A Series of Unfortunate Mistakes – Part 1 of 3

We celebrated our 10th anniversary this year. It kind of snuck up on us what with COVID and all. We were going to go on a trip over our actual anniversary weekend but ran into important delays/reasons to postpone. Due to the delays, I actually forgot that this trip was originally scheduled to celebrate our anniversary! Whoops! Thankfully my husband is awesome and didn’t hold it against me.

As you may have surmised from the title of this post, our trip didn’t work out quite as we’d envisioned. The first mistake was mine. I refused to get a cat sitter for the weekend (Mistake #1 – no cat sitter = 36-hour rodeo). Monster needs daily pills but we’re still kinda in COVID times and I don’t know anyone close by so I made the call that we could only do a single night away from home.

The plan for Saturday was simple: check out the Tree of Life and hike in the Hoh Rain Forest. Within the forest, I picked out 2 awesome trails Hall of Mosses and the Hoh River Trail. We knew the Hoh Rain Forest was popular and it was a pseudo-holiday (Fathers Day) weekend so it was bound to be crowded. We got up at 4AM and were on the road by 5.

We had to stop and charge the car (Mistake #2 – electric cars are a time suck) in Aberdeen which was a fantastic excuse to try breakfast at Taco Bell. We don’t normally eat fast food except on road trips. We talked about Taco Bell breakfast the entire drive out to Washington but the stars never aligned enough for us to try it. Well, the stars aligned today and I have to give it 2 thumbs up.

With full bellies and a fully charged vehicle, we hit the road again towards the Tree of Life. En route, I saw a sign for Beach #1. I wasn’t quick enough in pulling over but told Chris we’d get the next one. He had just woken up from a nap (did I mention the 4AM start time?) and obviously he wasn’t fully functioning as he asked me how I knew there’d be a next one! ???? Beach #2 didn’t have any real parking and Beach #3 only had parking on the other side of the road so I also missed all of those as well but I did NOT miss the turn for the Tree of Life.

How I miss living near the ocean and getting to see these views daily.

Erosion has taken away nearly the entirety of this tree’s sustenance and yet it still lives floating over the beach. It’s an impressive situation and I was even able to explore underneath it. I suspect, based on how moist it was that it gets a lot of moisture from the air and nutrients from the few roots still in the surrounding soil.

Funny story about the moment before this selfie. Chris was sitting on a log in front of the Tree of Life and I had just returned from exploring underneath of it. I wanted to climb over the log and sit next to him but the log was slightly too tall to step over and I didn’t want to hurt my knee so I decided to jump over it. I totally wiped out scraping my foot on the log and landing on my hands and knees in the sand. I was fine but it’s ironic that you do something different to avoid injury and then nearly cause the thing you were trying to avoid. Whoops!

We left the Tree of Life and continued down the road towards the Hoh Rain Forest. I saw the sign for Beach #4 with plenty of time AND they had a HUGE parking lot. It was meant to be. We immediately pulled over and started exploring.

There were 2 trails leading away from the parking lot. I immediately chose the one on the right. I don’t know why but even in video games, I always go right. I’m predictable like that. The path led to a scenic viewpoint that I was just a few inches too short to fully appreciate so I stood on the fence for a better view.