Michelle Visits - Quinault Rain Forest and the Pacific Ocean

One of the big goals during Michelle's visit was to see the Pacific Northwest rain forest in Olympic National Park. My Mom and I had visited the Hoh Rain Forest, but it was a little too long of a drive for a day trip and Michelle and I wanted to cut costs; so we decided to visit the Quinault Rain Forest area instead, which is a little closer. It wasn't very crowded when we got to the Quinault area; I'm guessing because it was a weekday and the weather was miserable. We tried going to the visitor's center, which was closed. So we had to make our own itinerary. We completed two hikes, one to see the world's largest spruce tree and the other to see a waterfall. The Quinault Rain Forest has some of the world's largest tress in the world - a spruce, hemlock, douglas fir, and red cedar. We only saw the Sitka Spruce, which is 191 feet high and a thousand years old. We really wanted to check out some of the other trees, but it started to rain hard and we were cold and ready to move on.

After we left the rain forest we decided we were close enough to the Pacific Ocean to drive to a random beach and take in the views. We listened to my Garmin and took a turn onto a street that would take us to the Ocean. Interestingly enough this road took us directly onto the beach. The road turned into sand and all of a sudden my car was driving on the beach. We looked up and down the beach and saw a few cars and SUVs parked on the sand. I parked close to the road because I didn't want to be driving around on the beach and get my little Honda stuck. We got out of the car and looked at the beach and water. There's nothing to say expect that it was the weirdest beach I have ever been to. The way the waves stirred up the mud in the ocean, and the sand that went on forever was very unnerving. It felt like a post-apocalyptic world and we felt very isolated and disturbing. After taking a few snapshots we quickly got back in the car and left. I've never seen anything in nature that made me feel that uncomfortable before. Unreal.

Well, that's the end of Michelle's visit. I'm pretty pleased with everything we got in during the visit. We got in our Seattle tourism,  Pacific Northwest nature, and a lot of girlfriend talk and relaxing. (We even dyed Easter eggs the last night she was here.) Her visit went by way too quickly. I am so glad she came to visit and I can't wait until another friend from the East Coast makes it out here so we can show off our amazing state.