Seattle, Bellingham, La Conner, Seattle Day 3, March 30

Day 3: Seattle, Bellingham, La Conner, Seattle

Weather: Intermittent rain, with temps dropping into the 40s at night

Pics: DB’s feet all clean and pretty, Alexis breakfast spot, Japanese winners (no pics of pieces allowed), Serra, Maya Lin, Bellingham downtown and trash bin, Staple and Fancy

Breakfast at the hotel: dutch baby (okay on outer rim, way too doughy on inside) for THB and scrambled eggs and toast for DB, one cold coffee, $30 minus a daily food credit of $25 for a total of $5

Today we take a ride…quite a ride, an hour and a half all the to Bellingham, to see a Japanese women’s traveling show (one we could of seen in Sacramento!) at WWU (Western Washington University). The show is great, we have a piece by Mishima (sorry, no pics of the work allowed) and the director is very helpful, even giving us access to their chair collection in the room behind her office (see pic of chair by Maya Lin). WWU also has a great outdoor sculpture collection (see pic of Serra right outside the gallery).

Lunch at Bayou: fried chicken sandwaich (THB, not near as good as Bake Sail Betty), pulled chicken sandwich, Caesar salad, pulled pork sandwich, sweet potato fries, iced tea, pepsi, Arnold Palmer, $50.

Then we visit the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham to see a traveling Israeli women’s ceramics show. To THB’s aesthetic, the Japanese women shut out the Israelis by a score of 17-0. The others do not see it that way…ah, the joys of art.

A long drive back towards Seattle to the Museum of Northwest Art in La Conner to see the show of tulipierres (tulip vases) ceramics show…another winner (and way better than the Israeli women, who have been eliminated, having lost twice in the double elimination round robin). Lots of very interesting pieces; unfortunately, the 750 tulips used in the opening last Saturday have dwindled down to about 20, so we have to use our imagination (DB suggests to the docent that they take the pics from the opening and display them alongside the exhibit, a great idea!).

Another almost two hour drive to get back to Seattle (we get caught in Friday rush hour) to dinner at Staple and Fancy, another restaurant we ate at last year. Just as good, and just as much food: we order the $45/person set meal for the table, along with 3 glasses of white wine, a bottle of malbec and two coffees. $310 total

Here’s what we had: smoked whitefish crostini, raw squid salad with chickpeas, fried oysters, buffalo mozzarella and shallots, prosciutto and olive oil (aka speck), escalar ceviche, grilled radicchio salad, gnocchi and lamb ragu (shades of Cantinetta two nights ago), tagliatelle with meat, beef tenderloin with more grilled radicchio and onion, branzino, cheesecake (not THB’s fave) and apple and rosemary tart with apple jack ice cream.

Lastly, J is right: Buffalo mozzarella (Italian: mozzarella di bufala) is a mozzarella made from the milk of the domestic water buffalo. THB has only one thing to say: that’s pure buffaloploppen.