Bainbridge Island via the ferry.

It's super easy to get to Bainbridge Island by ferry, especially if you have an Orca transit card like I do. Take the light rail to the waterfront, walk a few blocks to the ferry terminal, find the ferry line you want and just swipe your card to get onto the ferry ($8.25 to the island, however, there was no place to swipe our card coming back so I believe you just pay the fare to get onto the island). The trip on the ferry is half of the fun, it takes about 35 minutes and the views are very nice.

 A ferry arriving in Seattle from either Bainbridge Island or Bremerton.

Here you can see the Space Needle on the left and on the far right is Smith Tower (tiny little white building). We've been to both.

Bainbridge is a lovely island about the size of Manhattan in square footage but with only 25,000 inhabitants. The weather is quite temperate, the winters average about 40F and the summers are cool. There aren't a lot of mosquitoes and flies, so many homes don't even have screens on the windows. We took a small tour of the island and learned a few things: there are seven wineries but only two of them grow grapes on the island, mostly the white grapes for sweet wines. Most of the people on the island commute daily by ferry to work in Seattle. Many of the large businesses, like Boeing, have vans to shuttle workers back and forth from the ferry terminal to work. Bainbridge Island, like many other places that are beautiful with lovely weather, has a housing problem. It is expensive to own or rent and so a lot of people who work on the island can't afford to live there and they commute by ferry also. There are three hotels on the island and a fourth might be built. Dense housing, like condos and town homes and apartments, are only allowed in the downtown waterfront area by the ferry terminal, the rest is more "rural" and only a few businesses (like grocery and hardware stores, cafes, etc.) are allowed to build in  small clumped areas of each section of the island for the convenience of the islanders.

Here I am, looking at yarn. I managed to restrain myself from buying yet more yarn.

On the island tour. A view of downtown Seattle. The wood sticking out of the water in the foreground is what's left of an original boat pier from the late 1800's.

 On the island tour we stopped at the Japanese Exclusion Memorial. During WWII over 120,000 Japanese people (the majority of them U.S. citizens) were rounded up and placed in camps in the California desert because they were deemed a risk to the U.S. About 277 of those people lived on Bainbridge Island at the time and they were given six days to get their affairs in order and pack a suitcase each before being shipped off to California.

Beautiful and restful woods at the memorial.

This harbor was where the ferry dock was at the time of WWII and the removal of the Japanese from the island.

 There are pictures from the newspaper at the time that show the Japanese boarding the ferry. Our guide pointed out a picture of a two year old boy and said that the boy's family came back to the island and the boy grew up to become a dentist. That man was our guide's dentist. Many people on Bainbridge did the right thing and took care of the homes and businesses and farms of the Japanese prisoners while they were gone so that they would have a home to return to. Unfortunately, not everyone did so, some of the homes were destroyed and/or stolen by some of the inhabitants of the island.

Driftwood beach. Bainbridge Island was originally home to the Suquomish led by Chief Kitsap. This was their summer home and the natives would fish, gather oysters and clams, net dungeness crab, and there was also game and berries on the island. Much of the food would be smoked and otherwise preserved for the winter months in Seattle (actually named after Chief Seattle but the pronunciation isn't very close to his name, the language has a lot of glottal stops).

Don's new camera has a great zoom lens. This was taken from Driftwood Beach.

 After the tour we visited the history museum.

Just one section of a 30 foot chamber used for applying creosote to wood.

 A before and after look at the graduating class of 1942 and 1943. All the Japanese are gone from the 1943 graduating class, they're all in internment camps in California.
We also visited the small art museum. There were at least four exhibits by local artists and we loved them all. This artist, Joe Max Emminger, really caught our eye and imagination.

I really loved the exhibition "An Abecedarian of Artist's Books" and wish I had pictures but here is a link:
https://www.biartmuseum.org/artists-book-collection/

We spent some time at the brew pub next to the museum, drinking beers and playing cards while sitting outside, what could be better? We then went for a walk along the waterfront.

Crossing over a little creek on the way to the waterfront park.

 We then walked back to the ferry terminal and waited for 30 minutes because the ferry was late.

Cars waiting to board the ferry.

The angled building to the left of the black building is supposed to evoke the hand on hip pose of Audrey Hepburn in "Breakfast at Tiffany's".