During our 3 day visit, we also drove over to the town of Coupeville, which sits on Penn Cove where the famous Penn Cove mussels are harvested.  They had a small sailing regatta on Saturday, which featured some local farmers and artists selling their wares, two old wooden sailing ships that you could tour and some local singers, the Shifty Sailors.  The weather was gorgeous this day as well.

I ended up bringing home some local honey and some strawberry-rhubarb jam made by a local farmer, that is delicious.  I already had some this morning on my toast!

We also had an amazing lunch at the cutest restaurant, The Oystercatcher.  We ended up ordering raw oysters, broiled oysters with a bacon jam and Steve had their massive cheeseburger while I went a little lighter with their grilled halibut with buttermilk-dill sauce and fresh greens.  The food was incredible – I highly recommend this restaurant if you are in the area.  Unfortunately the white win gave me bad heartburn by the end of the meal so that put a damper on my lunch but it went away not long after.  White wine can sometimes give me terrible heartburn and I forgot my Zantac this trip!

We wandered the town a bit, which isn’t much (really just one main street with a few shops) but reminded me of an old Cape Cod village.  We also popped into a local wine store and did a tasting of a few Washington State wines.  The wine regions are in the Southern part of the state, with the best known being the Columbia River Valley and Walla Walla Valley.  We sampled some nice syrahs and a lovely white albarino.

We ended the day by enjoying some more wine on our little boat house and listened to music and watched the sunset.  We thoroughly enjoyed this trip and had great weather as well.  It was sunny with highs around 65 to 67 degrees during the day and dipping into the low 50s at night.  We look forward to visiting again sometime soon and had such a great time seeing our friend and catching up.  She was kind enough to be a tour guide for us this trip as well.  Such a lovely visit!

Steve and I became instant fans of Washington State and this area – it’s gorgeous!