D - Belated Washington Trip Report

Last July Mike and I were able to take a wonderful 15-year anniversary trip to the state of Washington. It was a short visit as I was joining him on the tail end of a business trip, but we managed to pack A LOT into the two full days that we had there - because that's what we do. :)

When I landed in Seattle we had an almost three hour drive to our hotel in Port Angeles. I was starving, so we stopped on the way in Gig Harbor where we ate our nicest meal of the entire trip (food is important to me, so this is worth noting). We ate at Anthony's Restaurant where our table had this BEAUTIFUL view of the harbor and Mt. Rainier in the distance. It was just perfect.



Our first full day of the trip was HUGE. We began with a hike up Hurricane Ridge in the Olympic National Park. It offered "amazing views of the Olympic Mountains and the Olympic Peninsula Coastline." Indeed.

Fortunately, I brought along my own nature photography buff, so no beautiful scenery goes undocumented.

Our next stop (and my personal favorite) was kayaking around Lake Crescent. This was the most beautiful body of water I have ever seen - and that really means something given the strong pull we feel toward water vacationing. It was so clear, the weather was absolutely perfect, we were some of the only people on the lake, and the mountains surrounding the lake were just breathtaking. I couldn't help but sing a few verses of "How Great Thou Art."

Since Mike's presence often goes unnoted in our photos, here's one I caught with my phone.

And here's what he usually looks like...

Our next activity was a short hike to Marymere Falls.

And a quick tour of the Hoh Rain Forest

Yes, that was all day one.

We realized when we chose to go to the rain forest that we would not be able to make it to the ferry that we needed to catch to get to our hotel on Whidbey Island, so we had to make other arrangements. Turns out, this isn't as easy in Washington as it is in Oklahoma (or anywhere else I've ever travelled). Almost all of the hotels in this area are locally owned, mom & pop type places rather than national chains, and their front offices close fairly early. Because we didn't' even start looking for a place to stay until 5 pm or so, this proved to be a problem. Also, tmobile apparently isn't big in Washington, so we had no internet service by which to search for someplace.

Fortunately, we were able to stop alongside the road in a place where we actually had a weak cell signal and get in a call to my dad who found this place for us. Thanks, Dad! We wound up here - back at Lake Crescent. We were able to get an A-frame cabin at the Log Cabin Resort, and it was fantastic. The stars that night were the brightest I have ever seen, and I didn't even have to get out of bed the next morning to be able to see this view.

From the outside...

And, of course, the inside....

Because Mike's business experience in Washington had him spending so much time on Whidbey Island, he really fell in love with it and wanted to take me there. It was so very picturesque! We went to Village Pizzeria set on the side of a hill overlooking Puget Sound.

While we were waiting on our food, we had an incredible experience - we saw 5 bald eagles! That was my first time to ever seen one in the wild. Mike, of course, rushed down the hillside to the beach to capture this guy up close.

We took a faster route leaving Whidbey Island than the ferry. We drove across Deception Pass. But not before stopping and hanging out there for a while.

The problem with not blogging a trip for 6 months after you take it is that you forget a lot of details. I've been trying to figure out where we were on our last night, but I just can't find it. So, wherever we were, we somehow found our way to a beach and ate dinner there. We walked along the shoreline, enjoyed people watching, and seeing the sunset. It was a perfect end to a fabulous trip.

A HUGE thank you to my parents for making this trip possible by watching our kiddos during a very hot week of VBS. We kept hearing their lousy, miserably hot and humid weather reports while we were nice and cool in the mountains, and that little escape somehow made it even more refreshing. As always, it was very good to see my babies again at the end!