Port Townsend

On our way to Victoria, BC, we stopped in Port Townsend.  After visiting the local lighthouse and old World War II fort, we made our way to the old downtown for dinner.   This required navigating around a music festival.  We didn't have to be anywhere, really; the ferry left from Port Angeles early the next day, so all we had to do was eat and then drive to our hotel room in Sequim WA (where they were about a third of the price of the ones in Port Angeles).  

We found a restaurant called "Siren"; I wound up ordering fish and chips, I forget what Mark and Nancy ordered, but the food was good.  The most amusing thing about the restaurant was that all of the tables on the outside balcony were swathed in large, hexagonal umbrellas:  this was to protect them from seagull poop.  

Afterward, we wandered into a jewelry shop.  The shop owner commented that she thought we knew each other from somewhere; I'd have to agree, but we didn't know where.  She was a Eugene Country Faire regular, so maybe that was it.  

That was the funny thing about Port Townsend, I kept seeing people who looked vaguely familiar—perhaps it was a Small, Liberal Town in the Pacific Northwest Filled with Middle Class White People Thing.   Mark purchased a sparkly orange/red vest from Sri Lanka.

The old part of Port Townsend had many buildings from the later part of the 1800's, so there were lots of cool fiddly-bits on the buildings.  I like how buildings from this era have the mark of their craftsmen upon them in the column capitals or in the keystones of arches or the weaving patterns set into brick.  There weren't any gargoyles or grotesques that I could find, which was too bad, but there was still a rich vocabulary of place there.   (Eugene, alas, lost a lot of its distinctive Victorian architecture during a period of urban renewal in the 1980's.)  

What caught my eye architecturally were the sandstone capitals from the old city hall:  they reminded me of some similar capitals in New York City, and I wondered how much of the similarity was because they were carved by the same artisan or if there was a common booklet of carvings that masons in the late 1800's used.  

Looking back at my old photos (see the dragon, below), I see that the carvings are different enough that they probably aren't the same craftsman... but maybe they're from the same workshop?  I don't know; the similarities are there, but they were more prominent in my memory than they are in the photos.