Will and I decided to head over to the Olympic Peninsula this last weekend to escape the woes of everyday life and stress. While we were trying to escape the busy-ness of the work week, we felt like we were characaters in that 'Rat Race' movie the entire weekend as we competed for a spot on the ferry, a campground, and the even fought against the weather...
(We loved this sign next to the lighthouse - which by foot is a 5 mile hike down a spit (long piece of land surrounded by water). We opted to kayak out to the lighthouse, which was just under a 10 mile roundtrip route. The sign read "Welcome to Serenity" and then the other direction it said "Reality: 5 miles")
Wait for ferry in downtown Seattle at 2:30pm on Friday afternoon: 2 hours
Length of ferry ride: 45 minutes
Time from ferry landing to Sequim, WA: 1.5 hours
Time to find kiosk at a post office in the middle of nowhere: 3 towns and 5 hours
Number of campgrounds that accept reservations: None
Number of campgrounds that had an open campsite available: 1
Beating everyone else to it: Priceless.
Let the Rat Race begin!
As we neared 9pm and still couldn't find a campsite, we found out via one of the rangers that there was one more campground 3 miles up the coast and they had 1 tent site left.
(In your best racer announcer voice): And the racers are off! Will and Jenni Thomas scurry from the ranger office back to their car and jump in. They make a mess of the gravel and leave a cloud of dust as they race out of the parking lot!! What are they going to do, it's just a 2 lane road, thick with trees and cars.
Pass the first car! Right on - these folks are serious campers, they won't let anyone get in their way.
Pass the 2nd car!! Ooooh and they get flashed with the brights from the car behind. OH....but what is ahead....it looks like a Jeep Cherokee and the back looks like it's full of camping gear. Definitely another camper. Will they let this stop them? No!! PASS again, they fly by the Jeep and turn into the campground and race down the gravel road.
Will runs up to the ranger office and spews out the words as fast as he can "Do you have any campsites left tonight? We'll take it!!"
Done! And the Thomases score the one and only last campsites available on the entire north end of the Olympic peninsula!! (Crowd cheering loudly)
We also kayaked out to the Dungenous Bay Lighthouse. It was quite the trip. We had the tides against us and the wind, and not to mention it was a 10 mile kayaking trip. I thought we were going to get attacked by harbor seals or pooped on by seagulls. But we finally made it.
Harbor Seals - We kayaked around 75 of these little buggers. I swear they were following us just waiting to jump up, make me scream and tip us over. But they didn't.
The Racers (LOL)
A cute kayaker I found
Reality: 5 Miles thataway
A passing cruise ship
Serenity
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