How do you top a perfect day? You don’t. But you hope to follow it up with another great one.
Olympic National Park covers over 900,000 acres, across several different geographical areas; we covered 3 of them yesterday on our very busy first day. Today, it was time to leave our campground in Sequim and move to another section of the park. It was the first clear, crisp morning we have seen in Washington, which was helpful to enjoy the landscape of this area in all of their grandeur during our 2 hour trek. Plus, the traffic was greatly diminished now that folks are back to work and school. The last half of our drive afforded us new views of the PNW. Unfortunately, most of that was just a boring drive through windy roads with lots of frost heave and bridge repair. Guess it can’t all be a 5-star drive.
Literally the only area that was populated and/or of interest was Forks, WA. Forks is known for being the rainiest town in the contiguous US. They boast 120″ of rain per year, which is significant since the area we came from just last night is only 16″ per year. Spectacularly, there is no rain forecast here for the next couple of days.
Forks had almost nothing else worth mentioning, other than that they are all about Twilight. They are gearing up for their big Twilight festival next week as they are big on marketing to bring people to stay in this sleepy town in the middle of so much National Park grandeur. Why? Apparently the Twilight books were based in this city and they are playing that up to their benefit. I am sure that the few shops and gas stations are stocked with crap, but we are not intending to find out.
We are, however, staying on the outskirts of town at what is seriously the strangest place we have ever stayed at. We are in the back of some big garage, where they have 5 full hookup sites that are tapped into the garage for electric/sewer. It seems that they just ran a few sewer lines and called it an “RV park”. I suppose they are correct in that there are RVs parked here, but there is little else. We don’t even know what they do in the garage since there is no business even listed. Strange. They are highly rated (location, location, location), and fully booked. The campers around us also have lovely vehicles and are likely here for the same reason we are. The place seems safe but we are surrounded by logs, a big garage, and some junk. We are allegedly near a river where he could fish, but not sure that we want to venture out. We’re all just hiding back here behind the garage until morning… seems like some kind of horror novel just waiting to happen. Maybe it is the “twilight” zone after all.
It does, however allow us to be nice and close for tomorrow’s adventure. More on that tomorrow. It also gave us time today to get to one of our favorite destinations.
The beach!
It was great to return to the Pacific Ocean today, and it was all that we hoped it would be. While the major portions of the park are wilderness and were designated in the 1930’s, there are multiple coastal regions of Olympic National Park that were designated in 1953. So we were excited to check out Ruby Beach at our friends’ recommendation. It is only about 20 miles past this “RV Park”.
After hardly seeing any cars for about 25 miles, we had hoped that our odds were good to get a parking spot. Sorry, no. This cute beach was well-occupied, and we’ll have to try again another day if we want to visit it.
But we weren’t going to accept defeat so easily. We could see the coast, and the Olympic NP coastline ran for several more miles, so we continued south, hoping for the best. At this point, we had snacked but were still close to hangry (a difficult spot for anyone, but especially anyone travelling with me). Thankfully, a lovely beach named “Beach 4” approached on the right, and I made a quick decision to turn in.
I’m so glad that we did as there was plenty of space for us. We were appropriately nourished and then made the trek to explore Beach 4. Pets are allowed, which is good since the beach is one of Daisy’s favorites. Well it was a decent descent on the trail/steps, weaving through some thick forested area, where we could hear/smell the approaching beach area. Daisy was literally dragging me down the steps. Being low tide, we found ourselves on a driftwood landing above the beach. The final 3 feet would have been fine on our own in hiking boots, but felt challenging in flip flops with the (ACL-healed, wanting to keep it that way) dog.
Rick was not deterred and worked through my “still not quite out of almost hangry” mood. He even carried Daisy part of the way so that I wasn’t freaking out about a potential injury.
We made it to the beach safely. And it was lovely.
After that adventure, it was time to go settle in at our new RV park…
But we are safe, happy, and excited to be well positioned as early arrivers for tomorrow’s adventures!
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