Sunday, October 9, 2016

Our 25th Anniversary Trip to WA

We took a four day trip to Washington for our 25th anniversary.  Even though we do not have small children at home to look after, because of Mike's teaching schedule four days is all we can manage to get away.  

The weather was perfect and the drive was beautiful.  We visited the Bellevue botanical garden.  It is part of the city park system and was free to the public.  The garden was divided into different themes: rock garden, Japaneses garden, perennial garden, waterwise garden, just to name a few.  I loved the dahlia display.  My mother had dahlias in her flower bed when I was a little kid.  























We visited the Olympic game farm in Sequim.  It is 84 acres of drive through zoo where you can feed and have a very close look at these friendly animals. Mike had great fun feeding them and because I didn't want to risk my fingers getting licked by them I took the pictures.



This Yak was so eager to take the bread out of Mike's hand he practically slobbered all over the side of our car.




We had to guard our bread from this greedy llama.




There were a lot of peacocks and peahens with their babies at the farm.




This is a waving bear.  He waved at us as we drove next to him and at first I didn't realize what he was doing, but he was kind enough to wave two more times so there was no mistake what he was doing.  Only after the visit to the farm I found out he is quite famous.  you can find a video of him waving on YOUTUBE.




This elk was on guard duty.  He was waiting for us right by the gate.





The white deer at the bottom of this picture chased us while we were driving and as soon as he figured out that Mike was not handing out bread anymore he switched over to my side begging for bread.


We went to the Dungeness national wildlife refuge.  It was a short walk from the parking lot along a beautiful forest trail.  The spit itself is about 5 miles long and there is a light house at the end.  We didn't make it all the way to the light house because walking on the sand and pebbles was putting too much strain on my sore ankle. 




Someone had a fun making this.







There was driftwood of all sizes everywhere. 




The view of the spit from the top of the trail.


We loved Olympic National Park.  We decided that we have to come back and spend more time enjoying this beautiful park.  It has all the things that I love: the ocean, waterfalls, forests, hiking trails...

For this trip we hiked in the Hoh rain forest.  It was beautiful with maple trees changing colors mixed with evergreens, ferns and mosses on the ground. We hiked a couple of short trails.  The one thing I noticed was that there was no dry place to sit and eat our lunch.
  






This curtain of mosses was soft to touch.





Look at this cute mushroom! I would love to have some of these in my fairy garden.














I learned that this is called a nursery log.  You can see the seedlings growing on the log.










It was a such a great trip.  I love spending time with Mike. 

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