I don’t know how this started, but our family is trying to visit every county in Washington state. With our impending move next summer, we are trying to finish off the remaining counties soon. I divided them up into two trips, the first of which was an Olympic Peninsula tour. It was about 800 miles so we chopped it up into three days and did it over Memorial Day weekend.
Before we started, I added two doses of nerd to the trip:
- I had GitHub Copilot create a nicely formatted HTML page with our itinerary on it and then I shared it with Tyla and Elijah so they could look at it during the trip. It had all our stops on it along with links to menus at restaurants. It also included the nice header image that you see in this post.
- I used GitHub Copilot to build an app that lets me generate custom podcast. First it asks me how long I want the podcast to be. Then it researches a bunch of material about the topic and generates a two-speaker script. Then it renders that script into audio using my Azure subscription. Finally, it generates a podcast XML feed and uploads it all to my webserver. That gives us custom podcasts based on specific things that we’re going to see on our trip. It’s not as good as real humans but it’s fun to learn more about specific things we’re seeing.
Saturday
On Saturday, we left early to get in line for the Edmonds to Kingston ferry. We knew it would be very busy (and it was) but we got on comfortably to our target sailing. It’s a pretty quick ride across the Sound and then we made our way west to US 101. Our first stop was Forks, WA for lunch, but since we were doing good on time, I lengthened the trip a bit by taking SR 112 which follows much closer to the water. That road was wild! It had clearly been washed out in many different places and hastily repaired. The speed limit was slow but going any faster would probably destroy your vehicle anyway.
We ended up in Forks for lunch and I was happy to see that a lot of the Twilight-themed stuff had disappeared. There was still plenty of vampire tourism going on though. We charged the car and had lunch ate at the Longhouse Cafe. It’s an authentic Native American restaurant and everything they serve comes with or on Indian frybread. Delicious!
After that we continued on to our stop at the Hoh Rainforest Visitor Center in Olympic National Park. This is where we hit my big mistake in the itinerary. Visiting a national park on Memorial Day weekend? Duh. Huge line. We waited close to two hours to get through the entrance station, but thankfully we were in the Tesla so we weren’t stopping and starting our cars every few minutes like everyone else in line. We stamped Elijah’s National Park passport book at the Visitor Center and the rangers were very impressed with our idea to put a family photo next to each stamp. We hiked a few short trails but we didn’t stay long. Olympic National Park is a tough one to visit. It’s beautiful but it’s a huge area and each entrance is very far apart. So even though we’ve been to multiple parts of it, they’ve all been for short visits where we just see glimpses of the overall park.
From there we continued our trek down to Aberdeen, WA for our first hotel stay and we had dinner at Billy’s Bar & Grill which was also a winner.
Sunday
On Sunday, our first stop was the Historic Grays River Covered Bridge. It was built in the early 1900s and you can still drive your car across it today. I’ve never seen a covered bridge before so I was glad that there was basically no one around and we could spend our time looking at it.
From there we headed to Hood River by way of Jimmy John’s for lunch. For this stretch, we hopped back on the interstate and drove through Oregon. At Hood River we stopped for a round of disc golf and then had ice cream while watching the wind surfers. Then we took the toll bridge across the Columbia back into Washington to collect a few more counties on our way to Yakima.
We had perfect weather both Saturday and Sunday which gave us great views!
Monday
Our last day of the trip was just a ~2.5 hour drive back home, but since it was the Monday of Memorial Day weekend, we didn’t want to delay our start. We shot through Snoqualmie Pass before it clogged up and we were back home before lunch.
Summary
All in all it was just under 800 miles. A silly road trip like this would have been harder to justify at $6/gallon for gas, but the whole trip only cost us $87 in electricity. We stayed both nights in Best Western Plus’s (as usual) and got some discounts there from the rewards we’ve built up. Eating out was a big slice of the total cost and we could have cut that down by packing lunches like normal, but part of the fun was the food along the way.
Now we have one more trip planned to hit the remaining counties in southeast Washington.
