2 Best Sights in Bellingham, Washington Cascade Mountains and Valleys

Bellingham's art and history museum fills three buildings near one another downtown; its centerpiece is the Lightcatcher, a LEED-certified building with an 180-foot-long translucent wall. It's home to FIG, the hands-on Family Interactive Gallery, along with permanent collections of contemporary Northwest artists and spaces for rotating exhibits. Three blocks away, Bellingham's imposing redbrick former city hall dates to 1892, became a museum in 1941, and now contains historic exhibits. The third building, the Syre Education Center, contains a photographic archive. The museum's restaurant, Bar Cicotti, is in the Lightcatcher and garners raves for its creative Northern Italian lunch and dinner fare.

At this quirky downtown museum, rooms filled with some of the world's earliest electrical appliances—light bulbs, phones, batteries, motors, radios, TVs—along with photos, news clippings, and interactive exhibits tell the story of how electricity transformed our world. A particularly interesting exhibit sparked by the film The Current War traces the competitive battle for technological supremacy among Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and Nikola Tesla. On weekends at 2:30, docents present a wildly entertaining electric light show, complete with 12-foot lightening bolts, in the museum theater.