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Time travel day trip

Today was just begging for a Sunday drive, Mother’s Day crowds be darned, so the Tailor and I moseyed up to another of my favorite haunts: Port Townsend.

Port Townsend is located on the northeastern tip of the Olympic Peninsula (close on a map to but in reality very far from Cape Flattery) and guards Admiralty Inlet, where Puget Sound ends and the Straits of Juan de Fuca begin. It’s practically within shouting distance of Canada on one side (you can just make out the line of Vancouver Island along the horizon here), and lava-spewing range of Mt. Baker on another.

These days it’s a sleepy, semi-tourist town (thankfully it’s remote enough that it’s often possible to go without being mobbed by teeming hordes), home to both artists and seagulls, but at one time this place was hoppin’.

Its location made it an ideal military, trade, and shipping hub; Port Townsend was a prosperous and well-established seaport by the 1870s—nearly twenty years before Washington became a state. The town’s early boom afforded it a lavish and significant array of Victorian architecture—and once shipping fell out of favor there, its failure to develop a replacement industry (see above: remote) proved to be an accidental blessing of historical preservation. As a result, Port Townsend has an astonishing collection of Victorian houses and commercial buildings, and is one of only three seaports on the National Register of Historic Places.

Beyond the architecture (which, don’t get me wrong, is the stuff of my dreams), what I love about this place is how lived-in it feels. It’s not a stage set, or an overgrown museum, like so many historic towns I’ve seen. Port Townsend feels comfortable, inviting, and absolutely real.

It reminds me of places like Durango, Colorado; Stillwater, Minnesota; Salem, Massachusetts—all places that have taken up permanent residency in my heart. Places with real, breathing history and still-current ordinary life.

And I’m not even biased by the New England-authentic jimmies-coated ice cream cone I stumbled upon today—though the pitch-perfect nostalgia of my favorite childhood treat favorite-thing-in-the-whole-wide-world (which really can’t be found west of the Hudson, at least not completely slathered like this, and for which I nevertheless search tirelessly) made me happier than I can say.

Ahem. I digress. Big time. Port Townsend has one more beauty up its sleeve—although as it’s not on the beaten path, it’s easy to miss. The tippy-tip of the town’s little peninsula is occupied by Fort Worden, formerly an army installation (1890s to 1953) and now a state park. The gub’mint knew what it was doing with this one—they picked one of the loveliest and most strategically important chunks of real estate in the Pacific Northwest. I’m sure glad it belongs to all of us now—I think it’s better for flying kites than cannonballs anyway.

Fort Worden’s best feature, and the perfect climax to a day in Port Townsend, is Point Wilson Light, the tallest lighthouse on the Sound. This is one of my favorite spots to sit and watch the world go by, and today’s date reminded me that while we didn’t get to it on her recent visit, this is one spot that I think my mum would love, too.

Happy Mother’s Day, everyone! (And happy birthday, Dad!)