A Series of Unfortunate Mistakes – Part 2 of 3

Without traffic, it takes just under an hour to get to the Hoh Rain Forest Visitor Center and, for the majority of the drive, there wasn’t much traffic at all.

It’s a lovely drive. You start out on 101 which basically encircles the park and then you turn onto Upper Hoh Road for the last 18 mile stretch to the visitor center. It’s gorgeous! I cannot describe to you what the trees looked like in this rain forest and I’m sad to say I have no pictures to share with you.

Remember how I said there wasn’t much traffic? Totally true until we were about 8 miles from the visitor center. It slowly became more congested at the 8-mile mark and then, 6 miles from the visitor center, traffic stopped.

It was 11:30 so we ate some snacks in the car and moved perhaps 2 car lengths. As we waited, and waited, and waited some more, it eventually dawned on us that this was the line to park your car at the visitor center. The line was SIX. MILES. LONG. (Mistake #3 – getting to a popular destination far, far too late in the day).

We, just like so many of our fellow visitors, turned around and headed out for new activities. Some people pulled off the road in order to take pictures but we didn’t because before we turned around, we decided to cancel our Sunday hike plans in favor of coming back and doing the planned Saturday hikes. Exploring the rain forest was the #1 activity for Chris at this park so it made sense.

While we didn’t stop to take pictures of the rain forest, we did stop to check out two different gift shops conveniently located on the way out of the area. I took a picture of Peak 6 and I still need to know if Peaks 1-5 are a thing or if this is like Lake 22 where the name stuck for one but not the others.

We leave the rain forest and head to Forks home of a Tesla charger (Mistake #2 again) where we have a more substantial lunch of almond butter sandwiches. I don’t know if you know this but Chris doesn’t like almond butter and the natural stuff is messy especially when eaten in the car (Mistake #4 – almond butter). We are able to use our downtime wisely and come up with Plan B: Second Beach, Plan C: Rialto Beach, and Plan D: Cape Flattery.

Plan B was quickly ruled out as having too small of a parking lot so once the car was charged we headed to Rialto Beach. The line for that wasn’t 6 miles long but it was certainly full. The only parking was on the side of the road about a mile away and not Tesla friendly (Mistake #3 again) so we once again turned around and headed on our way.

At this point, we wouldn’t be able to easily make it to Cape Flattery without going back to Forks to charge the car and, given our luck with 2 popular destination points, we decided not to chance it. Instead, we just headed to the campground.

Chris drove and I frantically tried to find any sort of hike along this route that wasn’t popular that we could do while kinda sorta exhausted from too little sleep and lots of frustrating side trips. I’d also like to point out that we’re in BFE so cell phone reception is practically null. It was a challenge but I’m happy to report success!

The plan was simple. Park at the Mt Mueller Trailhead. Go east until we connect with the Olympic Discovery Trail then follow that west until we get to some unnamed road which we’ll take back to the trailhead. Easy peasy.

It was! I am so happy to report to you dear reader that it WAS easy. Well, minus the blip where I accidentally took us north instead of east for about a quarter of a mile but once we started ascending a mountain, I kinda figured out I goofed. But seriously! Look at these pictures. One of them clearly has a sign that says “Trail”. Of course, I picked that one rather than the no-name / no sign one (Mistake #5 – not picking the right trail).

After I got us on the right path, the trail was flat and easy and glorious.

Plus there were snakes!

Six miles later it was time to head to the campground. It’s a lovely campground right on the water. It’s also off the beaten path and our particular campsite was a the top of a hill. The Tesla made it but it was a near thing. We set up our home away from home and headed off into the city for dinner.

We intentionally didn’t pack food for dinner because the campground was in Port Angeles and there are a ton of restaurants there. My parents live 15 minutes south of the city named in their mailing address so I should have known better. The campground is actually 30 minutes west of the town in its mailing address (Mistake #6 – not looking up exactly where we were staying in relation to the perks we wanted) and every single restaurant was either closed, by reservation only, or had a 2-hour wait for dinner (Mistake #7 – not making a reservation / bringing our own food).

We tried to go to Wendy’s drive-through but while in line, we watched someone try to enter the store (it was open and we could see people inside eating at the tables) but the doors had all been locked. The drive-through line didn’t budge and the doors remained locked. We suspect the poor employees had noped out and decided enough was enough.

We ended up having Taco Time for dinner. Not bad but certainly not the pub food I’d been planning on. Ah well. At least the campsite was fun to explore. I got to wave through the mist at Canada and they had an old boat just hanging out between campsites.