The Journey To Eternity: Family Trip to Washington

With all these COVID shut downs and such we postponed our annual fourth of July family vacation to a National Park until August this year.

We decided to head up to the Northwest corner of the country. We left on a Thursday and traveled 14 hours to North Cascades National Park. We set up camp that night and explored the park on Friday.

Friday we got up and had pancakes for breakfast then set out to explore North Cascades National Park.

We ended up walking on the Diablo Lake Trail. Although we did not walk the entire trail. Instead we got sidetracked at the creek where the boys had a blast throwing rocks in the creek.

We then went back to Diablo Lake and had lunch on the shore of the lake. The boys got all wet playing in the water.

This is the Diablo Dam that we had to drive over to get to the other side of the lake.

On our way back to the campsite, all the boys fell asleep so we decided to drive up the mountain to Cascade Pass. Up at the trail head parking lot, we saw the glaciers. We also counted 7 waterfalls that we could see just from the parking lot. We however did not actually hike the trail but Connor liked walking in the tall grass.

We then went back to the camp site where we had tin foil dinners. We were going to have smores but Connor tripped next to the fire and put his right hand directly in the fire. So we spent the rest of the night doctoring up his hand and trying to calm him down.

On Saturday, we woke up and packed up our camp. Then we drove to Walmart to get more things for Connor's hand. Then we drove to Edmonds Washington where we caught the ferry to Kingston. Due to COVID we were not able to get out of the car on the ferry but that's alright. We then drove to our campsite on Bainbridge Island at Fay Bainbridge Park. We set up camp and the boys explored the park. They had a lot of fun playing on the pirate ship playground they had there.

On Sunday, we woke up and drove to Olympic National Park. There we did the Marymere Falls hiking trail and we actually completed this trail.

We saw lots of very large trees and the boys liked climbing all over them.

We did eventually make it to the falls.

We even got to go through a tunnel under the road to get back to our car.

We then had lunch and drove back to Bainbridge Island where we went swimming in the Puget Sound. Well the boys went swimming, but it was too cold for the parents and Evan. We then had pizza for dinner. We also learned that the boys can't eat dinner in camp chairs. We lost at least 3 pizzas to the dirt because they kept dropping them.

On Monday, we packed up camp once again and drove to Mount Rainier National Park. There we completed the Grove of the Patriarchs trail.

There was a suspension bridge over a creek during the hike. The boys had no problems walking over it. Then of course we had to stop at the water to throw rocks in it.

Then we kept walking into the grove of the patriarchs where we saw some very big trees.

We stopped here and had a granola bar break.

Connor loved to run all over the boardwalk. Then we headed back to the car. However we had to stop at the creek on our way to throw more rocks.

We then went to our campsite and set up our tent for the night. We also set up the 2 hammocks and the kids played in them. We had chicken tacos for dinner.