This morning Mark and I picked my friend, Wendy, up at Aunt Marg’s house — they had been having a good visit — and took her with us to my hand surgeon appointment.  He has got to be the fastest doctor in the world.  (He doesn’t even close the office door!)  He took the Band-Aid off my wrist, asked if I wanted him to operate on my other wrist, and when I said I wasn’t sure, he said, “Call me when you decide,” and I was out the door!

We got to spend the rest of the day with Wendy.  First we drove her to our place along Birch Bay.  She got to come in and take the tour of our RV (“Your standing in the living room/dining room, and that room over there is the bedroom!”) and meet our cats.  We picked up our camera and then took her up to Blaine, which is just up the road from us.  From Blaine you can see the Peace Arch and Canada.  Then we took her to lunch back in Birch Bay.

After lunch we drove into downtown Lynden where we did the walking tour.  The unfortunate thing is that downtown Lynden is dying.  When I was a girl it was a thriving town with many businesses.  Now the stores are few and far between, and in one of the shops the proprietress told us she’d give us a discount on whatever we wanted because she’s going out of business.  I asked her what’s happening and she said that the city council can’t decide what they want Lynden to be.  They’re trying to decide on a theme for all the businesses.  Silly me, I thought the windmills and Dutch theme was Lynden’s signature, but this woman said that some people like it and other’s want something new, so they haven’t been able to agree on what to do with the downtown area.  She told me that there are some forward thinking people who want to take a burned out building downtown which used to be a mall and turn it into a hotel.  I said that would be a big start on revitalizing Lynden because when Wendy looked online to find a hotel to stay at up here, she could only find two.  Of the two, one is closed for renovation and the other, which is thankfully not in town, is a dive.  If they have more places for people to stay, they may be able to sustain more businesses downtown.

Most of the shops that we did find open were antique stores, but there was also a kitchen store, a fabric store, a bakery and a consignment shop/yarn store.  Wendy found gifts for nearly everyone in her family in the various stores.  Mark was so tolerant of us.  He’d go in and look around a bit, then wait on a bench outside for us to finish looking and shopping.  When the bags and packages began accumulating, he carried them back to the car for us.  By the time our feet were getting tired, Mark took us to Edaleen’s for ice cream.

We laughed so much today that my jaws began to hurt.  Wendy is every bit as much fun as she was when we were in high school; maybe even more so because she now has a lifetime of funny stories to tell!

After having ice cream, we went back to Aunt Marg’s house and Wendy took us all out to dinner.  We ate at a place called the Rusty Wagon.  Mark likes to eat there because it has a life-sized cardboard John Wayne in one corner and all sorts of funny cowboy décor.  They also serve heaps of good food.

Wendy needed to fill her gas tank, and being from Oregon she’d never done that before, so after dinner we stopped at a gas station and Mark showed her how to use a gas pump.  On the way back to Marg’s house we were finally too tired to laugh and talk.  Here are some pictures from today: