Whether you’re looking to have a few chickens in your backyard or are planning to start a full-fledged farm on your Pacific Northwest property, you first need to worry about the abundance of predators in this region. The larger ones are easy to spot and repel — it is the smaller ones that cause the …
Even though we’ve gone on several whale and dolphin-watching trips my six-year-old daughter has never seen a whale. We have literally seen whales in the Puget Sound and around the San Juan Islands dozens of times but she is always “too busy” doing something else when one breaches. If you’re not like my six-year-old, going …
Whether you want to swim on a coastal beach in a Pacific Northwestern state or are deliberately looking to harvest sharks, you need to know if these fish live in the Pacific Northwest. Pacific Northwesterners have stories of witnessing majestic sharks on boating trips, but does that mean you put your life at risk when …
If you’re in Seattle and looking for fine dining, you may find that the options seem rather limited (not as limited as Portland, but still…) While Seattle is known for its food scene, it’s not necessarily the luxury end of the spectrum that it caters to. Rather, the Seattle food scene is known for small, …
Hey, what’s the capital of Washington? I’ve been doing pub quizzes and bar trivia in different cities for years now and every single time the question is asked, someone says, “Oh, I know this one! It’s Seattle, right?” Is Seattle the capital of Washington? This may surprise a lot of people, but no, Seattle is …
The area of Ocean Shores is Washington’s best-kept secret. At least, it is if you believe their advertising. However, if you’re a Seattle resident that’s looking for the nearest bit of beach it soon becomes apparent that everyone and their dogs are probably headed to Ocean Shores at the same time you are. Despite the …
Every time I take a place to somewhere I’ve never been before, one of the first things I do is to find out whether or not I can drink their tap water. Not that I prefer tap water over bottled or purified, of course, but when it’s 3 AM at the hotel and I can’t …
Whenever we go camping in Oregon my kids are fascinated by the little wooded boxes hanging on trees that have “no bird hole.” Well, that’s because they’re bat boxes! Bats are, in my opinion, some of the most interesting animals in the PNW. In the opinion of other (smarter) people, they are among the most …
At A GlanceMormon crickets do not bite or sting humans. They have mandibles that they use to consume vegetation and other small insects, but these are not used (even defensively) against threats like humans. They also do not have a stinger. While they can be a nuisance, especially when they swarm in large numbers, they …
My wife grew up in Washington and told me it was literally impossible for a hurricane to hit the Washington coast. I was pretty confused, then, when we were looking to move to Oregon and she was emphatic that we stay away from flood and tsunami zones. Wait, what? Isn’t a tsunami and a hurricane …