Maritime Fest: Sunday Trips are back

We started off on our drive to Seattle. The plan was to only use back roads. We took a path by the water and spotted big sign advertising the Maritime Fest. It was quickly decided that we must have stumbled upon it for a reason, so we found the last free parking spot and headed toward the festival. We passed stands selling funnel cakes and chocolate covered frozen bananas. We came upon a dock jumping competition for dogs and watched that for a brief time. From there we headed down the line of tents grabbing pamphlets for a historical house tour from the historical society and various other things. We stopped at the Tall Ships Festival tent and Dave got information at volunteering there this summer from the 3rd to the 7th of July and I talked about seeing the Tall Ships Festival this summer in Ostend, Belgium, which was an amazing experience.

Dave heard someone talking about free tickets to a Port tour, so we got some and hopped on the boat just before it left. We went through all the channels of the port and watched a crane demonstration. I happened to be standing out on the upper deck next to the Port Commissioner and we talked for a while about the plans for the port in the future. In the years to come it is expected to jump from handling 2.1 million TEUs, cargo containers, to 8 million. If you lined that many TEUs up end to end, that would go from the port to the Washington Monument and back a total of four times. He also recommended some towns for us to explore that are sort of like Port Townsend. He suggested we check out Liberty and Monte Cristo, two late 1800’s mining ghost towns that have some pretty spectacular hikes by them from what I’ve found so far. But from what I found they sounded very deserted.

As we left I helped an elderly woman carry her walker and she told me how to pick mushrooms correctly. You’re supposed to cut them just below the soil level so they grow back again the following year. Very useful information if you can differentiate the edible from the deadly mushrooms, which I can’t.

We walked around past a lot of tents not related to the Maritime theme in the least (like Wells Fargo and a tent selling glass dragons). We grabbed some cheep t-shirts from last years festival and left feeling satisfied after another great Sunday Trip.