Seattle and Olympic National Park, WT

On our way to Seattle, we had the unfortunate timing to reach a blasting site five minutes after the road was closed, forcing all traffic to a complete stop for the next hour.  It was about dinner time and we now knew that we would be setting up camp in the dark, so we decided to make the best of the situation and cooked dinner on the side of the highway.

When we eventually reached camp later that night, we discovered that it was very small and situated so close to the airport that that you could make out the fine details on the airplanes as they landed and took off.  The showers were coin operated and vacillated wildly between hot and cold without ever settling in the middle.  The pit toilets were something that is best not described, but left to the imagination.

We went to Pike's Place in the morning, which I did not enjoy much more than the painful shower I'd had earlier in the day.  Lester, being more tolerant of crowds, had fun watching people toss around fish while I followed along behind him, letting him part the waves of people too busy taking pictures with their iPhones to watch where they're walking.

The Chihuly Glass and Garden did not have this problem, as people appeared to be more conscious of the fact that they were in a museum full of very breakable art.  As we toured the museum, Lester and I realized that we'd actually seen work from this artist before when we were in Venice five years ago for coursework for WPI.  He'd had large, abstract chandeliers hanging around the palazzos and open spaces in Murano, where he'd studied decades ago.

The next morning, we took the ferry from Seattle to Bainbridge Island to reach Olympic National Park.  We have now officially traveled by land, sea, and air on this trip.

We drove to the Pacific ocean and Mora beach in Olympic, which is as far westward as we are going to reach on this road trip.

After getting a backcountry permit form the park rangers, we hiked out two miles along the beach to spend the night camping in the sand near Hole-in-the-Wall.  The park is very strict about enforcing the use of bear cans (plastic, bear-proof food containers), although the ranger said that this was less for the bears and more for the raccoons.  He warned us not to turn our backs on an unclosed bear can or a raccoon would seize the opportunity and "tackle" it for the chance to steal food from us.

At the start of our hike, the fog that had settled along the beach was so thick and the sun was so bright behind it that the sky and waves appeared like a solid white mass.  On the other side, the driftwood, many of which were really whole trees wider than my arm-span, lay strewn together to form a low wall of sun-bleached, white wood.  Since the beach was made of small, shiny, black pebbles, the whole hike felt like we were walking on the shores of a monochromatic, alien world.

When the sun eventually burned through the fog as we ate dinner on an especially large piece of driftwood, we were finally able to see the ocean and the huge, towering rocks just off of the coast.

We shucked oysters for dinner and rinsed the dishes in the ocean.

Our view of the beach was just as beautiful at night as it was during sunset.

The next morning, at low tide, we explored the tide pools, trying not to step on too many of the tiny baby snails that covered the rocks.  Afterwards, we packed out our soaked and sandy belongings and headed inland to the Hoh rainforest, but not before driving through Forks, WT (we had to as it is on the only highway).  If you are not familiar with the writings of Stephanie Meyer, you should know that this is the setting for the Twilight series.  The sign below is an example of what you can now find in Forks.

The rainforest was not as rainy or damp as we expected it to be, but we did enjoy the Hall of Mosses and several other nature walks.

We've just left Portland, Oregon, so that post should be coming soon.