We had an “open night” between the ferries from Orcas to the Olympic Peninsula and our spot on the Washington Coast.  By open, I mean a night where I hadn’t reserved any sites…perfect for our second Harvest Hosts experience.   You are limited by what is available in the area where you are, and that meant we had a choice between a winery and a lavender farm.  I had a strong lobby going for the lavender farm and Dennis was leaning toward the winery, but after I shared that one of the previous visitors had commented on their fruit wines, he switched to the lavender party.

The reason we didn’t have a reservation wasn’t just because I hadn’t planned well, by the way.  It was because it was the Friday of Labor Day weekend.  We’d barely gotten the sites for the coming week pieced together…back in March!… and Friday reservations were just really hard.  So I expected it could be a bit busy when we got to Purple Haze.  

We were the only people there! 

We had the whole place to ourselves, rolling up just as they were closing shop.  They basically said, stay wherever, make yourself at home.  Maya visited with the chickens and peacocks, we mooched off their wifi, and basically just relaxed in a field.  A field with rows of lavender right next to it, that is.  The lavender had hit peak bloom a few weeks prior, but there were enough second blooms and late stragglers two still make it smell divine.  It was lovely.  And the next day we had lavender ice cream and bought sachets from the shop so now our undies smell better.  And we watched the UK football home opener.  Everyone was happy.  

At this point we were at the northeast top of the Olympic Peninsula.  We headed counter clockwise around Olympic National Park, following the shoreline for the most part, down to Ocean City.  Along the way, we stopped in the National Park to have a picnic on the shore of Crescent Lake, which is a clear deep turquoise blue due to the fact that it’s cold, deep and has low nitrogen.  We then took an hour detour to visit Sol Duc Hotsprings.   Crescent Lake was gorgeous but icy cold.  The hotsprings were warm and smelled like rotten eggs.  

This is my fourth our fifth hot springs experience, and I feel like that’s enough to legitimately be of the opinion that hot springs are not for me. At least not the kind that are feeding into what looks like an oversized public hot tub.  Dennis and I got to experience them in Costa Rica as they came down the mountain into pools that we know were not completely manmade but definitely man-nudged.  That experience was like sitting in a creek that happened to have good seating.  But the few times we’ve been in these weird “modern” swimming pools that are hot-spring fed…it’s just gross.  I don’t know how to say this without sounding either like a snob, a prude or both, but imagine the clientele of your local water park in a hot tub with you.  Maybe we’d be better off at some of the “natural” ones.  We’ll see.

From the hot springs we made our way over and down the outside of the peninsula, stopping in Forks for an AMAZING greasy, juicy burger at a diner called Sully’s.  The minute we saw it we all agreed we HAD to stop in honor of Wyatt’s teammate Sully.  Our entire dinner was about $35 and we got our money’s worth to be sure.  The fries were so hot you could barely eat them when you first got them.  The onion rings were beer battered.  And the burgers were juicy/greasy enough that the buns fell apart as you at them. 

After our healthy, light dinner, we limped on down the coast in what seemed to be a never-ending journey to our campsite.  Finally at around 10pm and in complete darkness, we followed our Google Maps directions down the road to the campsite.  Except the campsite entrance was not obvious.  Finally we spotted a campfire and decided to keep driving.  We followed a truck as the paved road ended and the “road” became dusty.  He stopped, so we pulled up next to him and asked if he knew where the campground was.  His answer was that straight ahead was the Pacific Ocean and we should probably get our camper off the beach before we got stuck.  OK!  We turned around pronto and got back to asphalt PDQ.  I hate to think what would have happened if we hadn’t seen him.  Would we have figured things out before our tires hit soft sand???

Anyway, after stopping and asking directions from a local…because Google was clearly not reliable…we backed in to our spot and went to bed thankful that we hadn’t had to test out how watertight our rig was.  

The next morning we took our coffee and walked out to the beach during low tide to dip our toes in the Pacific Ocean.  Standing with the wide, wide stretch of sand and the Pacific Ocean in front of us, I felt like we had made it to our furthest reach on the trip.  Actually, this isn’t the furthest west or north we will go…Victoria wins on that account. But for some reason, both Dennis and I felt like this was the far left point of our trip map.  

We found an awesome bakery in town where the owner proudly let us know that everything was made from scratch (including the bread for the toast!) and they only used real butter.  She said that even their sausage gravy was scratch and not from a can, and the biscuits were extra large.   Well, three of our party fell for it.  I went for the ham and cheese croissant.  The other three had the sausage gravy…  You don’t order hamburgers at a Mexican restaurant, you don’t order steak in a diner, and you shouldn’t order sausage gravy anywhere outside the SEC.  And Missouri is questionable.  It wasn’t BAD per se…it just wasn’t “our” sausage gravy.  Meanwhile, my croissant was UNBELIEVABLY GOOD.  🙂

While in Ocean City we spent time on the beach building driftwood forts, looking for treasures, and inspecting dead crabs and jellyfish.  It was a short but sweet stay because we shortly moved 20 miles up the beach to Pacific Beach.