Home

Our last chance to see Mount Olympus, and it was the cloudiest of the trip. Never the less, we decided to drive up Hurricane Ridge to at least say we’d done it. As we climbed, the fog became more and more dense. It wasn’t smoke, because I had to run the windshield wipers to keep clearing off the droplets. Dang, I wish I had my Tacoma truck with its fog lights. I crawled along at less than 20 miles per hour and prayed some local wasn’t going to fly into us. 

Then, suddenly, we were above the clouds, and it was a beautiful sunny day. And we could see the mountain tops with their receding glaciers. We walked along the meadow trails where the Olympus marmots were supposed to be gamboling, but it must have been their day off. A couple of chipmunks came close enough for me to be suspicious that perhaps they had been given the occasional trail mix treat. I did see two juncos and two yellow-rumped warblers, in addition to the ever-present crows. This has not been much of a birding trip. Wrong time of year for the area. 

Not wanting to hike even moderate trails, we opted to look one more time at Mount Olympus, then head down the road, through less dense fog until we were off the ridge and under the cloud level. Having more time than we wanted to spend at Sea-Tac airport, I found Salt Water State Park for lunch and short walk along the shore. We drove on to Seattle, turned the rental car in, then had dinner at Beecher’s in the airport, Mariachi Mac n cheese again for me, tuna melt for Grant.

Once aboard the plane, I settled back with my glass of wine and another of seltzer. I didn’t think I’d slept, but the next think I heard was, “Welcome to Orlando.”  As usual, glad to go, glad to be home. 

The cats were just as helpful unpacking.