June 22-28: First Week of Summer: Olympic Peninsula with Nana!

Over the weekend I hung out with my friends Sara at her new house in Shoreline and Karen at Magnusson Park.

We did a day of packing and prep work for our trip out to the Olympic Peninsula. We also had the first swim team practice of the season for Edison and Charlotte. They had 12 kids in the pool - one on each end of a lane - and did sets that way to social distance in the pool. Both Edison and Charlotte also snuck in a bike ride with friends on Monday, too. We left for Olympic National Park first thing Thursday, towing our pop up camper. My mom met up with us in her camper. We ended up staying at an RV park near Lake Crescent the first night and exploring Marymere Falls and the Lake Crescent Lodge area beach on our first afternoon. Being in the woods felt nourishing and reinvigorating and everything felt really fresh and alive. The campground we stayed at had a really nice lawn, tetherball, and a stunning view of the mountains across the valley. (This was after driving to Sol Duc Hot Springs for a reservation only to find out my reservation was made for July (d’oh! and and I made it over the phone - should have done it myself online!). 

 Luckily Sol Duc had an opening for a cabin Wednesday night, so we transferred our reservation and headed over to the Hot Springs Pools Wednesday morning. The hot springs were awesome. Because they are limited to hotel guests only, there were hardly any other people to share them with! The kids loved getting into the pool again! That afternoon the kids and I hiked Sol Duc Falls which was really stunning and had way more CFS than Marymere Falls. We also chilled at Lake Crescent on a little beach for a couple hours in the sunshine. That night, we had a cute little cabin and settled in well for the evening after an early dinner and second swim session. Reed and Charlotte joined me on a late evening, pajama-clad, bike ride exploration and we found a gurgling outflow of more hot springs water near the bike path.

 Thursday morning the kids went with Nana to the pools while I snuck in a 5-mile hike to Mink Lake. The lake was nice, but not extraordinary - it was shallow and large, though, and I imagine coming back with an innertube and floating the day away in it. We did a second swim session after a picnic lunch that had fewer than 10 of us swimming. It was unreal and totally amazing. After that, we drove to a campground near the Elwha River and Port Angeles. It was well-kept and we had a nice big area on a grassy lawn to set up our digs. The kids enjoyed riding bikes around the loops, checking out the RVs, and eating fresh peas and veggies from the gardens on the property. We walked down to the site of the old, earthen, Elwha Dam, that had been removed a few years ago. It was quite a site and hard to imagine a river with that much force being dammed up. We enjoyed sunshine until late at night and a nice fire with donated wood from a neighboring camper and Edison’s fire skills. 

On Friday the kids and I drove up Hurricane Ridge to hike Sunrise Ridge while Nana went to Sequim and the Dungesness Spit. We saw a mama bear and her two cubs on the drive up (and two more bears coming down). It was a beautiful, sunny, post-card day up on Hurricane Ridge (5200 feet elevation). We saw deer, marmots, chipmunks, eagles, and more in addition to the bears. Best part is that we were there early and didn’t run into crowds of people. Even the views of the parking lot were spectacular and the kids were really excited to be up on the ridge. I can’t believe I hadn’t taken them there yet! It took us less than 45 minutes to go back to our campsite after the hike and we took a little rest there before heading out 112 to the Salt Creek area. First stop was a boat ramp and a rocky beach with a lot of tidepools to explore and views back up to the Olympic Mountains. Afterwards, we continued west and found another part of the Salt Creek Beach and campground. It was a sandy beach at low tide and fun to play on, though the weather had turned cooler and cloudy. We hiked up the bluff and explored the empty campground and an old bunker from WWII when the area had been called Camp Hayden. We enjoyed another nice dinner and campfire at night.

We headed back to drizzly Seattle Saturday and enjoyed a birthday party for my friend Sara’s son, Charlie in the afternoon. Sara’s son, Ollie, and Charlotte are just a couple months apart and we’ve now updated the picture of the two of them side-by-side. That night we caravaned with the Birgfeld’s to a pop-up drive in movie at the LFP Town Center to celebrate Bryn and Harper’s 11th birthday. We had a nice, socially-distanced, dinner inside the LFP Bar and Grill. It was fun to see the girls interacting and having a blast with each other. After dinner we settled into our cars to watch Goonies in a downpour. It was a fun experience, probably made more memorable by the less-than-ideal weather. We ended up leaving halfway through for bedtimes, but will finish the movie later together (after many lectures on the inappropriateness of SO MUCH of that movie, by yours truly).