For our lunch break today we decided to do a little island exploring. First we drove back up to Oak Harbor and picked up some fresh Penn Cove mussels for dinner tonight (and some salmon for dinner tomorrow night), and a few clams I'll toss in with the mussels for variety.
Then we checked out the other state park I researched online (Fort Ebey State Park) to see how it would be to stay there. It's wooded, on a bluff but with no view spots, but very pretty. Sites looked like they had water/electric, and were large and pretty and private. We both had 3 bars of Edge from AT&T. There's a beach, and a gun battery, and lots of trails. Looks good. I'd stay there. 🙂
We also went to check out the Lavender Wind Farm (gorgeous, lots of beautiful, fragrant lavender, chickens, cool gifty things in the gift shop, including lavender cheddar and fresh eggs). Cyrus (whose blog is here), commented on one of our recent posts and told us about a very cool organization called Harvest Hosts. For $35 bucks a year you can stay overnight at one of many, many participating farms and wineries (as long as you're self-contained and don't require hookups) with no nightly fee. The stay limit is usually 24 hours unless you buy a bunch of wine/produce/eggs and maybe help out a little on the farm and then ask nicely if you can stay longer, please pretty please. Rockin' great idea, isn't it? These are the kinds of places we like to visit anyway, so I plan to be using this frequently. Anyway, the lavender farm looked lovely…the RV parking spot may even have a slight water view…couldn't tell.
After the lavender farm we headed south to go check out the town of Langley. Adorable little town! (Thanks Kathy H. for the tip!)
We returned to camp, worked a bit more, then took the Hobie out for an evening sail. Well guess what? We ended up directly under the pattern for another round of F18 touch-n-goes. Sailing. In nature.
Remember, this was taken with my iPhone. Which makes things looks way further away than they really were.
We saw about 6 harbor seals and one porpoise. Here's where we went:
Now, I'm going to cook up some mussels in the classic French, steamed with garlic, butter, white wine method, probably with some garlic bread and salad.
Langley is our town. It’s funny to think about it again from the perspective of a visitor. I was down there today too, picking up Nate from preschool and doing a few errands. Glad you liked it!
Beautiful description; thank you for the good info on Harvest Hosts, and you really made me hungry! lol.