theladyrebecca | Steamport Gamble and the 1890s Walking Dress

On Saturday, my bf and I headed across the water to Port Gamble (the privately owned Victorian mill town) for their first ever Steamport Gamble event. It was due to be a tiny event, with four panels/presentations, a handful of vendors, and a fashion show. There were also originally supposed to be crocquet and lawn bowling outside, but they were cancelled due to rain in the forecast. And really, weather is the big story here.

We arrived there about 11am, looked at the vendor hall (so not impressed), and then saw that the huge Victorian house that has always been closed up in the past was open! It turns out that was where they were doing a couple of the presentations, though they were still setting up when we got there. That means that no one was paying attention to prevent us from going upstairs and exploring the house. I know the house has held a variety of functions over the years, but it hasn't been able to be used for anything in quite some time because it's not up to fire codes. Most of the house has not been updated, though there were two 50sish-era bathrooms added, and many different layers of wallpapers in all the rooms. It was so cool to see, though, because while I love gleamingly restored homes, there's just something about ones that have been kept repaired but not updated. We took a whole bunch of pictures, and then headed down for the firearms panel downstairs.

Here's some pics of us in the house:

Conspicuous electric lighting

During the panel, the wind started really picking up. Weather.com had predicted winds up to 33mph on Saturday. I have since heard that there were actually gusts up to 57mph in Port Gamble, and supposedly up to 80mph deeper into the peninsula. After the firearms panel, we started walking down the street, and were warned to watch our heads because a branch had just fallen on a car. She really should have said a humongous tree limb had fallen. Apparently the guy was sitting in the passenger seat at the time - it was lucky he wasn't in the back seat, because that was quite crushed. Unfortunately, he happened to be the 1pm speaker, so I believe that panel was cancelled. Here's a pic:

The fallen tree was right outside the shop that hosted the event, Mrs. Muir's House of Magic. They had some new decor since the last time I was there, so naturally, I had to have a couple pictures:

After that, we mostly just wandered around town for a while. August must be the season for dahlias, because there were mulitple gorgeous dahlia gardens, including some taller than me!

Just past the garden was a double tree take-down. It looked like one large branch had fallen and had taken another one out on its way down:

The wind finally managed to actually knock my hat off at that point, and blow it about 100 feet. It was so strong, it blew two of three hatpins right out of my hat! It also loosened one of my goose feathers. Alas. We found this cool "tank" car:

And then headed back to the car, just as it started raining. It was a fairly rocky ferry ride back, and the power was out in a lot of places from north Seattle up through Everett (it had gone out mid-day in Port Gamble, too). We found some heavily damaged trees in Edmonds, once we were back. We went to a park that literally had half a pine tree in the basketball court.