Ballard and Fremont

Today's peregrination took me to the Sunday Farmers' Market at Ballard.  I arrived just as the market opened and had my pick of the produce - fresh baby lettuces, arugula and rose-pink radishes, blue oyster mushrooms, a bunch of lilacs, bluebells and apricot tulips, organic eggs, beef and bacon and a jar of wildflower honey. Is your mouth watering yet?   There were some other intriguing goods and services on offer including a stall that sold edible wild plants including lady fern fiddleheads, seabean (a kind of very salty samphire), morels and nettle leaves, and a poetry stall where who name the topic and the price and they conjure up a poem and type it out for you on a very old fashioned typewriter while you wait.  There were all kinds of beverages on offer from kombucha to hot cider toddy; I settled for a lavender latte with green tea and black sesame shortbread cookies. Entertainment was provided by numerous buskers, most of them on guitar but including two enterprising young boys on penny whistle and concertina.  And there were dogs everywhere. Seattle famously has more dogs than children per family.

After enjoying the delights of Ballard I hopped aboard a bus back to Fremont, the neighboring community whose motto is 'De libertas quirkas' or 'Freedom to be peculiar'. The Ship Canal borders both Ballard and Fremont to the south, and Fremont has a pretty orange painted swing bridge across the canal that gives right of way to water traffic so opens and closes frequently.

Fremont has a number of art installations including a huge concrete troll lurking beneath a road bridge, a controversial and massive Bulgarian bronze statue of Lenin and a couple of aluminum statues of people waiting for (or running for) a tram. There's also a rocket ship (I think a repurposed Boeing  aircraft turned on end).

I took one of the Seattle stairway walks from the book of the same name in Fremont. I have to say it was a bit masochistic as the suggested route perversely wound back and forth, up and down the hill, with seemingly no other purpose than making the walker climb as many steps as possible just for the fun of it.  The views from the top across the Ship Canal to the distant Olympic mountains were admittedly spectacular as it was such a clear day, but my foot was hurting and my flowers were starting to droop by the time I got home.