Road Trip: Kite Festival at Long Beach
Get ready for a colorful, small-town getaway
By Jake Laycock July 6, 2016
This article originally appeared in the August 2016 issue of Seattle magazine.
WHERE: Long Beach, a small town in the southern coastal corner of Washington, a three-and-a-half-hour drive from downtown Seattle.
WHY: The Long Beach–based World Kite Museum’s annual Washington State International Kite Festival (8/15–8/21, kitefestival.com). The seaside skies will be ablaze with colorful kites during this weeklong celebration and competition, which attracts professional kite flyers from around the world as well as tens of thousands of spectators.
BERRY NICE: Take a break from the high-flying fun and get bogged down at the Cranberry Museum (cranberrymuseum.com), where you can finish your self-guided tour of the working farm’s crimson fields with a scoop of sweetly tart ice cream from the gift shop.
BEACHSIDE BREKKIE: Those local cranberries often appear in the bread and pancakes served at Laurie’s Homestead Breakfast House (Facebook, “Laurie’s Homestead”) in neighboring Seaview. Bring an appetite: This casual breakfast and lunch spot is known for its huge portions of hearty morning staples.
Follow Us
The Rise of the Experience Economy
REI brings back guided travel, betting that memories matter more than stuff.
In my household, with two young boys under the age of five, we often have to remind them to take things back. Did you really mean to tell dad that his dinner isn’t good? You might want to take that back. Did your brother deserve to be hit? Let’s rethink that one. Extreme analogies aside,…
Bellevue Is Treating Accessibility Like Infrastructure
A partnership with Wheel the World makes it easier to plan travel with verified details.
For a lot of people, the hardest part of travel planning isn’t arranging flights or booking a hotel. It’s figuring out whether a place will actually work for your needs once you get there. Bellevue has partnered with Wheel the World, a travel platform used worldwide, to verify accessibility details for hotels, attractions, restaurants, and…
Northwest Enters Winter After Warmest Fall on Record
Unseasonably high temperatures and rain instead of snow have pushed regional snowpack to record lows for this point in the season.
Across the Northwest, a record-warm fall and lack of snowpack going into the winter is putting more drought pressure on Oregon, Idaho, Washington and western Montana. Despite record rain in western Washington recently, and earlier this year in central and southern Oregon, the showers are filling up already overdrawn reservoirs in many areas, scientists said…
Renew Yourself in Bellingham, Washington
Images courtesy of Visit Bellingham Unwind and reset in 2026 with a trip to peaceful Bellingham, Washington. Located between the stunning Cascade Mountains and the tranquil Salish Sea, there’s no better place for a trip packed with quiet moments in nature combined with the amenities of a culturally rich college town. Bellingham is known for…