Lake Crescent and the Olympic Peninsula

We're a little late in posting this one, but in Sept 2015, we took our annual trip to the Seattle, WA area.  However, instead of staying in Seattle, we went further west to the Olympic Peninsula.

On the map, you'll see Seattle on the east side.  The airport is a bit south of that so we had to drive down to Tacoma and back up through the Bethel and Bremerton region before crossing over to highway 104 south of Port Townsend.  Then west along 101 through Port Angeles which was the closest town to where our cabin was.  Lake Crescent is that long lake just west of Port Angeles.

Here's Brownie from the deck of our cabin.  The lake was beautiful and the cabin had it's own private dock.

Down at the dock you can start to see how clear the water is.

It's at least six feet deep there and you can easily see the bottom when the wind is calm and not making too many waves.

Not far away from our cabin was the Lake Crescent Lodge.  It has more rooms and some tiny cabins people could stay at, but it was also near some very cool nature trails that had a bunch of educational information.  This is a tunnel that went under the highway to get to the other.

As the very large, old trees eventually die, new trees will start to grow on top of the old stumps.  It's really cool to see this up close and in person.  They'll even grow on giant horizonal logs, but I forgot to get a picture of that.

Here's Jeannette in front of a moss covered tree.  A lot of this area is considered a rain forest which is ideal for the moss and giant trees.

Mike and Brownie taking a short break on an old bench along the trail.

Jeannette and Brownie checking out the inside of a big tree.

All three of us at the top by the waterfall. 

This was a really great picture, but I don't exactly remember where it was.  Sorry!!  :)

The Lake Crescent Lodge was a pretty old place.  One of our U.S. Presidents had stayed there before declaring Olympic National Forest a National Park.  Jeannette was kidding around and pretending to be stuck in this old phone booth inside the lodge.

Later in the week, when our friends Chris and Emily were visiting us at the cabin, we drove out west, past Forks (on the map above) and to the beach on the west coast.  To get to the beach we had to hike along another trail and this time it was a bit foggy. 

A foggy beach picture.  The coast here has all kinds of rocky islands sticking up out of the water.  It's really cool looking with the fog.

Another picture of the foggy rock outcroppings.

The tide was going out and there were lots of jelly fish that didn't make it back into the water.  Don't touch a jelly fish, they may sting you!

Here's Mike climbing one of the rocks.  He had to be real careful not to fall into the water otherwise he'd have to hike back with soggy shoes.

We still had a few days to kill, so we decided to take the ferry from Port Angeles, WA over to Victoria, CA.  We thought we might do this so we'd packed our passports to cross the border into Canada.

When I think of ferries, I don't generally think of ships this big.  It transported a bunch of cars in the lower level and people sat in the middle and the top.  Very smooth and comfortable ride.

Victoria was a nice place, pretty touristy, but the highlight for us by far was the Victoria Bug Zoo.  A lot of the bugs were huge and totally harmless so we could hold them.  I believe the one Jeannette is holding is one of the leaf insects that camouflage themselves as leafs so they are harder to see.

Mike is holding a "thorny devil" which is explained in the text below.

 

 
Here is a millipede.  We don't have these in Illinois!

This giant beetle is eating an orange slice.

The Bug Zoo had the most impressive leaf cutter ant colony for display that we'd ever seen.  I encourage you to read about leaf cutter ants online to learn more about them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leafcutter_ant

Here's Jeannette with a stick insect.  They're actually very fragile so you have to be careful not to break their legs off.

The last cool thing about Victoria was that in the same place as the ferry dock was a dock for a bunch of sea planes.  I'm not sure where they were all coming and going to, but some day I think we need to take a ride on one for fun!