Home Stretch to Solar Eclipse

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Our next stop was another Elks Lodge in the Olympic Peninsula. We had originally planned on staying here for 5 nights but our host for the solar eclipse called and suggested we come a couple days early based on traffic predictions. With this stop of three nights, we will have spent 31 nights straight staying at 6 different Elks Lodges. This one is in Hoquiam Washington. It's a small place so I won't be surprised if you have never heard of it. This is one of very few lodges that allow you to make a reservation in advance. We had called a few weeks ago and put a deposit down. They had told us to park in spot #1. There are only six spots behind the lodge and when we pulled in, another rig was already parked and guess which spot he was parked in? Yep #1. Turns out, there are Master locks on the electric boxes and water spigots at each spot. The other guy had found spot #1 was unlocked so he picked that one. It probably was left unlocked for us, but since the bar opened in 90 minutes, we just waited until then to go in and settle up for the rest of our stay and get the keys to spot #4.

We didn't have lots of planned activities for our stay here so three nights worked out okay. We went in for a couple beers after dinner and ran into another couple that pulled in after us. We sat and talked about each other's travel experiences before heading back to the rig so the bartender could close up. Apparently they close when they run out of customers, so we may have kept her longer than usual.

The next day I wasn't feeling 100% so we took it easy in the morning and stayed in the rig. We heard all sorts of commotion at the backdoor of the lodge and found this rather loud couple with all sorts of furniture apparently from the lodge. For about an hour they attempted to pile all this furniture into and mostly on top of their old four door car. There were a couple Lazy Boy chairs, metal bookcases and who knows what else. Each time I looked out they had amazingly managed to pile items even higher than the last time I looked. I quickly grabbed the camera as they pulled out of the parking lot. Let's just say they could give the Beverly Hillbillies a run for their money!

Modern Day Beverly Hillbillies

Now that the morning entertainment was over, we headed west to the coast to Ocean Shores. This place is much bigger and your typical beachside tourist area. Lots of souvenir shops, restaurants and bike rental places. We headed to the interpretive center to look around. Then did a walk along the beach on the bay side of the town. There was one kid with a surfboard trying to "hang 10" but not having much luck. I am by no means an expert - heck I can't swim - but the waves didn't look big enough to be able to surf.

At the Interpretive Center

The Bay Side of Ocean Shores

We had planned to do a longer hike to the end of a spit but there were warning signs stating they were spraying herbicides that day and we should wait at least 4 hours after application. Since they didn't have a time stamped on the sign, we erred on the side of caution. One other beach area we checked out was on the ocean side. This was much busier area and even permitted vehicles to be driven on the beach. Some people were out in the water, but it looked too cold to us to be doing that. Since we were there, we drove to the Elks Lodge located in this town. We had really wanted to stay here, but there was something going on and they had told us they were going to be full when we called a few weeks ago. The place looked nice but it was full. Maybe sometime in the future we can make it back this way.

Looking Out the Spit

Shark Themed Store

The next day we headed back north along highway 101. We had wanted to stop at another portion of Olympic National Park called the Quinault Rainforest. One of our neighbors in Forks had stopped with their motorhome and disconnected their car to drive around and told us a bit about it. We thought it sounded nice but decided not to stop as we drove past it the other day. It isn't that far back north and is closer to Hoquiam than it is to Forks.

There is a nice nature walk that takes you past some big trees. If you have been paying attention, there are a lot of big trees in Olympic National Park especially on the western rainforest side. I didn't think this was as nice as the Hoh Rainforest so if you are in the area and limited on your time, I suggest you go to Hoh instead of Quinault.

More Big Trees

Big Leaves Catching the Sunlight

Just a bit further up the road is a ranger station and a huge lodge with a great view of Lake Quinault. The rain gauge on the building shows the record at over 15 feet! We found a picnic area to have our lunch and soak in some of the beauty here. Continuing counterclockwise around the lake, we get to the largest Sitka Spruce tree in the world. Now having just seen the largest red cedar a couple days ago and being underwhelmed, I wasn't expecting much. Well this one is much more impressive mostly since it truly looks to be alive. It is 191 feet tall and about 18.8 feet in diameter. That makes this tree a little taller and slightly smaller in diameter than the cedar north of here.

