Tuesday August 16 -- Drove to Leavenworth. The mapping web sites all suggested going up I-5 to I-90 to US-97, but I-5 can be a bit of a pain with a trailer, so I decided on on alternate route, up I-84 to US-97. In retrospect, I'm not sure my decision was sound. It took a lot longer than I expected, although it's a nice drive.
We stayed at the Pine Village KOA in Leavenworth. I tend to stay at KOAs because (1) they have enforced cleanliness requirements, (2) they always have free showers, (3) they always have a pool, and (4) they have a system-wide reasonable set of rules. I'm stunned at how many RV parks are openly kid-hostile, and the RV guide books don't tell you that. KOAs are all safely kid-friendly.
Anyway, the park has some very nice features. The pool is large and open late. It fronts the Wenatchee River and has great swimming acccess. It has a meeting area and game room, and the pancake breakfast so common to KOAs. However, it is oddly laid out, and many of the sites are less than desireable. We were shuffled into a "slum" site, only about 30' long. A path to an upper level started directly behind our site, so we had people running through our site all the time. However, in their defense, I made the reservation quite late, so I can't be too picky. All in all, I would cheerfully stay at the Pine Village KOA again.
Wednesday August 17 -- Part of our agenda today was to acquire tickets to Sound of Music at the Leavenworth Summer Theater. I had tried to get tickets the week before, but it turns out their summer theater performances all sell out. Fortunately, a lot of their seats are sold in subscriptions, and the subscribers can't attend every performance. So, the day before a performance, they sell these "rush" tickets starting at 11 AM at their box office. Fortunately for the kids, the box office is in the Icicle Fun Center, which is a mini-amusement park with a fabulous mini-golf course, an arcade, a small gauge train, some kiddie rides, and a bumper boat setup. They had 23 rush tickets, and we were second in line, so we were able to get tickets. The mini-golf course was a lot of fun.
After the fun center, we headed into the Bavarian village. Don't think that this is a genuine outgrowth of German immigrants trying to recreate their homeland. No, Leavenworth's Bavarian village is strictly a tourist and marketing outgrowth from poor financial times in the 1960s. There is some great food and some ecelectic shops, but I wouldn't go back just for the village. We did have a great lunch of an assortment of various German-style sausages and wursts.
Thursday August 18 -- We had two items on our agenda today: inner tubing and Sound of Music. There are several companies that do rafting and inner tubing trips down the Wenatchee River. We went through "Tube Leavenworth". It was great fun, and may have been the highlight of the whole trip. They bus you upriver and drop you into the river with fabric-covered inner tubes. We were out for more than 3 hours, floating, swimming, and tubing. There are a few little rough sections, just enough to get you wet.
We even took along a lunch, and just paddled over to the bank and sat on a log while we ate. While we were stopped, my kids pointed out a big log floating downstream. As I looked at it, I said "that's not a long, it's a black bear!" Sure enough, it swam across and crawled onto the opposite shore not 40 yards from us. Very exciting.
After a pseudo-German dinner in town, we headed up to the outdoor theater for Sound of Music. It was an enjoyable performance, with lots of enthusiasm and local flavor.
Overall, I enjoyed the Leavenworth area. I would like to return to explore the river and mountain areas some more. There's a lot to see in this area.
Friday August 19 -- Drove to Port Angeles. This is only a 190 mile drive, but it has some interesting aspects. US 2 is a very pretty mountain drive. The high point of the day was the 30 minute trip on the Edmonds-Kingston ferry across the Hood Canal. However, be warned that it is expensive to take a long vehicle on the Washington ferries: 20' van plus 25' trailer plus 4 passengers totalled about $85. Still, it cuts about 3 hours off of the paved alternative.
In Port Angeles, we stayed at the Port Angeles/Sequim KOA. The KOA sits halfway in between Port Angeles and Sequim (which is pronounced "skwim"). This KOA has a smaller pool. Although it has many grassy sites with shade trees, we got a crappy "new" site, all gravel, with no vegetation at all. Again, we reserved late, but I was very disappointed in this park. In addition, we had credit card trouble here. My credit union claims that KOA's merchant provider doesn't record addresses when they send a card in for validation, so they routinely decline their charges. Personally, I think my credit union is feeding me a line of bull here. I've never heard an excuse like that before. The Leavenworth KOA took Amex, but Port Angeles was Visa/MC only. It was awkward and inconvenient.
The weather could not have been nicer. The Pacific coast of Washington gets vast amounts of rain, but the Olympic mountains on the peninsula provide a large rain shadow over the inland areas, giving Port Angeles the dry weather of a city much farther south. The whole week had comfortable highs in the mid-80s, although the mornings were foggy and somewhat cool.
Saturday August 20 -- Explored part of the Olympic National Park. Spent some time at the visitor's center, and then headed up to Hurricane Ridge. This is a 3.2-mile round-trip hike with a 700' rise in altitude up to a peak with a 360 degree view of the Olympic mountains, the local cities, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the San Juan Islands, and Victoria, BC.
Sunday August 21 -- Two things make a visit to the Olympic National Park a challenge: (1) it is big, and (2) it is almost all wilderness. There are no roads across the park. To get anywhere, you have to go around. Today, we decided to drive to the Hoh Rain Forest on the western side of the park. It's about 2.5 hours each way. The rain forest gets vast amounts of precipitation, and results in huge trees and ferns, and mosses that hang several feet off of the branches.
After the rain forest, we headed to Rialto Beach near the city of La Push on the Pacific coast. The Pacific coast of Washington is quite different from the Oregon coast we are used to. The central Washington coast is quite rugged and rocky, with many rock stack islands offshore.
Monday August 22 -- Our agenda today was Victoria, British Columbia, on Vancouver Island, across the Strait of Juan de Fuca, in Canada. We decided to take the Victoria Express, a 144-passenger ferry that makes the crossing in about an hour. We took the 8:10 AM ferry over and the 6:00 PM ferry back. It was a nice day wandering about town, although things were very expensive. There was a time when US$1 bought as much as C$1.40, but the exchange rate now is closer to C$1.15. We got a lot of souvenirs, but the kids weren't too much interested in the museums.
The trip back to Port Angeles was quite a kick. It was a change of tide, and the wind had whipped things up enough that the seas were quite rough. I was very surprised by this, seeing as how the Strait is fairly well protected.
Tuesday August 23 -- Our last day. I had originally hoped to head out to Neah Bay, which is the very northwestern tip of the continental United States, and visit the Makah Indian Tribal Cultural Center, but I decided not to subject the family to another six-hour car day. We toured the old Dungeness area and the city of Sequim. The city is a friendly small town, with a number of cute shops in the downtown. The Sequim area was once a general agricultural area, with lots of irrigated farmland, but they can't compete with the corporate farms today. Many of the farms have decided to specialize in growing lavender, which is something my allergy-prone nose did not allow me to enjoy. We went to the Sequim "marina", which is really just shorthand for "yacht club".
Wednesday August 24 -- Drive home. We had to choose between taking US-101 down the coast down to Long Beach and inland to Portland, and taking US-101 to Olympia and down I-5. We finally opted for I-5, which cut about two hours out of the day. It was an uneventful drive. There are a lot of resort towns on the south end of Hood Canal that would be fun to explore.
It was interesting that gas was more expensive in Washington than in Oregon. I hadn't expected that.
