Larrabee State Park

With an early Monday morning meetup with inspectors on our [hopefully] new sailboat, we chose to camp as close to Bellingham as possible. Twenty minutes to the south is Larrabee State Park and was our only real option other than a RV resort (ew). So Larrabee it was. The campground was nearly full when we arrived on Saturday (what happened to nomad liberation day?) but by noon on Sunday only a few campers remained. Even with the quite active train tracks nearby, it was the road right outside the campground that was the worst part of it. Take a twisty road and place it with a view of some water, and it attracts all the loud motorcyclists and fart-pipe import cars you can imagine. None of those morons can resist incessantly mashing the throttle every ten seconds, making for a loud campground.

With a single day left to wait before the big day of sailboat inspections and sea-trials, we set out to keep our minds and bodies distracted to pass the time. A trail started right outside the campground and winded two miles up the hillside to Fragrance Lake. Kerri and i haven’t been hiking a whole lot recently, so the thought of a four mile trek seemed like torture, but we decided to go for it anyway. The key piece of info we left out of the decision making process was the elevation gain that would take place during those miles – 900+ feet. It was tiring, and we did are fair share of sweating and complaining, but in short order we arrived at the lake, where we snapped a quick photo and turned around to return to Big Blue for a scheduled appointment.

That appointment was a gentleman coming out to buy the inflatable kayak we have been carrying around since Baja – barely used. We had decided to get rid of it a month or so back, especially as we set our sights on a sailboat. With it gone we clear up a huge space in the van as well as drop another 60 pounds of weight off the greatly overloaded and old Big Blue.