Washington Trip Part 3: Olympic National Park

After spending our morning exploring Mount Rainier a bit more, we drove to Olympic National Park on Day 4!  We drove straight to Kalaloch Campground, because we knew we wanted to stay there since it's right on the ocean! It was soooo beautiful.  We got a great campsite and set up our tent, and then we went exploring a bit! We walked around the beach and had a great time. Then we spent a super relaxing evening hanging out at our campsite! We played lots of Yahtzee, had some beers, had a nice dinner, and lots of smores around the campfire.  It was the perfect evening!! 

That's the ocean right through those trees! 

 

The ocean! 

So pretty. 

This tree is amazing!  It's totally alive and still growing, even though a giant cave has opened up beneath it.

I don't know how clearly you can see it, but there's a little sea otter playing in the waves! It was adorable. We didn't want to get too close to scare it. 

There's the sea otter!  It was just jumping around and playing. 

On Day 5 we thoroughly checked out Olympic National Park!  We drove over to the Hoh Rainforest and went on a hike there, and we went to a bunch of beach areas!  We saw First Beach at La Push, Ruby Beach, and Beach 4 (it has the best tidepools). It's such a beautiful area. And so much of the coastline looked like something straight out of The Goonies (though that technically took place in Oregon I guess...).

Hoh Rainforest!

Hoh Rainforest!

Hoh Rainforest! 

Tidepools! 

The evening of Day 5 we felt our first raindrops of the entire trip!!  We had perfect weather up until the evening of Day 5. We were sitting around our campfire after dinner, and starting to think about heading to bed, and then it started lightly raining. It ended up raining pretty hard overnight, and it was still raining in the morning on Day 6! We woke up and packed up our car, and then started driving through more of Olympic National Park!  There were parts of the park that were pretty far from our campground, but that were on the way towards Seattle so we'd decided to save those for when we were exiting the park! We drove up to Lake Crescent and Hurricane Ridge, and it's seriously SUCH an amazing park!  Here are a few pictures from our drive out: