Bellingham

Last year, we took our Moms on a day trip to Whidbey Island (apparently it didn't result in a blog post). This year, we tried Bellingham. It was a lot of driving on a warm day, but no one complained. The route and the stops were all pretty familiar to me, and some were familiar to M. I suspect Claire and Alison had also been some of these places before, but not as recently.

The Colophon remains a good place for lunch in Fairhaven. Chuckanut Drive is always neat, even when it's hot and smoke is making the air quality terrible. The more distant islands and the mountains were barely visible. We drove the loop through Washington Park and then ate dinner in downtown Anacortes. I took everyone up to Cap Sante before we finally headed back south.

Bainbridge Island

M and I had both been to Bainbridge in the last two weeks for separate events, so maybe that's what prompted the idea of going over together. Like tourists.

We took the bus downtown and joined what seemed like thousands of foot passengers on the Bainbridge Ferry (so much for original ideas and less crowded destinations). But Winslow (do they still call it that?) handled the crowds well. We had lunch at Fork and Spoon, then waited in line (with what seemed to be thousands we had seen on the boat earlier) at Mora for ice cream.

We took the ferry back to Seattle and hopped on LINK to Capital Hill and Cal Anderson Park, where we watched the Seattle Cascades play Portland (Ultimate). We grabbed dinner at Dick's, but didn't stay for the Capital Hill Block Party.

Sequim

It's taken me just over a month to catchup on the Norway trip in both this blog and on Gravel Beach. But then there was the rest of July, so I'm still behind!

The second weekend of July, I headed over to Sequim on Sunday, figuring I'd get a good bike ride, then stay in Port Angeles so I'd be able to get out to Twin for a work thing on Monday morning. The plan worked well and I was even able to meet up with Randy late afternoon and we drove up to Hurricane Ridge.

I hit the Edmonds ferry early Sunday morning and was unloading my bike in Sequim by 9:00 AM. I had a big loop planned which took in pretty much all of Sequim's shoreline, but also required climbing to the top of Bell Hill (it doesn't look that big, compared to the Olympics behind it) and a chance to ride some neat sections of the Discovery Trail. Including the old Milwaukee Route Bridge over the Dungeness River.

Reykjavik

Icelandair's recent success has turned KEF into a mess. I suppose the airport authority simply can't keep pace with the airline's growth spurt.

We spent our short layover in a terminal bursting at the seams with lines of people waiting for their connecting flights. And then spent 30 minutes closed in a warm bus on the tarmac while they sorted out a problem with the plane.

Someday we'll take advantage of a stopover in Iceland and spend a few days, but maybe better to pair that with a Mediterranean vacation, not a Scandinavian one. Not to dismiss either one, but Iceland and Norway are sort of in the same category, and we'd already seen plenty of arctic landscapes.

Helsingborg

We had figured that we would spend the last night of the trip somewhere in southern Sweden, within an hour or two of the Copenhagen airport, but it was the only night of the entire trip that we hadn't booked months in advance. So while we were driving down from Oslo, M found us a place in Helsingborg, which sort of balanced our desire for time on the drive through Sweden with our need to get to the airport the next morning.

Helsingborg turned out to be a good choice, as was our hotel. It was an easy walk through the park, past the old castle tower, and down the steps to the main part of town. The view from the wall above the terrace stairs looked out across town, towards the harbor, and over the narrow northern part of the Øresund to Denmark. It would be hard to overestimate the strategic importance of this high bluff, since virtually any shipping in and out the Baltic goes by here.

The next morning, I walked back down and out to Tropical Beach (really, that's what they call it -- see the last photo), on the north side of the harbor entrance. There's always something special about the final morning of a long trip, knowing that by the end of the day, we'll be back in Seattle.

Mellbystrad

By late afternoon, I had already taken several potential side trips off my list. M had found us a place to stay in Helinsgborg and we still had a long ways to go. But the highway swung close to the coast near Laholm and I decided it was necessary to make a quick detour to the beach.

Mellbystrand was more of the archetype of a beach than the other beaches we had visited this trip. The beach itself was sandy and stretched for miles. There were beach houses in the dunes. There were kids playing ball and folks laying in the sun.

Tjørn Island

Continuing down the coast on our hastily improvised effort to avoid the Interstate (not that they call it that here), we stopped at a grocery store in Henån for lunch makings, then drove south across Orust and Tjörn Islands.

Skulptor i Pilane was another place I discovered completely by accident the night before. I didn't tell M much before we got close, although at some point I was sufficiently lost that I needed help. She noticed the great white head first - it was hard not to. Jaume Plenta has a piece at Seattle's Olympic Sculpture Park, too, but this one is much bigger. And the context is a bit different.

We ate our picnic lunch in the car, then headed off across a rocky landscape dotted with some pretty amazing sculptures. The setting is what makes this place really stand apart from many other sculpture parks - there are few, if any buildings in sight, the ocean can be seen many miles away, and the trails are laid out to make the discovery of each new sculpture a surprise.

There were older works on this landscape, too. Off to one side, and carefully identified, there were stone circles and standing stones dating back more than a thousand years. Which just enriches the context for a modern day sculpture park.

Fjällbacka

We would spend about 24 hours in Sweden on this trip - all along the southwest coast as we drove south from Oslo towards Malmo and the Øresund Bridge, which would take us back to Denmark and CPH for our flight home.

I hadn't given this stretch much thought beforehand, so my list only emerged the night before, largely from Google Maps and Google image searches, looking for interesting looking places along the shore. As usual, I had a few more ideas for stops than we had time for, but it still turned what might have been a pretty dull day on the expressway (much of it looked like upstate New York) into something a little more interesting.

We got off the E20 soon after crossing into Sweden and drove rural roads out to Fjällbacka, pictures of which had caught my eye during my reconnaissance. It was a busy summer day in a coastal town (it could have been Maine), but we found a parking space near the base of the Kungsklyften, the trail that winds its way to the top of the cliffs. M was a little put off by the bouldery trail, but we made it through (we found a different route coming back down), and the climbed several flights the stairs to the overlook. It's amazing what you can find on the internet.

Holmenkollen

We could see the ski jump up on the hill from downtown and I guess we realized that meant that it would have a great view back of the city, too. Our CityPasses were good on the T-Bane and we were hoping it might be air conditioned (nope). We took the subway out to the closest stop, then walked the rest of the way up the hill (warm, but not too far).

M convinced me to ride in the simulator (this may have been her scheme all along), which included both a ski jump (over very quickly) and a downhill race (which is more exciting and takes a lot longer). Of course, the downhill was something I could actually relate to, which made it particularly neat for me.

Ski jumps share some basic geometry and characteristics, but this still proved quite the contrast to Lillehammer. Jumps are somewhat limited by the size of the hill on which they're built - if you need more height, you have to raise the in-run higher off the ground. While this jump has a long history, this  structure was completely redone a few years ago.

Besides the simulator, there is a small museum and ticket facility at the base, and then you ride to the top on an inclined lift. As at Lillehammer, there is a great view down the in-run, but unlike at Lillehammer it wasn't set up for summer training jumps. Walking up another level provided a 360° viewing platform - with an outlook that took in all of Oslo.