Travel Diary: Bellingham, WA

As regular readers will be aware, I occasionally write a travel diary here, on condition that the trip is in some way work connected. The current journey is to Bellingham in Washington state, right up in the north-western bit of the United States, almost as far from North Carolina but still within the States as you can get. The occasion is a lecture I am giving tomorrow in the Logos Lecture Series. Logos Bible Software is based up here in Bellingham, and I am looking forward to meeting some of the folk and seeing the heart of operations. There is a little biblioblogging synergy happening here since Logos have their own blog, Logos Bible Software Blog, and so too does Rick Brannan of Ricoblog, though I expect him to be on paternity duty at the moment since he is now a proud father.

It was the strangest feeling to make our journey up here. It took us almost as long as it takes us to get to England, and there are big timezone adjustments too (from Eastern Time to Pacific Time), and yet here we are, after all those hours, still in America. It was one of those experiences that brings home just how enormous the USA is. We got up at 3.25am, having had a late night too, after packing, cleaning and sorting things out (and finding just enough time to watch last night's fabulous episode of Doctor Who, written by Steven Moffatt, called Blink). Our flight from Raleigh-Durham was at 6.05am; we got into Atlanta at 7.30, set off from there at 9.30 for Seattle, arriving at 12pm (3pm EST). It was AirTran, and so no TV or food, and I slept the entire way, with just a few minutes of Horbury's Messianism and the Cult of Christ before drifting off each time.

It is a pleasure on this occasion not to be travelling alone this time, and the kids are able to come too, having finished school last Thursday. We hired a car in Seattle, and drove the 98 miles or so to Bellingham, stopping off for a nice Italian on the way. Seattle looks like a great city and we return there for a little bit of holiday on Tuesday. I put on the car in the radio but couldn't find Frasier Crane's show. What we saw of the State, though, looked very nice, with as many trees as where we live in NC, but a lot more mountains.