Epic RVing with the Gradys - Day 10 - Olympic Peninsula

Well, we’re about half way through. RVing is becoming a bit challenging. Between losing the water for a full day and being in the Northwest where nothing ever gets dry, people are starting to show some chinks in the armor. One of the men’s toilets today was overflowing onto the floor, and it wasn’t nice, fresh water flowing out… We move on tomorrow.

Today we visited Olympic National Park, our third National Park on this trip! Olympic is situated on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington, and due to the fact that there are mountains in the middle of the peninsula, it makes it somewhat difficult to get anywhere. You pretty much have to travel around the perimeter to get anywhere. So you might see something that is 30 miles away and it will take 2 hours and 30 minutes to get to it. We chose the closest place in Olympic National Park, the Stairsteps area, and aimed for that, which was pretty good - it wasn’t too busy, and the foliage was very lush.

We targeted a 2 mile loop trail that traveled along a river, but we started out on the wrong one, or at least we thought so! After about half a mile, we doubled back to the parking lot and found the correct trail, then followed that throughout. Of course, 1.5 miles into the loop we ended up right back where we turned around in the first place. I guess we call that bonus hiking!

We drove back out and decided we’d like to go to the the coast but found it was 2.5 hours away, so we aimed for Aberdeen instead, only 1 hour away. Aberdeen was… fine… It is apparently the logging capital of the world! We didn’t do much other than head towards the coolest sounding brewery in town, Steam Donkey Brewing. The beer here was actually quite good, though I was severely disappointed in the logo. With a name like Steam Donkey, I was hoping for something a bit more creative and gaudy, but alas, not to be.

We headed back towards “home” by way of Olympia, WA, the state capital. We targeted a seafood restaurant on the sound which was pretty decent. After dinner we headed back towards Harvee. We finally made it back at a reasonable time, about 7:00, so Mireille and I swam, Quinton played basketball, while Jenny did some laundry. All in all this RV park is pretty nice, but there are too many people here, so everything is FULL! Jenny even had a hard time securing a washer and dryer as somebody had taken up 5 of the 6 of them by themselves…

After dark started falling, Jenny was still doing laundry, so the kids and I played a game of Scooby Doo (it’s like Trouble), then everybody took a shower. Now Jenny and I are sitting at the table while we try to convince Mireille to go to sleep with fireworks going off on the distance.

Tomorrow we head south to Portland, stop 3 of 4 on this trip. Happy 4th of July!!!