2014/06 Haida Gwaii trip - Bayview |
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We thought we’d picked the wrong few days as we left Hope in heavy rain with blizzard warnings up on the Coq, but the weather dried up as we crossed the border. We wasted some time in Bellingham trying to buy a couple of Diehard batteries from Sears; we subsequently found that the Sears store had closed last year.
We were camping at a state park called Bayview. I thought this might be the Washington state version of Baywatch, perhaps with plastic macs instead of bikinis. No such luck. The park is not much more than a campground and an artificial sandy beach, good for kids but not too interesting to us.
However it’s on very shallow Padilla Bay and at low tide we could walk for miles along the beach as long as we kept on eye on the tides. Beyond the bay are the humps of the Gulf Islands and the refinery towers around Anacortes. The major life form on the beach seemed to be a mud snail, billions of them. To our surprise, it’s actually an invader from Japan, carried here decades ago with a cargo of oysters.
We took a walk along the cliff top to the Breazeale Estuarine centre aquarium, a neat little place focused on the local geology and wildlife. However, after a short peaceful period we were suddenly sharing the place with a school field trip, so we escaped 
to the overlook of the bay, where we found a fancy staircase to take us down to the beach for a somewhat squishy walk over mud and shingle. We could probably have walked back to the park that way but might have got mired in the mud.
The Sears store in nearby Burlington was still alive and we got our batteries, and Home Depot had some whisky barrels for planters in our back yard, so our shopping trip was successful eventually.