Washington Loop

After months of planning a summer vacation to Glacier National Park in Montana, we found ourselves just a couple of days away needing to change plans.  With all of the lightning-induced fires that have plagued Idaho and Montana this summer, we took one last look at the webcams in the park, and decided that it just wasn't going to be an enjoyable trip with all of the smoke up there.

We weren't too terribly disappointed, however.  Now that we live in the Northwest, there are oodles of places we want to go explore.  On a whim, we chose Washington state.  Suzanne and the kids had never been to Washington before, and since it is the Evergreen State, it wasn't suffering from the smoke as bad.

In ten days, we explored Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument,  Mount Rainier National Park, Olympic National Park, and Seattle.  We put 2020 miles on the car, and 39.7 miles on our feet.  At that, there was still more that we could've explored had there been more time to do so.  Below is a route of our trip.

Map Courtesy of GPS Visualizer

Highlights

Whew... we sure packed in a lot of stuff into our Washington tour.  Not bad for planning this trip just a couple of days before leaving.  It's a good thing we had ten days to do all of it:

• Mount Saint Helens National Volcanic Monument:
• Ape Cave Hike (Longest Lava Tube in the United States)
• Trail of Two Forests Hike
• Miner's Car Exhibit
• Meta Lake Hike
• Windy Ridge Hike
• Mount Rainier National Park
• Twin Firs Loop Hike
• Nisqually Glacier Vista Hike
• Box Canyon Hike
• Trail of the Shadows Hike
• Carter/Madcap Falls Hike
• Myrtle Falls Hike
• Christine Falls
• Narada Falls
• 2006 Flood Damage Presentation (18 inches / 24 hours = Millions of dollars of damage!)
• Olympic National Park
• Second Beach Hike
• Rialto Beach Hike
• Perseids Meteor Shower
• Hoh Rain Forest Hike
• Sol Duc Falls Hike
• Hurricane Ridge Hike
• Lewis River Waterfalls
• Lower Falls
• Middle Falls
• Upper Falls
• Taitpatum Falls
• Copper Creek Falls
• Big Creek Falls
• Seattle, WA
• Space Needle
• Woodland Park Zoo
• Seattle Acquarium
• Children's Museum
• Pioneer Square
• Seattle Center
• Puget Sound Ferries

Lowlights

We were actually favored with excellent weather conditions for the most part.  While the Olympic Peninsula is the wettest place in the contiguous 48 states, there was just a little bit of rain while we were driving to our campground, but by the time we arrived, the skies were opening up.  We spent almost three days there, and never got a drop of rain on us!  In fact, we spent almost all of our time west of the Cascades, and we only got a little drizzle of moisture on our first day.  Also, there were very few bugs and mosquitos to deal with.  Otherwise, we were favored with sunny skies and idyllic temperatures.  Even so, there were a few things that could've gone better.  Here is a small list of complaints:

• Not enough time to see everything!
• Mount Saint Helens gave us just a peek of a view through the clouds
• Mount Rainier spent most of the time in the clouds

Favorites

Here's what each family member said was their absolute favorite activity of the trip:

Raymond:	Space Needle (Seattle)
Amelia:	Rialto Beach (Olympic NP)
Suzanne:	Waterfalls (All over the place!)
Mike:	Nisqually Glacier (Mt. Rainier NP)

Takeaways

Here are a few final thoughts from our vacation:

• Washington truly is the Evergreen state.  We drove for days and days and days, and it seemed like we were in one giant forest the whole time.  Even the Seattle area is loaded with trees on every square inch of land that hasn't already been developed.
• Washington has a lot of water.  We lost count of the number of waterfalls that we saw, but I'm sure it was probably somewhere around twenty!  Of course, this shouldn't have surprised us... to be the Evergreen State, you need lots of water.  We found it very difficult to pick a favorite waterfall... each one has its own special charm.  
• There is a lot of fun stuff to do in Seattle.  We only gave ourselves one day in our itenerary,  ended up spending two days, and then wished we would've had three!  Our city-boy, Raymond, was really disappointed to leave!
• The beach is a great place for a meteor shower... especially if it's at the peak of the best meteor shower of the year, which this year happened to coincide with a new moon!  We could see gobs of stars, and a great assortment of meteors.
• Olympic National Park is huge!  It is very difficult to access this park, but it is well worth the effort.  95% is designated as wilderness area, so we just got to see the highlights from the road, and that took us nearly three days.  Olympic protects 75 miles of pristine Washington coastline, and only a few small points are accessible by car... And the rest?  By backpack and foot only!  The range is simply spectacular, and both Mike and Suzanne agreed that we felt like breaking out in singing "The Sound of Music" for their majestic Alps-like appearance.

Photos

As you've come to expect from the Lewis Family, there are loads of pictures to wade through from our vacation.  We've uploaded the following five albums consisting of over 300 pictures!  

• Mount St. Helens National Monument
• Mount Rainier National Park
• Seattle
• Olympic National Park
• Miscellaneous