Willows Inn offers the freshest seafood imaginable…from right outside the door.

Organic dining from a chef trained at the world’s best restaurant: Willows Inn is sheer heaven for foodies. It’s also the antidote to the hustle and bustle of city life, where you’d expect to find such summa cum laude gastronomy. Culinary star-in-the-making Blaine Witzel (age 25) trained at Noma in Copenhagen, where Rene Rezdepi has taken on Ferran Adria’s mantle as today’s most garlanded restaurateur. Now Witzel (pictured below) wows the crowds at this idyllic slow food haven on a tiny island off the coast of Washington State.

The Pacific Northwest is famous for its fabulous shellfish, especially razor clams, but also crabs, oysters and scallops, and fish such as salmon and halibut. They don’t have far to travel to reach your plate. Local organic vegetables provide the supporting roles in Witzel’s starry menus – don’t be surprised to see beach-foraged seaweed make an appearance. “Fished, foraged and farmed,” as they say since many ingredients as possible come from the island itself, and the water around it.

The seven onsite guest rooms in this wood-built inn are a stylish mix of traditional and contemporary featuring organic bathroom goodies, free WIFI and some rooms even have radiant heating, for toasty toes. Two rooms in the detached guest house have their own private decks and bath tubs; you can also stay on the farm where much of the food served at the restaurant is produced, including the eggs, or in stunning beachfront houses and apartments around the island.

If you’re all gourmeted out, have a massage (in your room, if you prefer) or a hot stone treatment in the spa. Then roll down to the nearby beach or venture out into slow-paced Lummi Island, with its thriving community of artists and artisans and respect for the environment; the island is renowned for its sustainable fisheries and eco-farms.

The more adventurous (and die-hard foodies) can take a kayak out to visit the other San Juan islands, minding any Orca whales or seals en route, to forage for sea lettuce, Saragassum, and beach plantain.

Rates from $204 including tax and whale-watching from the comfort of your room; the kayaking is an extra activity.

Photos: Willows Inn, Celebrate Big, coffee&donuts

Places & Spaces is a travel guide that will inspire you to carve out a vacation on your calendar. All of the gorgeous locations and accommodations in our guide share our concern for the environment. From tent glamping to lavish built environments, fair warning, you’ll feel compelled to pack your suitcase.

The post Places & Spaces: Willows Inn, Lummi Island, Washington State appeared first on EcoSalon.

We at EcoSalon are big on this whole electric car business. We write about it at ton, checking out everything from tech to design, sales to service, performance to promise. But the fact is, electric cars are now big-time begging the question of support infrastructure. Last week, when we wrote about Nissan Leaf pre-orders effectively making its upcoming December release a sold-out affair, we mentioned that Nissan’s Chief Exec said sales of the vehicle will be limited to regions where the automaker felt plans were coming together to get and keep the things charged. This is certainly not everywhere, but the fact that so many of you are willing to give electric cars a go is prompting D.C. and local governments to bring up the rear when it comes to creating electro-friendly environments for the environmentally friendly vehicles.

Washington State’s Departments of Transportation and Commerce, with the help of $1.32 million Federal grant, are about to begin work on turning a stretch of Interstate 5 (I-5) into the nation’s first “electric highway.” The idea is to start equipping the road with enough charging stations for electric vehicles to handle the 276-mile trip from the Canadian border to the Oregon state line. (The Leaf, as an example, will need a plug-in about every 100 miles.) It will be the first border-to-border highway to offer “fast charge,” Level-3 technology, which will get you back on the road in about 15 minutes.

“We want people to buy electric vehicles with the confidence that they can take longer trips than just around the community and to different cities,” a WSDOT rep told seattlepi.

The effort is part of the $230 million Federal EV Project, a Department of Energy recovery grant program that will eventually bring 900 Leaf cars (Leaves?) and about 2,500 electric–vehicle charging stations to the Seattle area. The broader scope of the project entails the introduction of 8,300 electric vehicles (the Leaf and Chevy Volt models) and 15,000 charging stations to Washington, California, Arizona, Tennessee and the District of Columbia.

The project supports the West Coast Green Highway initiative that’s promoting the use of cleaner fuels along I-5 from B.C. to Baja. The big idea is that I-5 will become the first U.S. interstate that’s electric-vehicle ready, border-to-border, with charging stations within striking distance of each other the whole long way.

Stage I of the Washington project will feature Level-2 chargers at Washington’s “gateway” rest areas for “public education and outreach.” The more powerful Level-3 stations will be developed through public/private partnerships with their ultimate locations depending on the private partner’s retail outlets, so to speak. A contractor is due to be selected this Fall with installations to begin immediately after.

The post Our New Ways: Washington Good to Go with America’s First Electric Highway appeared first on EcoSalon.