Olympic National Park

“Alaska South Annex” is what Greg and Marilyn call the Olympic Peninsula. It does seem like a small corner of Alaska was chipped off and put here next to Seattle. Ocean, Mountains, Forest, and Farms.

Mount Olympus

Having the opportunity to visit and see all this beauty makes us realize just how lucky we are in this lifestyle. We have seen so much of America. Almost as out of the way as Big Bend park in Texas, Olympic National Park needs a special visit – you don’t just happen upon it, and no road goes thru it. I’ll bet the percentage of Americans who have been to this peninsula is pretty small. We put Washington State on our RVing map early on in our travels, but that was only because we stayed on the Washington side of the Columbia river once.
Sequim, where we were staying at Greg and Marilyn’s house, is so close to the Hurricane Ridge entrance to the park, we could take an afternoon ride to go there – so we did. That was our “Apres-Show” treat for ourselves.

View from the Hurricane Ridge visitors center

Panorama from the Hurricane Ridge Visitor center

Do we look happy? Hard to believe that we even worked for half of this day! But, when we get to play ...

When we left Greg and Marilyn’s we were bound for a Thousand Trails park on the coast, south of the National Park, but Greg made us promise we would stop and see Rialto Beach. Believe it or not, he really had to twist our arms for this. I had planned to get to our destination and get back to work because it was the end of the month and I have a newsletter to write.  But a promise is a promise! So we postponed our TT reservations for one day and stayed at a park in Forks. From there we could see two more attractions of Olympic National Park: Rialto Beach and Hoh Rainforest.

We decided the beach would be best at sunset, so we visited the Rainforest first. I happened to be a bright, sunshiny day, so it didn't seem quite like a rainforest! The "Hall of Mosses" trail is the must-walk attraction at the Hoh visitor center.

But, Greg was SOO right that Rialto Beach was the to-die-for spot! We gathered our camp chairs, a bottle of wine, and two glasses and settled in to watch the sunset.

We weren't the only ones enjoying the beach. I happened to catch this group as they posed for their special, fun picture.