This is my town – Lynden, WA
I went out for my exercise hike this morning and when I got home, I realized what a beautiful day it was turning into and got the urge to head out again. I’ve been doing so much traveling this past year, why not get out and see my own town and take some pictures. So, I hiked around town for about six miles till my feet got sore, then I got in the car and drove around a bit.
Lynden is in western Washington, due north of Bellingham and just south of the Canadian border on the Nooksack River. This small Dutch town of about 12,000 is surrounded by a large farming community. Lots of dairy farms here and berries of all sorts grow well here as does corn and various other produce. And we have a few windmills, big and small, just decorative though.
We have festivals and parades all year round including the Lighted Christmas Parade, Holland Days Festival and parade, the Raspberry Festival, the antique tractor and machinery show, lawn mower races, and the mushball tournament. Lynden is the home to the Northwest Washington Fair grounds which hosts the fair in August and a number of other events throughout the year.
It’s a nice quite town with lots of churches. Everything is closed on Sundays and you can’t mow your lawn or make other significant noise on Sundays. But, be sure to mow your lawn on another day; if you don’t, the city stops by to mow it for you, and then they send you a bill. You can’t dance in public within the city limits without a permit. When people find out that I live in Lynden, they always say “really, you live in Lynden?” I never have figured out why they say that…
I live in the La Villa apartments and have a great back yard and a creek running through it and a big picnic shelter. Every spring, a pea patch garden is started and everyone has fun with that. The landlords keep the place up real nice.
The Lynden Municipal Airport is in the middle of town, the runway runs right between two rows of houses. Kind of weird. Here’s a video of an approach and landing in Lynden.
So, I had a huge revelation today while writing this. Raspberry has a p in it. Wow, I never noticed that; kind of like the missing . on a can of Dr Pepper. I thought my spell checker was out to lunch.
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- Local barber shop
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- Downtown Lynden
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- Renovations
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- Downtown Lynden
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- One of several murals around town
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- The Post Office
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- One of the many church steeples in town
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- Fishtrap Creek in the back yard
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- My apartments
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- My back yard
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- The Lynden Municipal Airport, right in the middle of a residence area
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- Where were these things when I was a kid, jeez.
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- Fishtrap Creek
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- A pretty nice damn barn
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- Donkey
Dear Ms. Williams,
Funny that you call Lynden a Dutch town as there ain’t much Dutch in the photo’s, not even the windmill!
I’ll tell you something about the Van Lynden family though. I used to live in the village next to the estate of the Van Lijnden’s. They are Dutch nobility (Barons) who lost their castle in Hemmen (NL) in WW2, the Canadians shot it to pieces as it was commandeered by the German SS and served as an observation post for the German artillery on the higher ground to the North. The castle was never rebuilt.
During the years 1860/1890 the Dutch railroads expanded hugely through our country. One day 2 directors of the railroad company knocked on the gate of the castle and asked the Baron if he would sell a strip of land sothat they could put ralroad track in a straight line from Rotterdam to the German border and from there connect with the main line to Cologne/Bremen/Hamburg. The answer was no, we do not sell land.
They tried a few times afterwards and having overcome such arguments as; man cannot stand these train speeds, cows will stop giving milk etc. the Baron gave in but under condition:
The land could only be sold back to the family;
He would build a trainstation himself;
Whenever he wanted to travel, the train had to stop to pick him up.
He was also a Member of Parliament and had to travel to The Hague regularly.
So it was decided and ever since when the Baron wanted to travel, the international train Rotterdam to Duesseldorf and Cologne, which stopped nowhere except in Nijmegen for the passport control, also stopped in Hemmen/Dodewaard, to pick up his lordship!