May 28
We’d wanted to travel to the Pacific Northwest for years, we’d never been anywhere near there and were sure we’d love it. Dave wanted to come too and that was great with us. So I researched hikes and made reservations. We wanted to minimize time away from the kitties and so only scheduled a 6-day trip, and only to Washington. But it was just fantastic and maybe we should have stayed a bit more.
Dave came up on Tuesday and we finalized packing, including one shared suitcase which we’d check. We were flying Alaska Airlines and they charged for everything, so we were carrying on most stuff. We also ordered food from them to be served on the flight, which wasn’t an outrageous rip-off.
Woke up really early on Wednesday, May 28, said goodbye to the cats (Andrew would be checking on them), and the Woburn Cab driver with the town car and the handlebar mustache drove us into Logan, a surprisingly painless drive. Checking the bag and going through security was surprisingly painless too, though everything in an airport is a hassle. Logan was already overrun at that time of early morning with tweens and teenagers going on field trips or maybe just hanging out and taking up space and quiet.
We found a Not Your Average Joe’s that was serving breakfast and had a leisurely meal, then found our way to the crowded gate, past the pet relief area. We were just able to get seats together in the gate area, and had a nice conversation with a woman from Waldoboro ME, who was moving to Washington with her cat, Frankie. Luckily, they announced that they were going to run short on overhead space and so were offering free checking of carry-ons, which we jumped at.
We had seats together and finally boarded the full plane, which left the gate pretty much on time at 9:00AM. Sarah had the window and Dave had the middle. I actually got in some snooze time (which I needed), the meal/snack we had ordered wasn’t that bad, and the jet stream was giving us West-bound travelers a break that day, so we were ahead of schedule. They offered free movies if you hooked up your phone to the on-board wifi and watched on the small screen with headphones. I read instead and snoozed and played cribbage on my phone.
It was pretty clear weather that day and Sarah had fun watching out the window. Mostly cities and farms across mid-America, but then the badlands and the mountains started as we crossed the Dakotas and Montana, and we had fabulous views of Glacier NP. Then civilization started up again and we landed in Seattle. And we were instantly delighted. We flatlanders were kind of ready for it, but were just amazed to be able to see snow-capped mountains in several directions from the airport itself, though it was a hot day in the city.
Picked up our checked bags (Alaska Airlines gets good grades, including their commitment to get checked bags out on the carousel quickly), found the shuttle to the car rental, and waited in line at Thrifty’s, eventually getting a black Chevrolet Trailblazer with just 532 miles on the odometer. We’d originally reserved a compact but had to switch to something else because they ran out of compacts, so chose a small SUV, which ended up costing us less money and working fine. The Trailblazer had a good amount of room for us three and odd luggage/food/maps/shoes/etc., got good mileage, and didn’t ever blink at the mountain/rugged roads we put it through. We named her “Muddy.”
Left the car rental place and headed East on Washington 518 and then South on Interstate 5 along with a shocking amount of other cars, the road swelled to five lanes at times. Luckily the left-hand lane was a (free) HOV lane and we could zip along, down to Washington 16 in Tacoma, where we headed West and then North over the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. The Interstate had been as urban an experience as you might expect, but as we crossed the bridge we were knocked over again by the beauty of the mountains off to our left and dead ahead, and the blue, lovely, open stretch of water we were crossing.
In Bremerton, 16 turned into route 3, and we exited on route 310 for some shopping. First was an employee-owned, huge WinCo Foods supermarket … quite the warehouse but we managed to get our small travel supply of PB&J makings, bananas, chips, beer, cider, water, granola bars, and bug spray and sunscreen. Then down the street to The Novel Tree for some gummies. Then back on the road to the North.
We were a little disappointed to not get many glimpses of the spectacular coastline we were driving up, but the suburbs, marinas, naval stations, and factories eventually petered out and we tourists were delighted by such prosaic things as the wildflowers and weeds growing on the sides of the road. We were surrounded by banks of ferns and grasses, incredible carpets of ox-eye daisies, and sudden explosions of yellow bushes, which we determined were a mix of exotic Scotch broom and gorse, but were beautiful.
