It’s November 2015 and we are here in Port Townsend, WA on our fifteenth home exchange. Our home away from home this time is a cosy cottage located in the quiet Uptown neighbourhood which is just a short walk up the hill from downtown….a perfect base to enjoy all that PT has to offer.
The town is situated on the NE tip of the Olympic peninsula and surrounded on three sides by the waters of Puget Sound with views of the Cascade and Olympic ranges. It’s a stunning location.
The historic downtown area is small (the population of the town is less than 10,000) and very charming. The streets are lined with low-rise stone and brick buildings, interesting small shops and inviting coffee shops and restaurants. It’s a great place to meander.
Uptown is located on the bluff above downtown (created originally so that the more genteel members of society didn’t have to mix with the riffraff along the waterfront below!). It has it’s own small commercial centre and attractive residential streets where there are numerous beautifully-preserved Victorian buildings, including an impressive post office, an old-fashioned movie theatre, a well-stocked food market which is reputedly the oldest in WA, and many lovely private homes.
Besides being a great place to walk around, PT is also a bicycle-friendly community. We enjoyed an afternoon cycling the outskirts of town, visiting the magnificent Fort Worden State Park and stopping off at various viewpoints along the way.
As we were here for American Thanksgiving we had hoped to enjoy a traditional turkey dinner without actually cooking one. We saw that the 7 Cedar Casino were advertising a turkey buffet so we jumped in the car and headed out there but despite arriving early (4:30) there was a 3-4 hours wait! We were too hungry for that long a wait so we missed out on the turkey but it wasn’t a completely wasted journey…it was fun to do something completely different (casinos aren’t our usual hangout) and their Christmas light display was spectacular.
Besides PT, there are many reasons to visit the Olympic Peninsula: other interesting small towns, festivals, wineries, craft breweries, art and craft markets, farms, orchards, hot springs, sand spits, the magnificent Olympic National Park and the long distance Olympic Discovery Trail. On our way home we decided to squeeze in a cycle ride along a section of the trail while waiting for the ferry at Port Angeles….it was another clear day (the fourth in a row which was a bit of a miracle at this time of the year) but cold and very frosty which made it a precarious ride!
One of the definite advantages of living where we do (Victoria, BC) is the accessibility of so many wonderful places to visit. And Port Townsend is definitely one of them. It was named one of the “Top 10 Coolest Small Towns in America” by Budget Travel, FOX News, NBC News and Yahoo Travel. We completely agree!
Cosmopolitana 