Fairwell To Fidalgo Island and Washington

 We departed Fidalgo Island and Washington's northwest coast with fond, lasting memories.  From savoring Skagit Valley's most tasty homegrown fruits and vegetables to enjoying this region's variety of creative arts; we shared boatloads of good times with our dear friends and made visits to fantastic  mountain landscapes, islands and coastal areas. Summertime is over on Fidalgo Island.  We have so many unforgettable experiences but we need to move on, here are a few that were outstanding. 

The Waxwing Organic Farms produced the sweetest tomatoes.  We visited her farm often.

The Waxwing Farms offered cucumbers, carrots, beets and more!

We spent almost every Saturday morning at either the Anacortes Farmers Market or Mount Vernon's.

 We picked fresh blueberries twice.  Twenty pounds!

 Anacortes offered free music every Friday evening, we went to almost all of their shows.

 Even the town of Mount Vernon had 'Free Music Thursday', where we saw a man dancing with his cat!

 

 The artists of Anacortes expressed themselves in all sorts of unusual and creative ways, from this truck adorned with Pez candy dispensers, small toys and more....

 ....to this couple's handmade 'wood & bric-a-brac' bird houses.

 What else but fish-themed art in a town by the sea..

 And a highlight we surely did not miss, The Annual Anacortes Art Festival.

 Ronnie and I participated in a couple of short, fun hikes with our dear friends Suzanne and John.

 And made memory after memory of good times exploring the northwest coastal regions of Washington.

 Memories of our last summer excursion, a Deception Pass Jet-boat Ride with Suzanne and John.

 

 Cool temperatures and gray skies didn't hinder our good time.  This sea level view captured both 2 lane bridges over Deception Pass: The main bridge (left) and Canoe Bridge (right) connected by Pass Island in the center.  To learn more about the bridge (built in 1934) and Deception Pass, click HERE.

 

A boat passenger eye's view of the smaller Canoe Bridge.

 The view of Canoe Bridge from the outside the Pass.  Both bridges are currently undergoing restoration and repainting.

 Jet-boating under the main Deception Pass bridge, salmon fishing boats to the left.

 The larger Deception Pass Bridge viewed from outside the Pass.

The Jet-boat excursion, just an hour long, circled a couple of the outer islands.  It gave us a sense of this vast body of water.

 One quick, last look back at one of our best campsites of the summer, the Swinomish Casino RV Park.

 Zoomed in twilight view of Mt. Baker from Swinomish Casino RV Park.

Thank you Suzanne for sharing your photograph of the evening's rainbow. 

 Swinomish Casino RV Park, Summer 2021.

More later from our new location,

 Coos Bay on the Oregon coast.

Seattle's Chihuly Garden & Glass + The Space Needle

 Our day trip to Seattle was amazing, destinations were the Chihuly Gardens and Glass Exhibit and a visit to the top of the Space Needle.  Both of these attractions are close together so the purchase of combo tickets made sense.  We visited the Chihuly Glass Gardens first and ended with outstanding clear sky views from the Space Needle.  Here are some highlights from our day. 

 First we came upon "Sonic Boom", an unusual group of flower-like sculptures made of custom solar panels allowing them to generate their own electricity.  These giant flowers and their presence before this blue sky was striking.  Their own generated electricity made the flowers move through out the day and evening.

 The Chihuly Garden & Glass Exhibit is positioned adjacent to this giant, red flower sculpture display. The entrance to the Chihuly Exhibit Hall is unassuming however once you are inside, your visual senses are shocked with vividly bright colors, amazing shapes, forms and unusual compositions. 

 

 

To learn more about Dale Chihuly, his life, how he was inspired to blow glass and his outstanding art click HERE.  To learn more about the Chihuly Gardens and Glass and its inception click HERE.

Photos below are a selection of my favorites from the Chihuly Garden and Glasshouse Collection.
 

Chihuly's glass baskets, inspired by Northwest Native American and Navajo basketry.

We walked into an entire exhibit room where the ceiling was filled with glass spiral wheels.  The overlapped, backlit forms visually created new patterns and colors. It made for a ceiling that looked a lot like a kaleidoscope.

Chihuly's Persian Ceilings were accidentally created while he was experimenting with these new glass forms.

 The "Mille Fiori" collection (Italian for 'a thousand flowers') is Chihuly's version of an assembled glass flower garden.  His inspiration for this work of art was his mother's own flower garden.

 The fire bright colors were enhanced by the darkness of the exhibit room.

 Everywhere you looked was a surprise of forms, brilliant color and intriguing abstract shapes.

 Splashes of color almost overwhelmed my visual senses.  I'm sure I walked around this exhibit several times, where I discovered something new everywhere I looked!

This glass sphere was one of the most interesting things I had ever seen!  How did he manage to layer all the varied glass colored stripes, blobs of green and blue tinted lines and then make it so round?

It was like a florescent carousel of swirls, stripes, wiggles, spheres and gooey blobs all dancing together on a merry-go-round.

 Chihuly's chandeliers were a showcase of glass spirals and swirls, hung together to create a giant upside down glass pyramid.

This chandelier reminded me of a huge multi-armed starfish or an exploding sun.

 This glass sculpture reminded me of a swirling ocean water tornado, caught in its movement were sea shells, sea stars and other sea life forms.

Close up of a sea star seemingly immersed into the swirling glass.

