Vacation is over. I am sad. Not devastatingly so, since my everyday life is generally pretty cool, but leaving La Push is always difficult for me to do.
Let’s start at the beginning, though. We had amazingly good luck with the ferries on this trip; we showed up at the last minute, both coming and going, and just made both ferries. So that was good. Less so was the fact that we forgot that the Hood Canal Bridge was closed for repairs the day we were headed out. This meant a trip around Hood Canal & another hour and a half on an already long day of driving. It wasn’t so bad, really. It’s very nice down that way, and there wasn’t much traffic. Coming around that last corner and seeing First Beach, James Island and La Push spread out below was an even more welcome sight than it usually is.
They gave us the same cabin we had last year, which was nice. We were somewhat surprised to see that the cabin next door had been demolished, though. The cabins reserved for guests with dogs are a little bit run down, by most people’s standards (we don’t mind – as long as we have a bed and someplace to store our stuff where the roof doesn’t leak, we’re pretty happy, and they’re really not that bad anyway), so the tribe is slowly taking them down. We’ve been promised that dog-friendly accommodations will be available after the last of the Shoreline cabins are gone, and that’s really good news, but we’ll miss #12 when it’s gone.
Being away from work and the city got me back on my normal sleep pattern, so I was waking at around 7:30 each morning. (Not real sure of the time – no clocks – but sometime around there.) Science Girl slept in (she ordinarily wakes at 7:30), so Lucy and I got in the habit of having a small breakfast and then going out for a walk down First Beachbefore SG got up. Once she was up and about, we’d make a sack lunch and head out to whichever beach we were visiting that day. We ended up hiking all of the beaches in the immediate area.
We snuck Lucy onto Second Beach. I know, it was wrong of us. I have a very refined sense of guilt, and it was throbbing mightily the whole time we were there. In our defense, though, we kept her on the trail the whole way down and back, and she never got near any of the tide pools. Dogs are permitted at both First Beach and Rialto, and she had a blast on both. She was very excited by the sandpipers on Rialto, chasing them (on leash) into the surf and around in circles. Much doggy fun, and we had a good time watching her.
Lucy stayed in the cabin when we went to Third beach. We both thought we’d been there before, but neither of us recognized any of the trail or the beach itself. Weird. The harbor seals there were very curious about us. They stayed just offshore the whole time we were there, but three of them followed us down the beach. Just as well Lucy stayed home that day.
The days were all about hiking and enjoying the seashore. The nights went something like this: we’d enjoy a simple dinner and a bottle of nice wine around the beginning of sunset; we finished the wine out on the deck and watch the colors come out as the sun slid behind James Island; then we’d come back inside, turn out all the lights, sit at the wide-open window as the stars came out (and we’d both forgotten that there were so many stars), and sip on some well-earned Maker’s Mark ‘til we got sleepy. We caught part of the Perseid meteor shower one night, which was especially nice, but to just sit there and experience the night and the waves crashing on the beach was a very rare treat for us.
And that, right there, is our vacation in a nutshell. Pictures should be up within the next day or so, and there are a lot of them. We bought a digital camera for this trip, and Science Girl gave it a thorough test drive.
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