Our Alaska cruise starts on August 29. We arrived in the Seattle area on August 21st. It was important to us to get here early so we could figure out how to get to our ship in Vancouver and find a storage place for our motor home. After looking at storage, boat, train, airplane and car options for a few days we finally worked things out. We were able to store our motor home in the RV park where we had been staying for the past week. From there we could drive our car to the Sea-Tac Airport and then take the Princess bus directly to the ship. This worked out to be our easiest and least expensive options.
While waiting for our cruise date we were able to make several excursion trips in the Seattle area. We went to Mt. Rainier, Mt. St. Helens, Olympic National Park, the Space Needle and Port Angeles. Don’t go to the Space Needle. It is a total rip-off! They wanted $13 each, just to ride the elevator to the top for the view. We decided to decline their offer. At each of the parks we did quite a bit of hiking. There were some very nice trails and most had water falls and other things to see.
The top of Mt. Rainier was covered with clouds when we were there, so we were disappointed about that. We did get in a nice hike to Carter Falls. Fortunately we were able to get a clear view of the mountain several times as we traveled about the Seattle area.
Mt. St. Helens was very interesting. We drove up to the Johnston Ridge Observatory where we did some looking and hiking. The volcano is still active and gases were escaping to form a cloud above the peak. We also saw a couple of movies that showed the big eruption on May 18, 1980. It was incredible to see the destruction that resulted from the blast and mudslides; some of which is still visible after 25 years. Weyerhaeuser has done a great job in restoring the forest that was destroyed. The last eruption was in 2004 which did little damage by comparison.
Olympic National Park is very pretty. We took a trip to Hurricane Ridge and hiked 1.6 miles to the top. You could see the bay area, including Victoria and Canada. It was a great view! We went back down the mountain and after a six mile bike ride in Port Angeles we drove over to Lake Crescent. The lake was beautiful. From the lake we hiked up to Marymere Falls. We passed through some very old forest with huge trees on the way to the falls. It was a great hike!
