Fires, Forests, and (No) Ferries

As the sun rose on Friday, July 26, so did we, getting all our things (freshly cleaned!) back into the van and helping the Westers pack up their car. They were headed to a college visit for Joel then back to Boise via Mammoth Lakes, and we were headed up to Lynden, WA to see some other Westers. We finished packing, then made a long goodbye before heading up the road. Our path was quite simple: up I-5 for untold miles all the way through California, Oregon, and Washington nearly to the Canadian border. So, we got going and immediately hit traffic in LA, of course. Faith had the pleasure of driving as I needed to catch up on hours missed during the busyness of the past week. She did a fantastic job and got us through traffic and out into the Central Valley in no time. We traded off and kept moving northwards, and I quickly took a wrong turn, taking us off I-5 onto another highway that, thankfully, parallels it to the east. We met back up with it just south of Fresno, CA after a long couple hours of flat, straight driving. The drive was pretty nice: the traffic wasn’t bad and we had a beautiful view up into the Sierra Nevada to our right the whole time. We got some neat views of huge plumes of smoke from the SQF Lightning Complex fire in the southern part of the mountains and the huge Park Fire to our north. We made pretty good time and got a lot of miles under our belts, but we didn’t even come close to getting out of California, man is it tall. We found a large, wooded park about an hour south of Redding, CA, and claimed it as our home for the night. We quickly passed out and slept soundly well into the next morning. It was our first night back in the van, and we both agreed it was the best sleep we had gotten in a while.

Fully rested for the first time in at least two weeks, we got back onto the interstate and headed north past Redding, out of the Central Valley, and back into the mountains. Despite the proximity of the Park and other fires, we got great views of Mt. Shasta, a 14,000 foot-tall volcano at the southern end of the Cascade Range. Faith and I agreed that we needed to come back some day to climb it. As we continued north, we eventually crossed into Oregon and out of California for the first time in nearly a month. Central Oregon where I-5 passes is mountainous and sparsely populated, something I was not really expecting. The mountains were relatively small but covered in green forests, at least as far as we could see through the smoke from those forests’ far away neighbors burning. We stopped in Medford for a much-needed break to get gas and lunch (+samples) at Costco. We elected to again split most of a rotisserie chicken and a fruit smoothie (highly recommend) for lunch. Rejuvenated, we hit the road with gusto and soon found ourselves in Portland; Oregon was apparently substantially shorter than California, evidenced by our exiting Oregon the same day we entered it. Since we had some time to spare, we opted for the scenic route around the Olympic peninsula to take in a new place that neither of us had been to before. So, we exited I-5 and made our way into the deep Pacific Northwest forests and onto smaller and smaller roads. Soon enough, we found ourselves traveling down a windy tree tunnel interspersed with a handful of small towns and the odd farm. We wanted to see Olympic National Park but didn’t really know what we wanted to do there, so we stopped just outside the park in the town of Amanda Park on the shores of Lake Quinault. We poked around the water’s edge, watched the sun set, finished our leftover chicken, then passed out for another night of sleep.

The next morning we didn’t get to sleep in quite as long as we had a lot of ground to cover. Olympic National Park and Olympic National Forest take up the entirety of the center of the Olympic Peninsula. The park is accessed through sporadic roads that wind their way up into the mountains from all around the edge of the peninsula. Additionally, large portions of the coast are protected within the bounds of the park. We didn’t have the time to go up and down all the roads to the coast and mountains, so we decided to just take the main road around the peninsula and stop at the visitor center on the north side of the park. Before we got all the way up there, I wanted to stop at a beach along the way. Soon enough we passed by a sign for Ruby Beach and quickly pulled off to explore it. We found some sea stacks, drift wood, cute little pebbles, and a ton of perfect skipping stones. We made some beautiful skips before heading back to our car and down the road. Our plan was to stop on Whidbey Island, where Faith’s dad had grown up, to get some lumpia (egg rolls) on our way to Lynden. Turns out the place they normally went to was closed but there was a local joint in Port Angeles near the Olympic NP visitor center. In order to assuage our hunger, we stopped for food first. I’ve never had lumpia before, and I can confidently say I will have them again: they were very tasty. We made a short jaunt up the road to the busy visitor center to get a postcard and park map and decided what to do next. We hadn’t done much in the park, and I wanted to see Hurricane Ridge, but that would also take a few hours and make us have a much later ferry across the sound. We saw that ferries went until 10 PM, but it was only 1 PM, so we figured we would be fine. So, we drove up into the Olympics and got some spectacular views of the whole range from a short hike above the parking area. We wound back down and out of the park and soon found ourselves at the ferry terminal in Port Townsend. Unexpectedly, we encountered a very long line of cars. A worker made his way down the queue informing everyone that standby was full until at least 8:45 with a slim shot of making the 10 PM ferry. We didn’t like those odds, so we opted for the 4.5 hour drive all the way around Puget Sound. Thankfully, we only encountered a few delays due to traffic and construction; otherwise, the drive was good but long. It offered us a good opportunity to call my parents for the first time in a few weeks and keep them up past their bedtime as we forgot we were two hours behind them. As night fell, we broke our cardinal rule of not driving after dark to arrive at Rick and Julie’s, Faith’s uncle and aunt, around 10 PM. We stayed up chatting with them for a while before climbing into bed and quickly passing out; it had been a long day of driving and we were ready for some sleep.

Animals Seen

• Sea gulls
• Crows
• Lots of cows!
• Turkey vultures

Stats

• ~1,700 miles of driving
• 1 new national park
• 2 new national forests
• 1 beach
• 1 gripe with the Puget Sound ferry system