We woke up in Tacoma on Wednesday morning and took a quick trip to the Tacoma Bridge of Glass… Warning: DO NOT use Apple Maps to get you to the bridge! The bridge is above the highway, and Apple literally dropped us off at the highway UNDER the bridge and was like.. you’re here! Ridiculous 😛

From there, we drove up to Kalaloch, stopping at Wally’s Sandwich Bar in Olympia, which we highly recommend! Lots of unique combinations of ingredients and super yummy sandwiches. We also bought a pint of raspberries from a stand that were absolutely delicious! We spent the ride snacking on raspberries, cherries and multi-colored goldfish. We ended up playing a guessing game with the goldfish, haha! Sam would have to tell me orange (standard orange and then a darker orange) or not orange (green or pink/red). Of course he got sidetracked into calculating out the possibilities of being right depending on how many I gave him! *cough* nerd 😉

We got there at around 3, but weren’t meeting up with Kate until 5, so we ended up taking a little walk on a trail near the Lodge. We grabbed the walking sticks from the cabin… which we TOTALLY didn’t need. It was fun for about two seconds before they were annoying to carry. Haha! So I handed mine to Sam.

I should get Sam’s photos, because he took a photo of us with a selfie stick… except the walking stick was the part that showed in the photo… Yeahhh he’s the master of bad puns 😛 We finished our walk just in time to drop some stuff off in our little cabin (right by the ocean!) and head off to Kate’s house. Her husband is a ranger and they live right across the street from the Kalaloch Lodge! Dinner was delicious (Kate was super sweet and cooked for us even though they had just gotten back from a trip the night before) and we followed it up by playing Settlers of Catan, which I had never played before! It was lots of fun… and unfortunately, Sam won.

The next morning, we were ready to head back to Seattle, but we were planning on taking the scenic northern route this time! We wanted to get an early start, but I ended up seeing the gorgeous light  so I made Sam stop and take a few photos. We walked on the beach for about half an hour and spent most of it looking for perfectly round and white rocks, since that is apparently something Sam’s dad does on trips to the Cape. After breakfast at the Lodge, we were off!

We took a quick stop at Crescent Lake and did a short hour hike up to some lovely waterfalls! It was the perfect break in our long drive.

One of the coolest parts about our trip was taking the ferry to Seattle from Bainbridge! I have taken the ferry in the Bay Area, but it is a smaller one and certainly can’t fit almost a hundred cars in it!

After dropping our rental car off (which was a complete NIGHTMARE. The traffic in the city was terrible. It took us almost an hour to make it a couple blocks) we checked into our hotel and grabbed a quick snack at the hotel’s restaurant before meeting up with Sam’s uncle and his wife. The plan was to go to the Locks… but we actually ended up running out of gas!! It was simultaneously hilarious and terrible. We pulled over in front of a pizza shop with pretty much the nicest workers ever. Luckily, a gas station was just two blocks away, so Sam and his uncle ran off to get some gas. Unfortunately, the car was a new Jeep that needed some special way to get gas in, so they struggled for about half an hour before we finally decided to just push the car to the gas station. This resulted in some googling and youtube watching to determine how to put the car in Neutral! We managed though, filled the car up, and were off! We decided to go straight to dinner, which was at a lovely little French restaurant. Afterwards, we went to the Locks, which actually ended up working perfectly because it was right as the sun was setting and the light was lovely! True photographer here, haha! It’s all about the light 😉

I didn’t take any photos on either my Fuji or my big camera while we were in the city, though I did take a handful of photos on my phone. It was a lovely two days where we pretty much just walked to Pike Place, bought a lot of food and hung out! On Friday night, we went to meet up with my dear friend and fellow CMMentor Elena and her husband. We ate a /lot/ of oysters! Haha! By the end of Saturday, Sam and I had eaten 33 oysters in two days. We also had four bowls of clam chowder, a crab sandwich, four macarons, lots of bread and cheese, some frozen yogurt and a delicious piroshky, which was probably our favorite thing from the entire trip other than the cabbage at Sitka and Spruce!

Our flight back was on the night of the fourth, which was actually really cool because we were taking off right at sunset and got to see hundreds of tiny fireworks going off below us. It was the perfect length of a trip and we got a day to recover before heading back to work. I loved Seattle (though I was seriously unhappy when we were trying to return the rental car! I have never been in such terrible traffic!) and am definitely looking forward to heading back sometime!

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