Get too hot, or get cozy under the covers and want to go to sleep, and you click it off.

In that climate, it probably comes in really, really handy.

The Willows Inn: The Main Event

I'll cut to the chase: this was one of the two or three best restaurant meals I have ever had in my life.

Which was all the more surprising, because when they handed out the menu an hour before dinner (there is only one seating, and most of the dinner guests are staying in the hotel, so they hand out the menus at happy hour), it looked disappointing. Five very plain courses.

But the chef, who trained at Copenhagen's Noma restaurant, seems to have picked up a taste for Nordic understatement.

We were served six amuses-bouche before even getting to the official first course. It went as follows:

• House-smoked salmon served in a box of still-smoking wood chips.
• Smoked black cod and homemade sauerkraut on a potato chip.
• Just-picked baby vegetables (turnip, radish, arugula) in "dirt" made from minced hazelnuts and dark beer, with an herb dip.
• Edible flowers on a piece of Melba toast.
• A local oyster topped with juice from the sauerkraut, sorrel and tapioca pearls.
• Sliced geoduck (a local type of clam) served with wild beach greens on a bed of squid ink, peas and wheat berries.

After that, it was time for the official menu:

• Butter clams (they look like quahogs, but are much sweeter and tenderer) with horseradish "snow" (water ice, it's called, where I grew up) and more beach greens. The horseradish overwhelmed the delicately flavored clams; this was the only wrong note in the meal.
  
• Spot prawns and cabbage in a mussel-flavored foam.
• Grilled local onions with rhubarb.
• King salmon with nasturtium leaves, turnips and kohlrabi (root vegetables in July? it really must be a lousy growing season) and a mustard-seed "caviar."
• Strawberries (still in season in July -- ditto) flavored with lavender and chamomile.

And finally, a flaxseed-caramel petit-four.

Wine by the glass is offered as a pairing; except for the dessert wine, it's all local (if you consider Oregon pinot noir, matched with the salmon, as local), and all terrific. Pairing of the night: a Sangiovese from Walla Walla, Wash., with the grilled onions. Who knew?

A friend asked me afterward if it was worth the two-hour flight from San Francisco. All I can say is that it was worth the six-hour flight from New York.

The Willows Inn: The Other Meals

We ate a total of five meals at the Willows Inn. I'll review The Big Dinner in the next post. But the others are worthy of mention as well, because except for one cafe there is nowhere else to eat on the island, and a $20 roundtrip ferry fare (for car and two people) if you choose to leave.

Dinner #1: We arrived on a Tuesday night, which was the chef's night off, so they served an abbreviated menu: pizzas, salads, spot prawns (a local, seasonal shellfish, much sweeter and more delicate than standard shrimp) and a steak. We had an artichoke, asparagus and prosciutto pizza; a small Greek salad; and the steak, with a side of prawns. None of the cooking was adventurous, but all the ingredients were top-notch. The only false note (aside from charging separately for bread and butter, a supremely irritating nickel-and-dime practice that seems to be catching on) was the alcohol service: the drinks on offer at the bar were margaritas, and a California red and Italian white by the glass. Margaritas don't go with this food, and a restaurant of this caliber ought to be serving local wines (they did fish one out of the cellar when we asked).

Breakfast #1: Kale-and-spinach quiche, honey-molasses-flaxseed muffins, and artisanal bacon. Excellent all around.

Lunch: They were out of the chicken breast sandwich, so we had very good but ultimately boring hamburgers.

Breakfast #2: Stewed kale, spinach and tomato on a corn cake; scrambled farm eggs (very, very deeply colored); fruit salad; a homemade palmier cookie, and more of that excellent bacon. Could have done without the fruit salad, since it consisted mainly of non-local citrus, but otherwise this was again a terrific breakfast.

So, don't worry, you'll be well fed there.

On to the main event ...

The WIllows Inn: Setting the Scene

The highlight of our trip (other than the wedding) was a stay at the Willows Inn on Lummi Island, which has one of the most talked-about new restaurants in the country at the moment.

The inn itself doesn't look like much:


It has a wonderful view, particularly at sunset, but noplace to sit and enjoy it except for some restaurant-style seating on the porch:


A couple minutes walk down the road there is a small private beach, but you don't go to Washington State for the beaches, unless you like just sitting on a log:


But there is one thing to do: inspect the inn's farm.

