Do you remember when I said we were heading to the Olympic Hot Springs? Well, nature had some other plans for us. A road closure at the Madison Falls entrance to the park due to a flood washout meant we had to come up with a Plan B.
We set off for the coast to peep some tide pools and scope out an old WWII bunker at Salt Creek in Crescent Bay, WA. While Darrel drove, I whipped up some extra gourmet PB&J’s, which we enjoyed with a side of fresh picked wild blackberries. Yum! The water was still a little high for good tide pooling, but we managed to see some neat stuff regardless. We tickled a thousand tiny anemones, tracked a bunch of miniature crabs hard at work, admired the savagery and hunting prowess of the seabirds via their piles of emptied mussel and urchin shells, climbed some very slippery rocks, snuck through a natural bridge, and scanned the shoreline for shiny tossed shells. It was a beautiful area well worth the stop, albeit a quick one.
Next we spun “Cousteau” around some crazy twists and turns on the road around Crescent Lake. The clear turquoise lake is massive and pristine. The thick forested mountains enveloping the lake peek through low-hanging clouds and rolling fog. The view was nothing short of spectacular.
On the road again, we made a pit stop in Forks. Now, if you haven’t heard of Forks, that probably means you’re not an 11 year old girl. Or that you haven’t read the Twilight vampire books. Fine, fine. Unfortunately, as we did not see a single vampire glittering in the sunlight as we’d expected, we carried on.
We wanted a night on the beach, so we opted for a site at the Kalaloch Beach Campground. The grounds were, again, incredibly lush and green, and set atop a cliff overlooking a soft, powdery sand beach. It’s hard to describe the immense and overwhelming beauty of the melding of such picturesque scapes as the temperate rain forest and the Pacific coast. It’s truly unlike any other.
Glamping was the name of the game today. We made a delicious dinner of Field Roast Sausages and vegetable skewers, with a vanmade–see what I did there? *wink wink*–herbed apricot jam glaze. It’s amazing how creative and inventive we can get when we are limited in our material possessions. After all, we had a refrigerator the size of a six-pack, so we had to use what we had by making more than peanut butter and jelly sandwiches out of peanut butter and jelly. Then we took a stroll, naturally with wine in hand, down to the shore and marveled at the distance we could walk out in the low tide. We wrapped up our lovely day with a crackling fire and some storytelling before bed. Perfection.
