Whidbey Island located in the northern part of Puget Sound is a long island that is accessed on the north via a spectacular set of bridges across Deception Pass and from the south via a ferry from Mukilteo on the mainland to Clinton. Another ferry crosses the entrance to Puget Sound from Keystone on Whidbey to Port Townsend on the northeast corner of the Olympic Peninsula. Whidbey Island is mostly rural with substantial areas of commercial forest land and farmland as well as some of the earliest American settlements in the state in the Coupeville area. It is also the home of Whidbey Island Navy Air Base. And as such there is a saying on the island, "The sound of freedom".
While crossing Admiralty Inlet from a venture to Port Townsend I could hear the roar of jets overhead. The jest were doing touch and go landings and take offs at the Coupeville Runway. The runway is located on a glacial outwash plain called Smith Prairie.
View of Smith Prairie and the Coupeville Runway
The jets are very loud and very fast. So this lovely, rural, historic island with its forests, farms and small towns rural does have periods of very loud roaring jets overhead - the sound of freedom.
Hi Dan,
ReplyDeleteGreat blog. Not sure if you meant sarcasm here but having grown up on Whidbey and now living in China, I have to say it really is a beautiful place and, this may be a bit of a complex thought, but I also enjoy the sound of EF-18s ripping overheard, especially at OLF Coupeville when we visit. If you think they are loud you would probably not have liked the 80s when there were A-6 & EA-6s practicing all the time to maintain their readiness in order to keep the Soviet Bear in check (hard to believe that cold are "ended" less than 25 years ago.