Map of the Ski to Sea relay race route, currently underway here in #BellinghamWA. Easily the biggest event of the year. Useful map whether you’re a fan or just trying to avoid the crowds!
So, super fancy, exclusive restaurant catering to wealthy diners rips off its customers, harasses and steals from its employees, then washes its hands by gifting real estate to a proselytizing Christian organization that provides housing and meals to people who have been pushed down, abused, and displaced by the kinds of people who endure a waitlist of up to year, jet to a dining destination, and pay $500 for dinner. Can’t help but think this illustrates the capitalism circle of life.
The Willows Inn, a super fancy, fine-dining, farm-to-table, restaurant on a remote island near Bellingham, WA, that the New York Times in 2011 labeled "one of 10 Restaurants Worth a Plane Ride,” had a precipitous fall from grace in 2022. Now, the property is selling, and the proceeds will benefit Lighthouse Mission Ministries, a shelter for the unhoused.
In its heyday, as it topped the culinary world's best restaurant lists, fraud and abuse festered behind the scenes.
Employees alleged a nightmare environment of sexual harassment, bullying, misogyny, and racism.
The Willows Inn paid $1.37 million to settle a class-action lawsuit for wage theft.
Turns out, the restaurant's "farm-to-table" claims also fell short. Some of the supposed locally sourced and foraged food actually came from random grocery stores and even Costco. At $500 a plate, that’s not what you bargained for.
To make amends, the former owners, Tim and Marcia McEvoy, donated the property to Bellingham’s Lighthouse Mission, a Christian organization that provides shelter and services to the unhoused (and only hires Christians). The property, reportedly worth about $2.4 million, has accepted an offer and is expected to change hands soon.
'The spray paint said simply: “45,000+”, which was the city’s population at the time (specifically 45,794 in the 1980 census). I have no idea why anyone would graffiti such a thing on a wall downtown, with no other commentary, but to me as a nerdy child with a growing fascination for maps and almanacs, it seemed like a perfectly normal thing to see written on a wall. I kind of miss it!'
New video from prolific High Speed Rail Youtuber "Lucid Stew" about Cascadia High Speed rail, which sketches out the details of a new hypothetical route between Eugene and Vancouver, BC. What do you think of this route?
This is a big deal for bikes in Bellingham! We have a new protected bike lane on Holly Street, the most important thoroughfare through downtown, and previously a big gap in our cycling network. Very excited to use this new route!
It's the morning rush hour in Downtown Bellingham and, clearly, the newly installed bike lane on Holly Street is leading to hell-in-a-handbasket traffic conditions for area motorists who are now denied one of three travel lanes!
I dug into my archives and found this map I made of 2016 election results aggregated by the (then) new Whatcom County council districts introduced in 2017. Gives a rough sense of the political alignment in our small county here in the northwest corner of Washington State.
I need to update this map with new data from all the elections since 2016, obviously, but it's a hassle to work with the precinct level results. Soon.
Hey people in Washington State, have you written to WSDOT to ask them to revise their Amtrak Cascades long term plans to include faster travel times? Comments close on April 18, so please write now!
@alan I wrote and just submitted an approximately 1,700-word assessment of the Amtrak Cascades Service Development Plan Preliminary Alternatives, specifically on Bellingham and Whatcom County impacts.
@alan Lolz. ... Beyond the medicore top speeds others have been stressing, for Bellingham and Whatcom County, I worry that a lack of rail corridor improvements in British Columbia will continue to hamper the reliability of southbound trains south of the U.S.-Canada border, despite the increased number of roundtrips and limited track improvements at Custer, Ferndale, South Bellingham and the BNSF Delta Yard in Everett. ...
@alan While I realize expanding rail capacity between Ballard and Everett and Bellingham and Blanchard is challenging due to topography, the lack of track improvements across the Skagit Valley, where trains could hit top allowable speeds, is disappointing. That means Bellingham gets stuck with sluggish service on slow tracks.
@alan Also, the Seattle-Vancouver, B.C. corridor is hamstrung by the slow, frustrating single-track chokepoint crossing the Snohomish River Delta near Everett, but the WSDOT Amtrak Cascades Service Development Plan doesn't address that.
@alan For Bellingham and Whatcom County, Preliminary Alternative A is mediocre with 2 train roundtrips replacing the 2 existing bus connections. The trip frequency to/from Bellingham and Seattle is, essentially, a wash.
Alternative B is a bit better with 5 roundtrips serving Bellingham-Seattle. Alternatives C & D are a bit better with 6 roundtrips serving Bellingham-Seattle.
@alan And for Bellingham, Alternative E isn't much of an improvement on Alternatives C & D. Instead of all trains starting/ending in Vancouver, B.C. as envisioned with Alternative E, I think it's in Bellingham's interest to have a few train trips start/end here, so they avoid some of the previously mentioned rail corridor issues in Canada, particularly at the Fraser River Bridge. We need more reliable southbound trains!
Reading this Cascadia Daily News article about the general lack of tech startup infrastructure in and around Bellingham makes me think: If Cascadia High Speed Rail were already developed (or in the very least, better Amtrak Cascades service between Seattle and Vancouver, B.C. existed), Bellingham would be especially well connected to those nearby tech orbits.
This will be the third year that I have created a pretty open-facing coffee event called the Bellingham Coffee Crawl. Y'all are welcome to join - check out the website linked.
'Lake of Glass' prints are available from my photography store. This is one of the first images in this personal project that I began around #bellingham in 2023. This project started out as a combination of two of my favorite things in life: photography and biking. It turned into something so much more and I'm very proud of this ongoing project.
Tomorrow in #BellinghamWA, the #WhatcomCounty Historical Society has a presentation about the 1880’s Bellingham Bay and British Columbia Railroad.
This might sound like it's only of interest to the nerdiest of train nerds. BUT HEAR ME OUT! The old track bed of this railroad still exists in places, and is part of the long-proposed Nooksack Loop Trail & the Bay to Baker Trail. We need to convert more old railroads to non-motorized trails!