Dad's commute to work

Since we're on the subject (see Heather's post below), I have to brag up the drive I take to work. In the darkest depths of Winter it's mostly done at night (except when coming home from night shift), but now that the solstice has passed, things will be getting better for the next six months! Probably my all time favorite commute was when I worked on Cocos Island in Guam.

We'd take a launch from Merizo at the South end of the island of Guam.

The boat would cross Cocos Lagoon...

...the view from sea level...

...and end up at Cocos Island....

Doing it in style was the route a couple of colleagues of mine managed. They rented a waterfront house in Merizo (a working stiff could afford to do that back in the day) and rode their windsurfers to work!

The boat that the employees took at the time was a small, open aluminum skiff, but I think that brought you a little closer to the elements and made the ride more gratifying. It was especially moving at night; the stars hung in the sky over you like an inverted bowl of cosmic proportions as if the surface you were perched on was the top of a ball and the sky above draped down to below the horizontal. Off on the horizon thunderheads would illuminate periodically from lightning flashes within them.

Absolutely surreal.

Perhaps it's the temperate winter or just plain nostalgia, but I really miss the place now.

Coming back to the subject at hand, the commute from Bellingham to the Keystone ferry terminal is one of the more scenic drives you can take.

I'm not the only one who thinks so, apparently.

Here's a few pix I've grabbed on the rare days when I had the foresight to bring a camera.

I like old barns. This is one of my favorites. It has "Summer in the Northwest" written all over it.





The Lucky Dumpster, my all time favorite name for a thrift shop, in the town of Edison Station (known locally as simply "Edison").





This picture conveys to me the sense of crossing the threshold, from land to sea. I look at this one and see the Olympics fading off into the distance on the left and in the center of the image, the water connects to the sky without any interruption. I get the same feeling from looking at this that I used to get when the ship I was on was leaving the last coastal port and starting off on the crossing.