27 May – Seattle – Ocean Park

We headed out of Seattle after breakfast heading for the coast. As it was Memorial Day here, the road out was fairly quiet, but there was a steady stream of cars and RVs coming back to town. We stopped in at Cabela’s (a giant huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ store) in a town called Lacey to buy a jacket for Steve to wear on the bike and a new polar fleece for Ros. After leaving Cabela’s we drove the wonderful scenic 101 to the coast. We drove through a town called Raymond that had loads of life sized rusted iron sculptures on the sides of the roads – deer, wolves, people, birds on posts, horse and carts etc. The weather was fairly well set in, rain and low clouds, which meant we didn’t get many photos. We stopped for lunch in South Bend and bought seafood from a wonderful little harbourside shack, with oyster shells piled around it.

After lunch the scenery changed to the typical Washington Olympic Peninsular forest. The trees are very variable, conifers and deciduous mixed together randomly in all the shades of green you can imagine – from iridescent new conifer tips, through mid greens of the deciduous trees and on to the dark, almost blacks, of the old conifers. The dead trees are shrouded in trails of hanging moss, like wool. We passed new growth forests, with signage telling us that hundreds of acres of forest was flattened by hurricane force winds in 2009.

After winding our way through the forest, the trees gave way suddenly to sand dunes as we arrived at Long Beach Peninsular. We stopped at Long Beach (allegedly the longest beach in the world) and walked along a boardwalk with interpretation plaques. It was really interesting. The area is treacherous to shipping with more than 2000 known shipwrecks due to the combination of the Columbia River joining the sea, rip tides and ever moving sand bars. 

The mouth of the Columbia River was blocked completely by the outflow from Mount St Helens in the 80s (obviously dredged now). 

The wind was whipping in from the sea, and the rain was getting heavier, so we jogged back to the RV and drove on. We parked up at a “quaint” little place called Ocean Park Resort, with only one other van in sight and settled in to cook some wonderful wild Chinook salmon – yum!