Day #29—Port Angeles/Sequim KOA--Olympic Peninsula, WA--June 20, 2011

We took the car to the Toyota place first thing this morning and they put us back on the road. Afterwards, we asked the mechanic a good place for breakfast, and he directed us to the Blue Beacon not an eighth of a mile down the road. Here we had a café style breakfast. I had corned beef hash, poached eggs, and toast and Sarah had two eggs over with bacon and rye toast. 

Breakfast and the drive inland today revived our spirits. Halfway to Sequim, on the east side of the Olympic Peninsula, the sun came out and buoyed us up. Don’t know how people live in the wet, grey, foggy north coast. It got old with us after only two days . . . not that I’m complaining about the temperatures, mind you. We’ve been in the mid 50s low 60s for the past few days. Plus, all this rain and fog produce abundant wildflowers and cool, beautiful big forests.

We stopped in the Olympic National Forest to walk a short loop trail and view a deep chasm with a ribbon waterfall flowing into it. Moss blanketed the forest floor, and the tree leaves and flowers seemed to stand out brilliantly along the trail. Many of the trees sported filmy strands of Spanish Moss and were wrapped in star moss and another type of moss the name of which I do not know. 

We also stopped at a salmon hatchery. Washington hatcheries raise 16 different species of fish: Chinook, Pink, Coho, Chum, Sockeye, and Kokanee Salmon, as well as Rainbow, Steelhead, Cutthroat, Brown, Eastern Brook, and Lake Trout. But, nothing much was going on and wouldn’t be going on until fall we learned. 

We saw mile after mile of forests in various stages of harvest or regrowth. The Weyerhauser Paper Corporation watermark is evident everywhere, and we passed logging trucks headed toward paper plants in Aberdeen and Potlatch, on the western side of the Hood Canal. A denuded mountain overlooks the town of Raymond—or at least that’s the part of the tree harvesting cycle we saw when we drove through. Raymond's roadside attractions are not crafted of wood, however, but of metal. I remembered them instantly from the 2000 Coast Ride. 

This stretch along Hwy 101 is called the "Raymond Wildlife Heritage Sculptures Corridor" and displays dozens of rusty metal cutouts—a mixture of area wildlife, early and modern townspeople, and logging industry scenes. In one place, bear and fox frolic next to a load of logs pulled by a team of oxen. In another, two metal men are sawing down a large real tree. At a bike trailhead, a bicyclist leans against his bike and downs a bottle of water. Raymond was having a cancer drive and some of the sculptures, including the guy on the bicycle, were adorned with purple ribbons. The Corridor was started in 1993 and created with the work of local artists. It is eye-catching and clever.

In Raymond—the "Town of Metal People"—are whimsical, metal, 3-dimensional figures. One shows a photographer with a camera and telephoto snapping some wildlife. Another depicts a girl feeding an ice cream cone to a large dog/wolf (above). 

Forgot to mention that yesterday when we took our unintentional tour of the peninsula across Willipa Bay, we saw many RV Parks and one called Pegg’s Over 55 RV Park. We also saw a couple of RV resorts. An RV park is entirely different from an RV Resort. An RV resort sells permanent RV plots for considerable $$ to those who want to live out their retirement years in a pretty or interesting place. One put up the C2C riders in 2009. It was located on Idaho’s Pend Oreille River and the lots were going for upwards of $150,000 each. On this detour, we also passed a procession of Model-T cars with drivers who looked like possible original owners. 

We saw two interesting signs today: “Road Approaches Ahead” (meaning intersections?), and “No Unmuffled Engine Brakes,” a polite way of saying “No Jake Brakes,” a sign with which I am more familiar.

Our scare for the day occurred on a fast section of four-lane divided 101. A woman pulled onto the road and started at us driving south in our northbound lanes. The car ahead of me went right, and I braked in the inside lane. Last we saw in our rearview mirror, she had pulled onto the median. We had no cell coverage so could not alert the police. 

Our disappointment for the day occurred when it dawned on us that we could not go to Victoria tomorrow as planned. Neither of us has a passport with us, and one cannot get back into the U.S. without one or a Nexus card. Darn that we did not think of this before! There are still plenty of things to see and do on the Olympic Peninsula and Whidbey Island, but Victoria and Butchart Gardens would have been fun. 

We will be here for the rest of the week so have many options. Tomorrow we plan to drive up to Hurricane Ridge in the Olympic Mountains. These mountains tower over our campsite.

Olympic Mountains from our campsite