Taking it easy

posted at http://markandjoannatravel.blogspot.com

August 29, 2009

It was glorious to wake up in a bed all warm and toasty this morning. We took it easy today. After our tasty hotel breakfast we spent the morning cleaning up our camping stuff as much as possible, then re-packing everything for our 3 nights of car camping. Car camping consists of driving up to a designated campsite and setting up the tent right next to the car.

It's nice that we can take our hotel with us (tent and sleeping bags). We changed our original plans last night and we don't need to worry about where we sleep.

On our way out of Sol Duc, we stopped at Salmon Cascades but the salmon were not jumping today.

We drove to Forks and saw that we had entered the Twilight Zone. Every store was advertising the Twilight books and movies and welcoming fans. It turns out that the books were set in this area. There were lots of tween fans buying souveniers.

In Forks, we picked up some groceries, dropped our bear cans off at the ranger station, and continued to Mora Campground at Rialto Beach. (on the west coast of WA)

Campsites in the national park are first come first serve, but we had no problem finding a spot. It helped that the weather was foggy, misty, cold, and rainy.

After setting up the tent (we can do this in record time now), we drove to Rialto Beach for lunch and a 3 mile round trip hike.

Our hike started at low tide as we strolled along the beach looking for tidepools and interesting driftwood. The edge of the beach is a forest, and huge logs of driftwood line the edge between beach and forest. The weather started foggy, misty, and cold. This made for some interesting photos different from the typical sunny beach. However, about halfway through our hike, the sun came off burning off the fog. The weather became hot and sunny. So, we were able to see the beach in different ways.

We didn't find many tidepools, but in those that we did find, we saw anemone, mussels, barnacles, sea gulls, and the like. We also spotted a perigrin falcon and an eagle today.

Most of the beach was made up of river rock instead of sand. The pieces ranged in size from pebbles to palm sized. This actually made the beach quite different from the normal beach and beautiful.

After the beach, we drove south to La Push for sunset, but though the view was pretty, the area was run-down and trashy. We decided instead to have dinner back at Rialto and take our sunset pictures there.

Sunset was indeed lovely. We sat on the beach for a couple hours just relaxing and listening to the surf.

Car camping is rather like luxury camping as we keep everything we want at hand in the car. Also, there are bathrooms with running water to brush our teeth and everything!

Pictures will come later when I have time to go through them.