Recently we took a family vacation to Whidbey Island. Despite being an island, you can drive there (via Deception Pass Bridge), and it's not that long of a drive actually -- just over an hour from our house.
We spent kind of a long weekend at a rented house, with honestly the intention of not doing too much; life has been pretty stressful lately and a jam-packed vacation was just not what I was looking for. We have quite a few pictures, so I'm going to break this up into two posts -- next time I will post pics from Fort Casey.
Pacific Northwest Naval Air Museum
Our first stop was the PBY museum in Oak Habor; this is a pretty small museum but with lots of information. It was interesting to read about the development of the naval air station and the transition of community from primarily agriculture to supporting the military base. In its heyday, the main plane that flew out of the air station was the PBY-5A Catalina seaplane, so a significant amount of the museum is dedicated to it.
One of the cool things they have is a nose gun turret that you can climb into:
Island County Historical Museum
One of the things I appreciate about this museum is that it's not just history since European people arrived on the scene -- there was quite a large exhibit that talked about the native peoples and their traditional lifestyle.
The museum houses this piece of art called "Four Seasons of Water", which is a 15-foot long beaded canvas showing nature scenes. It took the artist 13 years to complete and contains over 2 million seed beads -- the effect of this is just incredible... so I took a lot of pictures.
The artist also has a video showing the rotating effect up on Youtube.
