Rachael and I have been in Bellingham before.  It's one of the places we hid out in when we were hopping from one month-long base to another during the Covid year.  We stayed in an Airbnb in the north end of town and had an embarrassingly good time exploring the region while so many others were cooped up quarantined at home or dealing with health crises.  We still have conflicting feelings about that year that we look back on now as one of the best years we've spent together. 

And we were here back in 2019 on our ride home to Portland from Victoria.  We were only here for two nights, staying with our friends Jamie and Seong near Fairhaven.  And there was a third time I nearly forgotten about, a brief break in 2017 when we took the train to Seattle and biked from there up to Bellingham on a four day escape to celebrate our 29th wedding anniversary before catching the train home at the end.

So Rachael and I have quite a history here.  It's a place we love and could imagine settling some day.

For me personally though, probably the most significant time I was here was at another crucial point in my life, when CJ and I moved here after I got out of the army.  I've made references to this time of our lives over a half century ago, but never in any real detail.  It fills in a large gap in my life story, pertains to bicycles, and will give context to the month ahead; so this is as natural a time as any to set something down.  I'll stop here for now but I plan to come back with a short series of posts because there's a lot of story to tell and too much to cram into one chunk.