All around good call
We have no regrets on making the decision to get ahead of the 101 closure. We do have the desire to come back some time and better explore the Sol Duc area. Our short excursion up the road was enough to show us that the area is beautiful and unexpected circumstances prevented us from getting very far into it. It will be a do over goal for another time.
Yeah, new bridge, I get it. But was there no other option than to shut down 101?
We saw the bridge construction on the way out and we get that they have built an entirely new short bridge to replace the existing one. I am not an engineer, so I don’t understand the ins and outs of why they couldn’t route traffic across one bridge until they were ready to switch to the other one. I’m just glad we didn’t find ourselves on the other side of that spot after 6pm, or on the next day.
Flying the Canadian Flag because BC is pretty close here.
The town of Port Angeles has enough services to be very helpful for things like dinner, ice cream, and restocking, but not so big as to be a traffic problem. The KOA is just a couple of miles past the town and not far at all from a bike path. If we hadn’t been hungry, we could have biked into town pretty easily. But we also wanted to bring back groceries, so we just drove.
Agreed
We found a place called The Rail that makes mostly burgers, but also has a steak salad on the menu with a sweet curry dressing that was really good. We split that and followed with a trip to Welly’s. This ice cream place was very highly reviewed and specializes in mixing mashed berries into an ice cream base, producing something that looks like berry soft serve. Richard had that, while I had a scoop of mint chip. I won’t ding them points for the mint chip, because it is not their main gig, but it was the kind with hard chips that don’t have a lot of chocolate flavor. But I survived the ordeal and we went on a little walk up and down the waterfront.
Marine Life Center and waterfront promenade
It’s a cute town, with a little park at one end, and a marine animal center at the other. In between are some coffee shops, little stores, and restaurants. Parking at the wharf was easy and there is a whole arcade place if that’s your vibe.
Pleasant, short stay
Short stay, which served its purpose. For future thinking, this might be a fine and dandy place to act as a base camp if we wanted to explore the Hurricane Ridge area of Olympic NP. At the time we passed through, the Hurricane Ridge Road was closed. It did open back up later, but we’ll save that one also for another time. Olympic National Park is big. All in all, switching plans and making this stop made travel the next day much, much easier.
Total miles from Fairholme: 34.9, 18.1 mpg, 1 hour 31 min. Site 310. Electric and water hookups. Dump, but didn’t use it. Great cell for both.