 

 The Chihuly Glasshouse was the center piece of the Glass Garden.  Suspended from the glass ceiling, this three dimensional collage of multicolored glass wheels and flowers sparkled in the sunlight.

 Strolling into the Glass Gardens, I felt as if I had entered into an Alice In Wonderland's garden of unusual plants and mystifying glass objects.  Everywhere you looked, there were individual glass still lifes nestled into the plantings to create its own exhibit.  

A multitude of colorful organic glass forms adorned the gardens.  It appeared the glass forms were used to compliment the variety of grasses, shrubs, flowers and trees.  Or was it the unusual plant-life being adorned with the artistic glass forms?

 Even these intriguing black glass swirls seemed to fit right into this shaded area of the Gardens.

As the sidewalk trailed throughout the gardens, every curve in the pathway offered a new still life/exhibit of glass and plants. It was fun to try to see the correlation between the glass colors and forms that were grouped with different areas of vegetation.

 This tall tree of green glass leaves was very striking against this blue sky today.

 Close up view of the individual bright green glass spikes.

 These glass forms appeared like raspberry sugar candy crystals growing on a stick.

 Interestingly this was the goal of Chihuly, to integrate unusual plant-life with his glass artwork.  Here is a screenshot from the Museum's website that describes his goal.

 The presentation of this gigantic yellow and red glass sculpture, called The Sun, in front of the glasshouse was impressive.  You can see there has been little rain here, note the browning black mondo grass at its base.

 Stunning...

 Today's rich blue sky enhanced the sunny yellow glass tubes.

 

This silver Airstream camper held the blast oven for the glass blowing demonstrations. 

 Ronnie and I enjoyed a nice lunch on their patio just under that canopy of suspended glass flowers.  Looking around these art filled surroundings, I discovered protected under plexiglass, Chihuly's signature.

 As Ronnie and I exited the Chihuly Museum we headed towards our next destination, the Space Needle. Of course we had to walk by this unusual painted steal sculpture nestled into a shady park nearby the Space Needle. Here we found another pop of color with unusual and strange forms.

It looked to me like giant PVC pipes glued together, yet on a humongous scale!

 Ronnie and I made our first visit to Seattle back in the early 1990's.  For some reason we did not visit the famous Space Needle.  It is a highlight of our tour today.  The sky is clear, no smoke either so we got some great sky views of Seattle.

 

 To learn more about the history of Seattle's Space Needle and how it was constructed, click HERE.  Built in 1962, the Space Needle was the centerpiece of the World's Fair. 'The Age of Space' was the theme that year, which the city of Seattle adapted as its own inspiration for future growth.  Ronnie and I discovered the Space Needle to be one of the most interesting buildings we have encountered to date.  The entrance way displayed scenes from the construction site, pictures from news headlines of the day and important politicians and celebrities who visited the Space Needle.  As we strolled up to the elevators we knew we were in for a treat.

 

 Fun Facts about the Space Needle:  it's 605 feet high, it is an observation tower, it was designed by John Graham, it's built to last and it weighs 9550 tons.  To learn more facts about the Space Needle, click HERE.

 

The bolts holding the Space Needle to those anchoring beams are almost triple the size of Ronnie's hand.

 

 Once our elevator ride landed us at the top, we entered onto the outdoor viewing platform. We were overwhelmed with this incredible view of downtown Seattle.

 As we walked around to see different views of the city, we caught the Space Needle's shadow cast on the ground.

 Wider view of that same landscape.

 The Olympic Mountains in the background, Puget Sound and a portion of Seattle's water front in the foreground.

 Zoomed in view of the Smith Cove Waterway and Elliot Bay Marina.  The Olympic Mountains can be  seen on the horizon.

 The Space Needle underwent extensive renovations back in 2018.  Glass viewing partitions and glass seating allows for views of the ground below.  That's the 'Sonic Boom' flowers beside the round roof structure (left) and the Chihuly Gardens Museum on the right.  You can see the large yellow glass Sun garden sculpture as well (bottom, center).

The Puget Sound is behind Ronnie, he's sitting and leaning (safely) on the glass walls and seat.

Afterwards we went inside the Space Needle's interior observation rooms to get views from the lower section or rotating portion of the Space Needle.  It offered a 'glass floor view' of the ground below.  The floor slowly revolved showing us a 360 degree of Seattle and the ground below.  We also observed the elevator as it transported tourists up and down the center support column.

Our view of 2 of the 3 Space Needle support legs as seen through the revolving glass floor.  The Space Needle's concrete foundation is 30 feet deep.

That's our shoes.  The floor rotated at a slow speed using a 1.5 horse powered motor.

 As the glass floor slowly passed over individual bottom sections of the viewing platform, we could get a peek at some of the mechanical gears that made the floor move.

I was able to capture Chihuly's tall, green glass tree, the Glasshouse and the yellow glass Sun as the floor rotated us over it.  The Sun sculpture can be seen in between my shoes.

 This day was clear enough (in spite of the smoke from nearby wildfires) to see Mt. Rainer in Seattle's distant horizon.

 We will recall this day filled with nice memories for a long time.

 This zoomed in underside view of the Space Needle captures both the outside top viewing platform and lower interior viewing room.  You can see the outside glass walls of the top viewing platform.  The interior rotating room can be seen as the darker layer just on the outside of the 4 support arms.

And no crowds today.

 More later from Anacortes and Fidalgo Island.