The Olympic Loop - Days 31 and 32

The North Western most point in the US
see all photos »

So here's a fact many of us may not have been aware of...the Olympic National Park is HUUUUUUUUGE!  I mean really really huge.  We had grand plans of spending two days seeing the whole park, but the reality is you have to really only pick one or two locations and stick with those.  We failed miserably planning for this leg of the trip.

So we left Seattle later than we wanted and got stuck in traffic.  We had planned on camping near the hot springs, but when we map quested it, we realized it was like 3 more hours away.  So we camped on the eastern side of the park.  When we got up the next day, we spent 1.5 hours driving to the info center.  PHEW.  Then we decided to go to the North Western most part of the US, Cape Flattery.  Which took us another 1.5 hours.  And then the road was closed so we had to take a shuttle, which took another hour.  We hiked out to the point which was beautiful - the ocean out there is really spectacular.  We hiked back...and then waited 45 min for the shuttle to get back.  We didn't end up leaving til almost 6pm, so we spent our whole day basically driving and seeing one cool thing.  We were pretty frusterated with our day to be honest, so we decided to go to Dungeness Point for some Dungeness crab.  Another couple hours and we made it to Three Crabs for some great seafood.  Then another hour and a half back to our campsite...arg.

see all photos »

The next day we got up and drove to the Hoh Rainforest for a quick hike.  We'll leave out how long that drive was ;o)  The rainforest is beautiful - much differnt than a tropical rainforest but really beautiful.

We drove then to Long Beach - Oregon, not California - to camp.  We stopped for dinner at the Shoalwater, a little bed and breakfast, for oysters.  Long Beach is home to Oysterville and much of the oyster production in the US, so we knew they'd be fresh.  Ok so Josh orders a dozen oysters on the half shell, and they tell him they're out of season but they have shooters, so he gets a dozen of those.  Dove ordered fried oysters (cause I loooooove them).  So Dove says to Josh, I didn't know you liked raw oysters, and Josh says, I don't know that I do.  Dove says, Um, you do know that oyster shooters are raw...and he says, I do now!  He was a trooper and ate all of them, and enjoyed them too.  Yay!  The food there was exceptional, even better than the Three Crabs the night before.

see all photos »

Tomorrow - back to Oregon!