Yes, it's one of those places that grows most of its own food. Walk about a half-mile up the hill from the inn and you can see what you're going to have for dinner. When we were there it was a lot of kale and spinach:


There were chickens on the farm (which I didn't take a picture of, but then they didn't serve), and beehives that yielded fresh honey:


It was oddly disappointing to see that their herbs mainly grew in pots, not directly in the soil, and that they relied on greenhouses for much of their stuff.


But then again, it has been an exceptionally cold, cloudy summer in the Pacific Northwest, so I guess they just did what they had to do.

The Wild Kingdom

On the ferry ride leaving Friday Harbor we saw something that a Discovery Channel cameraman would kill for.

A bald eagle attacked a seagull in flight, swooping down on it. But something went wrong and eagle and gull tumbled into the sound.

Eagles are not water birds; unlike ducks or geese, they have neither webbed feet nor oiled feathers. This one quickly got too waterlogged to fly.

So it swam, using its wings as paddles, the gull still clutched in its talons (that's the gull peeking out from behind the eagle's tail):


At first we weren't sure if it knew what it was doing, but it soon became obvious that it was making a beeline for the nearest shore. Which it reached safely, still (as far as we could tell; it was a long way off by then) carrying the gull.

Nature never ceases to amaze.

If It's Monday, Is It Still Friday Harbor?

Our journey from Victoria brought us initially to San Juan Island, the most populated island in the group known as the San Juan Islands.

Its 8,000 people are split between two main towns. Friday Harbor, where the ferry port is, is a modern, prosperous-looking former fishing village turned tourist destination (though a bit quiet on a Monday, when we were there).



Roche Harbor, at the other end of the island, is completely different. It was founded as a company town for quarrying limestone and turning it into industrial lime, and has been carefully preserved as a resort, including the 19th-century hotel ...


... the company owner's house, now the island's finest restaurant (reputedly: we didn't go) ...


... and the old company store, still a store:


We stayed in Friday Harbor for the sake of convenience, but if I went back I would definitely try this; I don't think I've ever seen such carefully preserved and concentrated 19th-century ambience.

On the Ferry

Ferryboats are an essential part of Washington's public transportation system, crossing Puget Sound from one side to the other and touching at all the main islands.

The standard boat looks a lot like the old, car-carrying version of the Staten Island Ferry:



The inside is comfortable but not lavish. There is a small restaurant, and a bar serving local beer and wine:


Outside, the scenery is nothing short of spectacular, with the Cascades and Olympic Mountains frequently looming in the distance:


There can be long lines for car ferries in the summer, but all of them accept walk-ups. Be warned if you go, though: there is no public transportation connection at many of the terminals.

Bilingual

At the Canadian terminal of one of the ferries to Washington State, there's a helpfully bilingual sign. Not French and English, but Canadian English and American English:

Chinatown, of a Sort

One tourist sight that all the guidebooks mention in Victoria is its Chinatown, said to be the oldest in Canada.

It's tiny, and not very authentically Chinese, but it is authentically kitschy:

One if by Land, Two ...

The best part about Victoria was getting there: we flew by seaplane.

There's a small terminal in Vancouver's downtown harbor:


No TSA patdown stands between you and the plane:


The luggage goes in the pontoon, you go in the back door (the plane seats about 15 people) and away you go. The view is spectacular:


After 35 minutes, you arrive at Victoria:


And you get off and walk to your hotel.

All for about $150, which, granted, is more expensive than the $30 bus-and-ferry fare. But look at it this way: you save about three hours. And you get a thrill ride.

Worth it to me.

Land of Hope and Glory-ah

Victoria, British Columbia, is often billed as "North America's most English city."

But just like Christchurch, New Zealand, which carries the same billing down under (or did, before it was destroyed in an earthquake), it isn't really English, if by English you mean Ye Olde Englishe Towne.

Olde it is, especially by Vancouver's ultramodern standards. But you can find buildings like this in pretty much any North American city of the right age:


And no, the cheesy tourist bus doesn't make it more English.

Victoria does, however, have three touchstones of the British Empire.

A hideously overwrought legislative building ...


... a grand old hotel serving a formal High Tea ...



... and, most importantly, lovely public gardens:


But the most breathtaking thing in Victoria is something you'll never see in England:


Those are the Olympic Mountains of Washington State, perhaps 20 miles south across the Strait of Juan de Fuca, but so close they seem touchable.