Food & Drink

Choose Booze

Chuckanut Brewery and Kitchen

Will and Mari Kemper (of Thomas Kemper Root Beer fame) opened a real-beer brewery near downtown Bellingham’s shops and cafes, with a focus on sustainable, European-style brewing. A waterfront pub, live music, and brewery tours fill an afternoon, but the Kölsch, British IPA, and Pilsner behind the bar inspire return trips. 360-752-3377; chuckanutbreweryandkitchen.com

Getting There 90 minutes: north on I-5

Get Crabby

Cama Beach State Park

If you’re hankering for a shellfish dinner, you can catch and cook up to five Dungeness crabs at this onetime fishing resort. While you wait for your crab pots to fill, hike the park’s 15 miles of trails winding among beautiful displays of fall foliage or rent a rowboat from the maritime volunteers at the Center for Wooden Boats (360-387-9361; cwb.org). 360-387-1550; parks.wa.gov/camabeach

Getting There 90 minutes: north on I-5

Brew Your Own

Gallaghers’ Where-U-Brew

When you start from the more than 50 recipes for beer and wine, the brew you mix yourself is likely to have incomparable flavor. To make sure that it’s as tasty as it is unique, seasoned brewers will pitch in and demonstrate the use of the facility’s professional equipment such as the wort chiller or the bottle sterilizer. Two weeks after mixing and boiling, you can return to bottle and take home your creation. 425-776-4209; whereubrew.com

Getting There 25 minutes: north on I-5

Eat Medieval

Bors Hede

Can you handle a menu that uses the words “buttered worts” to describe the sauteed greens? There are fourteenth-century recipes and the added theater of wandering minstrels at Camlann Medieval Village’s living history eatery, but there’s no Monty Python buffoonery. Your buttered worts come with a side of lute music and a straight face. 425-788-8624; camlann.org

Getting There 45 minutes: east on WA 520, Novelty Hill Rd and Fall City Duvall Rd

Satisfy Sweet Teeth

Boehms Candies Factory

Willy Wonka and Lucille Ball both understood the allure of a dessert assembly line; at this one you’ll see hands dipping candies in pools of chocolate. Tour the alpine-style chalet and chapel of founder Julius Boehm, an Austrian athlete-turned-chocolatier, then get a tasting tour of the 1956 factory itself. A two-hour chocolate-making class will give you new appreciation for the factory’s steady output of clusters, cordials, and Mozart-Kugeln. 425-392-6652; boehmscandies.com

Getting There 25 minutes: east on I-90

Try This Town: Edison 

You’ll encounter more calories than people in this pint-size hamlet, also known as the Skagit Valley’s emerging foodie destination. At the Breadfarm bakery (360-766-4065), sour cherry–lemon bread loaves fly off the shelves, along with Samish River potato bread made from local spuds. Next door, the small gourmet shop Slough Food (360-766-4458) sells local cheeses, cured meats from Salumi, and wines both local and international. And one more door down, Tweets (360-820-9912) serves breakfasts of biscuits with lamb gravy (or huckleberry ice cream, if that’s how your mornings roll) on raw-hewn wooden tables. 

New works from the neighboring Edison Eye Gallery (360-766-6276) grace the diner’s walls. But that’s just the beginning of the tiny town’s smorgasbord: The Edison Inn (360-766-6266) also fits inside the miniscule city limits, dishing up local seafood as it has done for a century, albeit under recent new management. Fuller service comes down the street at Edison Cafe (360-766-6960), known for homemade soups and a giant Wonder Bread advertisement by the front door.

Getting There 85 minutes: north on I-5 and Chuckanut Dr

Published in the 30 Great Day Trips issue of Seattle Met.