Our one-bedroom rental in Sequim
After a few days in Anacortes we moved over to Sequim on the Olympic Peninsula. Because it is in the rain-shadow of the Olympic Range it has very mild weather and so is considered a favored place to move in retirement. We rented a cute little one-bedroom house. It was nothing special; it had that lived in quality, but the location was fabulous—a five acre parcel in a private air-park. It was a gated community with a single straight road that doubled as a runway. Every house had a hanger and there was lots of grassy open space with no fences. The neighbor flew off to work every day. The owner of our rental had two aircraft in the hanger—a homebuilt and a Cessna 172. He sold the 172 while we were there.
Sunday 9/14
We drove to a trailhead on the Olympic Discovery Trail near the Dungeness River Audubon Center. This trail is a long, paved rails-to-trails multi-use trail that is planned to connect Port Townsend to Port Angeles. We biked east to Blyn where the trail currently ends. Altogether we rode 22.7 miles. We had ridden this portion of the trail (in the opposite direction) last year.
Monday 9/15
We drove to Port Angeles and then into Olympic National Park up Hurricane Ridge. After stopping at the visitor center briefly, we went on to the trailhead at road’s end and hiked up to Hurricane Hill. The sky was very smoky/hazy so the views to the north and Vancouver Island and to the south to the highest Olympic peaks were poor. Our round-trip hike totaled 3.6 miles.
On the trail to Hurricane Hill. This would be much prettier with snow patches
Tuesday 9/16
We decided to do more biking on the Olympic Discovery Trail so we went to the same trailhead as we did on Sunday, but rode west toward Port Angeles. There was open farm land, dense forests, and right along the Strait of Juan de Fuca. We poked around in Port Angeles little bit (mainly to find a coffee place to our liking) before returning. This was our longest bike ride at 36 miles.
Beautiful farm land with the Olympic mountains as backdrop.
We celebrated our anniversary with dinner at Nourish, which was excellent.
Anniversary dinner
Wednesday 9/17
With some online research I found a trailhead for the ODT that headed into Port Townsend (although on the Google map it is called the Pacific NW trail or the Larry Scott trail). It started off paved but then turned to hard packed gravel/dirt and in a few sections more like single track. We spent a couple of hours looking around old Port Townsend—it’s picturesque. On our ride back we stopped to pick some blackberries. Our ride mileage was 16 miles.
Downtown old Port Townsend
Thursday 9/18
We drove north of Port Angeles to 2 waterfalls (Madison Creek Falls and Marymere Falls). Madison Creek Falls is basically a drive up, and not very large this time of year (maybe it never is). The 1 mile trail to Marymere Falls starts at the Storm King ranger station on Lake Crescent. It’s an enjoyable hike through a lush forest.
Marymere Falls
After our hike we drove out to the coast looking for a place to hike. We found a lovely deserted beach (Crescent Beach) clearly posted as private (I guess Washington has different beach access laws than California), but there was a county park right next to it on a bit of a point. We hiked through it and found it was an old military camp with a couple of coastal defense batteries.
Friday 9/19
Our rental was adjacent to the Olympic Game Farm and daily we heard animal calls (mostly donkey brays). After breakfast we walked along the road past the game farm and watched a bit of the feeding of the plains animals. None were close enough to see well, but I suppose had we paid for the drive through tour we could have seen them up close. After this walk we drove out to the Dungeness Spit and hiked about 3 miles out on it. It was another 2 miles or so to the lighthouse at the tip of the spit—more than we wanted to do. We saw a few different species of birds (but not as many are sometimes present), including loons.
Dungeness Spit
Saturday 9/20
Check-out day. We did most of our packing the night before, so in the morning we finished packing up and left about 7am. We drove all the way home, arriving about 10:30pm.
Concluding remarks
We rented this little cottage through VRBO.com and I want to give a thumbs up to the owner. Here’s the link to the property. I gave the property a 5 star positive review but did mention that in the afternoon the sun shining on and through those big west-facing windows made it toasty on the warmish days we had. He promptly refunded half the rental cost—talk about customer service. We didn’t experience that level of discomfort so I requested his mailing address and paid all but $20 back.
Links:
—Washington 2014 photo gallery
