More Native American lingo

Today we travel to the Lavender Capitol of the World; Sequim, Washington, pronounced “squim”. With the driest climate in the state this small hamlet is popular with the retired set and is perfect for growing that purple flower that is supposed to calm and quiet our spirit. It is also home to some very spendy restaurants such as the Oak Table, where you can spend a very long time waiting for service before going to the Black Bear restaurant for a very good and reasonably priced meal, waaah!

Several Lavender farms surround the area but our favorite is “Purple Haze”, yes there is a portrait of Jimmy Hendrix hanging on the wall. Besides being named after one of my favorite songs, this picturesque little farm looks like a Monet painting. It also has an area housing “Bob and Shirley”, a resplendent peacock and plain peahen. There were also a few roosters that Bob was busy shooing away from Shirley, she had just given birth to six little chicks that were busy hiding under Mama. Bob’s awesome display of feathers was being used as a fence against those rascally chickens and would quiver and make a noise like a buzz saw.

Sunnyside Farmers Market is a delight to all your senses with a nursery as part of the open air grocery store, with enough “Organically” grown items here keep any old hippie happy. There are many flower children “flower grandparents”? I’ll pass on the free love stuff. Disgusting!  

Busy, busy, busy!

Please, click on the picture for the whole article. Wow, we just went thru seven hours of heavy duty thunder, lightning and rain! Other than that, the weather here has been sunny and warm (70 degrees).
This area has several places to eat, as you know I am a total foodie. Yesterday we went to a French Restaurant named "Sweet Laurette's"; We had a pork tenderloin, cheese, mushroom sandwich on cranberry bread, and a cheese, egg, ham sandwich called Croque Madame; to die for!

We revisited the sail loft where they make, what else, planetarium cloth? They were cutting black-out cloth for use on the round domed ceiling of a planetarium. They use a table that is about 50 feet long, it has holes in it which are connected to a vacuum; this holds the material absolutely flat. Tracks on either side of the table are what carries a computer assisted cutting machine that glides along cutting several patterns at the same time, and doing so precisely. And, of coarse, they were also making a spinnaker, which is the large colorful sail seen on the front of sailboats. This one was a chocolate brown, they only last about seven years. Cost? $5,000! I guess I will no longer grouse about spending $2,000 for the motor home tires every seven years.

From the sail loft we walked down to the harbor and went aboard the "Hawaiian Chieftain", classified as a Ketch, this square master was over one hundred years old and still very much in operation.