The trip continues with a big road-trip around the Olympic Peninsula. I’ve spent all of a half-day here before (on a family vacation back in college), so I’m quite excited to see mountains, lakes, and forests, which are my natural jam as a woodland-heavy landscape photographer. Along the way, we’ll visit some of the most astounding temperate rainforests in the world, check a second national park off of Jordan’s lifetime list, and have a really relaxing time hanging out with a toddler who increasingly believes (and adamantly states) that he’ll never have to go back to school. Maybe for our own sakes, we almost start to believe him.
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May 21, 2026: Off the Bainbridge Island ferry, we immediately stop at Hi-Life, an island poke shop where we grab huge bowls of fish and rice, along with a strawberry Calpico for the little man. An amazing meal, and probably the best we’ve had so far all trip. Jordan insists that I sit with him, which means Jane makes the long drive up to Port Angeles while I play entertainer and Spotify DJ in the back; again, despite the nearly two-hour car ride, he refuses to sleep. We grab groceries for the next several days at the local Safeway, then head further west to the southern shore of Lake Sutherland, where we’ll be staying in a lakeside cabin for three nights. Jordan enjoys running around on the cabin’s lower dock and throwing rocks into the water. I kick back and open a quart of peach ice cream to enjoy with the views. I grill salmon for dinner that turns out far tastier than the nonsense we had at Ivar’s the previous night. In the evening, I camp out on the back deck and take some hand-held stills of the lights in the distant houses across the lake.
May 22, 2026: In the morning, we return to Port Angeles and ascend the long and winding road up to Hurricane Ridge in Olympic National Park. Jordan hikes with us, faring impressively on the short but at times steep climb through the forest up to Sunrise Point, where we are afforded astounding views of the Olympic Range, and distant views east to the Cascades and northward into British Columbia. Back at the car, we encounter a friendly marmot hoping to munch on some car parts. We coast back downhill into town (out of boredom I’m trying to conserve mileage-per-gallon on our hybrid Dodge, and manage it make it nearly the whole 17 miles without touching the gas pedal). We poke around the Olympic visitor center for awhile (Jordan roleplaying a ranger) before getting an early lunch and drinks at Aloha Smoothies in Port Angeles. Jordan sleeps like a champion (as do we all). We do not go out again.
May 23, 2026: Off in the other direction now, we continue west and drive past Lake Crescent, into the Sol Duc rainforest. We take a really beautiful walk to Sol Duc Falls (Jordan makes it half a mile before asking to ride on our shoulders). On the way back, Jordan and I play a game where we must take turns greeting hikers coming in the opposite direction. He does decently well with this, except some of his greetings are less than polite (such as roaring like a lion or a dinosaur). Back at the car, we insist he uses the porta-potty before we drive back out of the forest. We retrace our route, stopping by the Lake Crescent Lodge to explore around the lakeshore before returning to our house. Again a monster nap. We spend the afternoon and evening watching TV and enjoying the back porch.
May 24, 2026: The road trip continues now. We pack up the house and continue west to the Pacific Ocean. Here at Rialto Beach, it’s a madhouse as Memorial Day weekend is in full swing. We find a spot beyond the massive driftwood logs to hunker down and eat a packed picnic lunch of turkey-and-cheese sandwiches. Jordan gets a little hangry and tantrums himself to tears when he realizes that his sandwich is not pre-cut in half. I tend to his emotions while Jane somehow materializes a plastic knife from the bowels of her backpack (exactly reflecting our two different parenting styles). Leaving the beach, we continues south into Forks, where we show Jordan the nearby playground (replete with an old, lumber-hauling diesel train engine that fascinates him). We check in early to our comfy ground-floor room at the Pacific Inn Motel, and Jordan gets up to his usual hotel room shenanigans (jumping on the bed, inventing games to play, and asking for TV time) while Jane and I take turns going out for drinks (at nearby Mocha Motion) and take-out Mexican dinner (unclear where Jane ultimately sourced this from). We go to bed super early, in anticipation of an early start toward the Hoh Rainforest.
May 25, 2026: Finally, after over a week in the Pacific Northwest, we have a rainy day; fittingly, we are in the rainiest single place in the contiguous United States. It’s pouring as we go through the Mocha Motion drive-thru for breakfast, head out of Forks, and turn off on the long drive up the Hoh River and into one of the densest temperate rainforests in the world, at the seaward foot of the Olympic Range. We arrive at the trailheads in a downpour; Jane breaks out her poncho and I don my rain gear and backpack cover. We force Jordan into his astronaut rain boots and he is a grump-fest the entire way up to the Hall of Mosses (seriously, when has this child ever complained about puddles and mud before?). By the end of the loop trail, he’s enjoying the mosses and the enormous spruce, fir, and cedar trees - from the comfort of Mama’s shoulders. This rainforest is on a different level of age and complexity than the other old-growth forests I visited in 2024. The national park infrastructure means it lacks some of the wildness and mysticism of a place like Eden Grove (Vancouver Island), but I can still appreciate how magnificent it is as an ecosystem and as a visual subject. We have our family photo taken in the Hall of Mosses before retreating to the car. From here, it’s a long drive back to the coast. The driving rain continues on-and-off throughout the morning, so we only make brief pit stops at Ruby Beach and the Kalaloch Lodge before zooming to our day’s last destination at Quinault Lake. Jane and Jordan take a photo with the Quinault Lake Spruce (the world’s largest Sitka spruce) while my camera gear gets increasingly water-logged. We dry off at the Quinault Lake Lodge, eat lunch, and idle away the mid-afternoon by the lodge fireplace and down on its lawn before we are able to check in to our room for the night. I head out in the evening to take long shots of the mist rolling between the trees across the lake.
May 26, 2026: The final full day of our trip. We hike the Quinault Rainforest Trail in the morning, and bid farewell to the big trees. Jordan enjoys playing peak-a-boo through the hollow of a massive, fallen nurse log. It’s a quiet weekday morning, and it feels like the three of us have the forest to ourselves; Jordan asks us to hold hands to finish the trail, and we wind up crab-walking laterally where the trail is too narrow to walk three abreast. I take the wheel to complete our drive around and off the Peninsula; we stop by Huckle-Bearies Espresso & Bake Shop for breakfast drinks and goodies before continuing eastward to Olympia and the Hands On Children Museum for the remainder of the morning. We grab lunch at a nearby food truck park; Jordan eats so much rice and beans that he barfs in the parking lot and promptly (finally) falls asleep on the last stretch of the drive, to Tacoma. We arrive at the Silver Cloud Inn on the Tacoma waterfront in the mid-afternoon, and Jane and I sit and play phone games in the car to let him sleep properly. He wakes up to the horn of a passing freight train (perhaps the only time in Jordan’s life that he was happy to be woken up from a nap before ready). He spends the rest of the afternoon watching trains, which seem to go by nearly hourly from the window of our comfy hotel room. Jane takes advantage of the free laundry in our hotel and gets a head start on post-vacation chores. We go to bed early and head back to SeaTac the next morning for our flight back to Boston.
