Visiting With Friends, and The FAR Northwest Corner

Yesterday was a kind of catch-up day after our city day.  We puttered around the  motor home, doing some routine maintenance, more cleaning and polishing.  We also took a break to visit a local farmer’s market for some fresh produce, followed by a stop at a nearby grocery.  Then, Dortha got a call from Deb and Rod, wondering what we all were up to.  Rod has been working on getting his mom’s house over in Port Angeles ready to put on the market, so they’ve been staying in the driveway there for a few months now.  It was time for them to take a break, so they came over to visit.  We had a fine little happy hour and then decided to drive over to Sequim to the casino for dinner and a little slot machine play.  It was fun to see them again, we’ll be getting together again before we all leave this area.  Jim, Dortha, and I all came home with a little more money than we started with, Mark left a little there, and I’m not sure about Deb and Rod, they were still at the Keno machines when we left!

As long as we were this far up in the Northwest, we figured we might as well go to the end of the road, so to speak.  So, today, we gathered up a picnic lunch and piled all of us, dogs included, into Mark and Dortha’s Jeep for a drive.

Cape Flattery is about 100 miles northwest from Chimacum.  It is the most northwestern point of land in the lower 48, and is where the Strait of San Juan de Fuca meets the Pacific Ocean.  We left about 9:00 and wound our way along the twisty-turny road for about 3 hours.

We came to this intersection, one of these days we will visit the little town of Forks, the setting for the popular books and movie, “Twilight”. 

But today, we went the other direction.  We got stopped by some road construction, and I was able to get a good picture of the dense woods along the road:

Eventually, we came to the trail :

Surrounded by these interesting, huge, old trees:

Soon, we got through the woods and found ourselves truly in the far Northwest:

  Complete with a lighthouse!  This is the Cape Flattery Light:

Beautiful!

While we were at the observation platform, we could see several different bird species.  A woman mentioned she thought one of them was a a tufted puffin.  I got some pictures to try to identify it once we got home.  The pictures didn’t turn out well enough to post (fuzzy!), but good enough to identify that it was a tufted puffin.

None of us wanted to leave this awesome place, but we knew there was a long drive to get back home, so one more look:

And we were headed back through the woods:

On the way home, we saw a bald eagle fly by!  Jim was the only one with a fast enough reflex to get a picture, but it turned out really fuzzy.  What a treat to see, though, picture or not.

We made a stop in Port Angeles to scout the ferry landing for a trip over to Victoria, BC while we’re here.  As long as we were there, we stopped for dinner at a local restaurant. 

It was a long drive, but oh, so worth it!