Route 3 turned into route 104, crossed another arm of Puget Sound on the Hood Canal Floating Bridge, and continued out West as route 101, which we’d be on for a while; we followed it in our circumnavigation of the Olympic Peninsula. Our destination was the Dungeness Recreation Area and National Wildlife Refuge in Sequim, a short drive North on Kitchen-Dick Road through farms that looked like they never saw snow (even though snow-covered mountains were looming in our rear-view) and more spectacular fields of daisies.
We pulled up to the end of Voice of America Road (guess they have to broadcast across the Strait to the Canadiens to protect Democracy??) into a small parking lot. We finally emerged from the car, ready to start our adventures, and were immediately knocked over by the blasting West-Northwest wind, though there was still a berm between us and the water. We put on extra layers, tightened the straps on our hats, and set off down the seaside path through the Recreation Area up the shore towards the NWR.
Some setting of the scene may be in order here. Between Washington and British Columbia is a huge arm of the sea called the Juan de Fuca Strait (part of the Salish Sea, that extends up into Canada). The prevailing Northwest wind blows sand down the strait and has made spits on the Washington coast, such as the Dungeness spit. We were up on the bluff, hiking beside clusters of beach roses (native Nootka roses), ferns, the ubiquitous salmonberry bush, and plants we’d never seen before, stopping at viewpoints to gawk down at the turbulent sea and across the @15 miles of brilliantly lit water to Vancouver Island, and being blasted at times by the sand, though we were high above the beach.
It was about half a mile, past the campground, to the entrance to the NWR, where they have a nice kiosk and bathrooms, and we had a short conversation with a volunteer who answered some of our amazed questions and checked my America the Beautiful pass. The path then took us downhill past huge trees to the start of the spit itself, and I have no idea how to describe how it was so immediate, was all I’d imagined, but was more. The wind was blasting us, the waves were threatening us, large seabirds struggled with the wind, the driftwood logs that had washed up on shore were massive, the sun was beating down, and the spit extended out and out into the sea with the faint mass of Mt. Baker seemingly hovering over the lighthouse out at the end of the 5-mile spit. Our cameras had no hope of capturing what it was like.
We walked around the sea side and the bay side of the spit a bit, but would have been foolish to venture down it, even though it would have been glorious. Well, glorious on the way there but impossible on the way back, with the wind and the driven sand in our faces. The accumulating sand actually adds 18 feet to the spit every year. We soaked in as much as we could, this was a great start to our vacation! But it was already getting near 9:00PM by our body clocks, and the restaurants we’d researched in our destination of Port Angeles all closed at 8:00.
Walked back up the path from the spit and detoured on the Primitive Trail to get back to the kiosk, rather than the straight trail we’d just been down. Back to the car, and it was just another half hour drive down local roads to 101 and into Port Angeles. Port Angeles is a funny town, nestled between the towering mountains of Olympic NP to the South and the wild Juan de Fuca Strait to the North. It’s a bit of a port town, a bit of an artsy town, and has a mix of nice houses and lots of run down ones, between straight streets of strip malls and auto repair shops.
We headed past the hotel we were going to stay at and into the “downtown” area, to the Midtown Public House, which is a really fun little brewpub disguised as an Asian fusion restaurant (or vice versa). I had a fantastic bowl of udon noodles and pork belly, but was too tired to finish it. Sarah and Dave were getting pretty tired too by that time. We headed back up the road to the Super 8 by Wyndham Port Angeles and were assigned a nice, quiet, small 2-room suite on the third floor (only 28 steps up) from which you could just see a mountain if you peeked around the corner. We dragged everything upstairs, stowed it all, played a quick game of our take on 3-person cribbage, and then I went to bed … who knows what the others did.
Sarah took pictures of these wildflowers during that day:
- Scottish Broom
- Gorse
- Smith's Cress
- Nootka rose
- orange honeysuckle
- salal
- Baldhip Rose
- trailing blackberry
- Lawn daisy
- Western Starflower
- Threeleaf Foamflower
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