Our stay at Schafer State Park in Washington was very peaceful.  We slept in and began our drive to Olympic National Park on Thursday morning. We didn’t think there would be many places to stop and pick up groceries, especially gluten-free bread, but we were fortunate that we came across a Costco in Sequim, so we stocked up. 

Unfortunately, we didn’t make it to the visitor center at Olympic National Park until around 2:30 in the afternoon, which didn’t leave us as much time to spend in the park as we would have liked.  As a friend said, we’ve been “sampling” the parks.  I think that is a great way to describe our short visits!

The park, according to the ranger we spoke with, was pretty busy that day, possibly due to the Juneteenth federal holiday.  We wanted to make it over to the rain forest in Olympic, but we were told it was going to be about a three hour drive over there and in the opposite direction from our campground that we were driving to next.  The other really good option was Hurricane Ridge, where evidently there are amazing views of the park from a mountain top, but Thursday was also a pretty cloudy day, so it wasn’t certain there would be a view of anything other than clouds.

We opted for a 30 minute drive and one mile hike to Marymere Falls.  A ranger at the visitor center had talked the kids into doing the Junior Ranger program, so they spent the hike busy looking for all kinds of things in nature. It was good for them, despite the reluctance of multiple children.

The hike was very busy, but easy until the end.  We were astonished at how cool the air was too.  With South Carolina dealing with some extreme heat, we were more than happy to have temps in the 50s in Washington!

After our hike, we were back in the RV driving to our campground to spend 4 nights in the Seattle area and looking forward to a few days of being less busy!

Rebecca