Lake Quinault

The Big & Beautiful Lodge

Rain Gauge on Lodge

Record Sitka Spruce

Chris is Dwarfed by Spruce

We continued the drive with the intention of going the whole way around the lake. Our Forks friends had warned us about the dirt road being bad, but I suspect that is a relative statement because we found it to be fine. Or maybe more to the point, we have driven roads much worse than this one. Admittedly there are stretches on the north side of the lake where it is definitely 1 lane, but we didn't see any other idiots driving the road so we had no big problems. We stopped here and there checking out some waterfalls or old buildings and abandoned vehicles. Is this a must do loop? Probably not, but if you have time it isn't a "don't bother" side trip.

Intricate Carving with Elk Above

And Fish Below

Waterfall Along Drive

Old Fence with a View

Fixer Upper

One brief geocaching interest along the way in Amanda Park near Highway 101. A cache is hidden in a phone booth. Yes! A phone booth. There are actually two, side by side. Neither have phones anymore, but there is a phone book on one of those pivoting holders. The log sheet is taped in the yellow pages in the location the word "cache" would appear. We thought that was a unique hide.

Our three nights in Hoquiam went fast. Next head over to Interstate 5 to go south around Portland and head toward Mount Hood. Actually a place called Mount hood Village. We had a two night reservation at the Thousand Trails Resort. We pulled into our site only to discover it wasn't the full hookup site we had expected. We had lots of laundry to do and I wanted to thoroughly flush the tanks so we went back to the office and was able to upgrade for the two nights we were there. Definitely one of the more expensive places we have stayed but it fit the bill and we were only here two nights.

The campground is reasonably close to two different significant geocaching locations. One is the location of the very first geocache. Unfortunately that specific cache is no longer active, but there is a cache that is a tribute to the original stash (as it had first been called) and this is one that hardcore geocachers want to find. The second significant thing are two old geocaches. One is the second oldest active geocache in the world which was placed on May 12, 2000. The only older one is in Kansas and is only one day older than this one. There is another old cache nearby but it was placed on July 21, 2000.

I suppose if we really wanted to we could have tried to accomplish all these things in a day, but we are trying to slow down our pace so we decide that we can come back up this way after the eclipse and explore this area with a bit more time. We think we could use a different campground as our location for the original stash, so we opt to drive up into the forest to get the two old caches plus a few others that happen to be nearby.

The drive into the mountains was a foggy one but it didn't last long. We needed up have some pretty nice weather to be up here. We found the parking spot for the one cache and started along the trail. Actually it was an old paved road that has been dug up just at the end to prevent vehicles from traveling on it. So the walk was pretty easy for at least half of the 3/4 mile to the cache. It was even easier since it was slightly downhill. We took one wrong turn along the way, but caught our error in about a tenth of a mile so it wasn't a big issue. The cache is sort of what we expected, a five gallon bucket (many of the first geocaches were this size). From the logbook, the cache is found fairly regular even though it is in a fairly remote area. Our signature wasn't the first for the day and we were here well before lunch.

Second Oldest Active Geocache

We went after a couple other nearby caches and then thought we could take a shortcut back to the car. Well that "shortcut" turned out to make us spend an additional 45 minutes with the only upshot was we got one more geocache than we planned. What was showing up as a road on my GPSr had been a road at one point. It had even been paved, but the guys in charge of this portion of the forest really didn't want people to use this road so they must have gone over the road with a bulldozer dragging a heavy duty fork which broke the pavement into foot sized chunks oriented in all directions. After a couple minutes of trying to use this "shortcut", we bailed out and bushwhacked back to the woods trail. Yes the woods trail was longer but much easier to walk on.

Torn Up Asphalt "Road"

We ate our sandwiches in the car and two other caching groups came by heading to the old geocache. Guess this thing does get a lot of traffic. While eating, we can hear somebody shooting round after round. We had read about this general area being a place where guys come for target practice but it is a bit unnerving to be able to hear nearby gunshots but not see anybody.  We wore our dorky blaze orange hats for safety.

Next we drive to another parking spot and on the way pass the guy that was shooting. He seemed harmless enough or at least as harmless as a guy with a gun in the middle of the woods can be. There is an obvious trail to follow and it seems to be heading in the right direction to lead us to the other oldish cache. This walk is much more challenging since there are some reasonably steep sections. But once at the top of the ridge, the views of the surrounding forest and Mount Hood in the distance is breathtaking.

View from Ridge of Mt Hood

After a snack and a breather, we head back to the car. We saw nobody else and guy with the gun had left as well. We make it back to the campground with plenty of time to do some of the prep work we wanted to do prior to going to our eclipse spot. This campground fit the bill but wouldn't likely be one we come back to in the future.