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Bainbridge Island/Seattle, Washington is a great place for a second home!
Bainbridge Island is an island in Puget Sound, and is an incorporated city in Kitsap County, Washington, United States. The island's population was 20,300 at the 2000 census.
In July 2005, CNN/Money and Money magazine named Bainbridge Island the second-best place to live in the United States.
The city is also known for its excellent school district, consistently rated near to, or at, the top of the state. Its crime rate is also significantly below the national average, ranking as among the lowest in the Seattle metropolitan area.
Since the 1960s, Bainbridge Island has become an increasingly affluent bedroom community of Seattle. The community has been especially concerned with preserving greenspace and keeping a tight control over development, both residential and commercial.
The island is quite hilly and is known for its popular 'Chilly Hilly' bicycle ride held every year in February. This ride has been the unofficial start to the bicycling season in the Pacific Northwest since 1992.
Bainbridge Island is connected to the Kitsap Peninsula by a bridge carrying WA-305 over Agate Passage. The only other public way off the island is by Washington State Ferries service from Winslow in Eagle Harbor to Coleman Dock in Seattle. The boat, as it is commonly known, takes about 35 minutes to cross Puget Sound.
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Seattle is the largest city in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. It is located in the U.S. state of Washington , about 96 miles (155 km) south of the United States–Canadian border in King County.
Seattle is often regarded as the birthplace of grunge music, and has a reputation for heavy coffee consumption; coffee companies founded in Seattle include Starbucks, Seattle's Best Coffee, and Tully's.
Seattle is located between Puget Sound, an inlet of the Pacific Ocean, and Lake Washington. West beyond the Sound are the Olympic Mountains; east beyond Lake Washington and the Eastside suburbs are Lake Sammamish, and the Cascade Range. The rivers, forests, lakes, and fields were once rich enough to support one of the world's few sedentary hunter-gatherer societies. Opportunities for sailing, skiing, bicycling, camping, and hiking are nearby and accessible almost all the year.
The city itself, somewhat like San Francisco, is hilly, though not uniformly so. Like Rome, the city is said to lie on seven hills; the lists vary, but typically include Capitol Hill, First Hill, West Seattle, Beacon Hill, Queen Anne and the former Denny Hill. Many of the hilliest areas are near city's center, with Capitol Hill, First Hill, and Beacon Hill collectively constituting something of a ridge along an isthmus between the chief harbor, Elliott Bay (an inlet of Puget Sound) and the freshwater Lake Washington. The topography of Downtown has been reshaped by regrading projects, a seawall, and the construction of an artificial island, Harbor Island (completed 1909), at the mouth of the city's industrial Duwamish Waterway.
The man-made Lake Washington Ship Canal incorporating four natural bodies of water: Lake Union, Salmon Bay, Portage Bay, and Union Bay. The canal connects Puget Sound to Lake Washington.
Seattle's mild climate is usually classified as Marine west coast. However, its wet-winter dry-summer pattern shows some characteristics of a Mediterranean climate, and it is sometimes classified this way. Temperature extremes are moderated by adjacent Puget Sound and Lake Washington as well as the more distant Pacific Ocean. The region is partially protected from Pacific storms by the Olympic Mountains and from Arctic air by the Cascade Range. Despite being on the margin of the rain shadow of the Olympic Mountains, the city has a reputation for frequent rain. In reality, the so-called "rainy city" receives an unremarkable 37.1 inches (94 cm) of precipitation a year, which is much less than New York City, Atlanta, and Houston and most cities of the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. Seattle's worldwide reputation for rain derives from the fact that it is cloudy (not rainy) an average of 226 days per year (vs. 132 in New York City). Most of the precipitation falls as drizzle or light rain, with only occasional downpours. The spring, late fall, and winter are filled with days when it does not rain but looks as if it may because of cloudy, overcast skies. As for temperature, winters are cool and wet with average lows around 35–40°F (2–4°C) on winter nights. Colder weather can occur, but seldom lasts more than a few days. Summers are dry and warm, with average daytime highs around 73–80°F (22.2–26.7°C). Hotter weather usually occurs only during a few summer days.
Seattle mayor Greg Nickels is among those who have called Seattle "a city of neighborhoods". Over a dozen Seattle neighborhoods have Neighborhood Service Centers, originally known in 1972 as "Little City Halls". Several dozen neighborhoods have one or more annual street fairs, and many have an annual parade. The largest of the street fairs feature hundreds of craft and food booths and multiple stages with live entertainment, and draw more than 100,000 people over the course of a weekend; the smallest are strictly neighborhood affairs with a few dozen craft and food booths, barely distinguishable from more prominent neighborhoods' weekly farmers' markets. Seattle has grown through a series of annexations of smaller neighboring communities, many of which now constitute prominent neighborhoods:
 
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