Charis: For us, Washington’s main destination was Port Angeles, as the current home of our two fabulous friends, Ben and Katie (who were our witnesses for our legal marriage back in 2016!). As well as being wonderful humans, they are also foodies, so our first stop in Washington was in Tacoma at H Mart, a huge Korean supermarket complete with K-Pop playing through the speakers, where we stocked up on various bits and bobs for meals for the weeks ahead.

Ben and Katie are currently living in and renovating a vintage boat in the Port Angeles Marina, where we got to join them for two weeks. After passing our borrowed faithful Z4 off to its delighted rightful owner, we settled in to the marina with its adorable visitors and incredible views.

Over the next couple of weeks we went on multiple fun hikes in the local area, ate some very tasty food, and Derek got his second full draft of his PhD written!

I finally got round to making some corn and chocolate cookies inspired by the cheesecake we’d had in Mendocino, and they turned out great! So much so, at the time of writing I’ve made 3 batches, haha.

Derek: Port Angeles and the area around are known as “Where the Mountains Meet the Sea” which we already could tell from our drive here. One of the first things Ben and Katie took us to see is Hurricane Ridge, barely a 25 minute drive from the marina to the top of a mountain overlooking a scene which easily could have been the Alps! There was even a ski lift (and apparently shorter ones we didn’t see). The mountain gets over 33 feet (10 meters) of snow a year. We didn’t have any snow on the trails as we walked around, but did spot some marmots playing and several deer grazing.

We went to several nature areas throughout Olympia. Salt Creek Recreation Area, a short drive west along the coast and had some tidepools and a sea stack island with a whole grove of trees. Marymere Falls Trail was at the end of Lake Crescent and gave us a teaser of the hanging moss and ferns that we’d see much of on future hikes.

Murdock Beach was an interesting spot as it’s covered in fossils! We didn’t do any research ahead of time and were easily able to find a dozen examples. The beach is all rocky and once you’ve found the first fossilized piece of kelp (a good example is in the middle of the photo on the right), you start seeing them all over. Charis had a good wander out onto this tree and came back with a water bottle! I hadn’t packed one so will be adopting it.

Charis: Back in the marina, one evening we were invited to join the Port Angeles’ Sailing Club for one of their races. As a noob, I mainly cowered out of the way, acted as ‘railbait’ when needed and tried not to fall out the boat, but it was an exhilarating and beautiful ride! Once the race was over, Keith our skipper put some tunes on and Derek got a turn at the wheel.

Port Angeles has a park with sculptures and installation art spread among the paths and trees, and even up them! Also, let us introduce you to Katie and Ben’s dog Mitzi, clearly the best dog in the world.

Derek: Port Angeles lies within the rain shadow of the mountains and remains relatively dry throughout the year. On the other side of the mountains the Hoh is a very different story, a temperate rain forest with 11.6 feet inches (3.5 meters) of rain a year. The drive there passed this adorable Gnome village, and the city of Forks which does somewhat embrace the notoriety of being the setting for the Twilight series.

Green green green, the photos just start giving the idea of how lush the ferns and mosses are. If forest bathing is a metaphor, we were plunged and soaked! In addition to the Hall of Mosses and Spruce Nature trails in Hoh, we stopped off at the Ancient Groves Nature trail on the drive back.

Katie and Ben came with us to one more trail halfway to Seattle, the Staircase Rapids Nature Loop, which had the best river we’ve seen yet as well as more of the local Salmonberry bushes.

Charis: We headed out to Seattle at the end of the fortnight, to pick up my lovely mum who we’d persuaded to join us out in Canada. She and I went to a city centre hotel whilst Derek headed northwards to catch up and stay with an old university friend of his.

Mum amazingly didn’t seem to get any jet lag so I got to get up at a reasonable time the following morning and after breakfast we headed out to see some of the famous sites of Seattle – the Space Needle (pretty, but we preferred the grounds!), Olympic Sculpture Park (pretty cool, and great views) and Pike Place Market (like a warren! Plenty of fun shops but it was very crowded). We had lunch from a Mexican food truck in the small, central Westlake Park – there were banners up for free live music at lunchtime similar to Portland but alas, the season hadn’t quite started yet.

The most fun thing we found was actually tucked away within the Pacific Place Mall. As it was Pride Weekend, a load of local florists had collaborated with the mall to create multiple gorgeous floral sculptures celebrating Pride. Aren’t these fabulous?!

Afterwards, we headed to the Paramount Theatre to see The Girl From The North Country – a Tony award winning musical based on the music of Bob Dylan. The music and singing was really incredible, though being set in Duluth, Minnesota in 1934 (the Great Depression) did leave it a bit on the tragic side.

On the Sunday we got Mighty O’s vegan doughnuts and coffee for breakfast, before strolling up to Union Lake and watching the seaplanes taking off and landing. We joined Derek at the fabulous Kati’s Vegan Thai for lunch. The heat was beginning to take its toll at this point though and having suffered a bit of a grumbling headache earlier in the day, a migraine decided to surface, so I left Mum and Derek to explore the Chihuly Garden and Glass Museum together before we continued back up to Port Angeles.

Derek: I had a really good time catching up with my friend from university, seeing his fascinating and inspiring projects, and did fit in hikes at Snoqualmie Falls and Lord Hill Park.

We drove to Port Angeles, joined Ben and Katie, and went to Hurricane Ridge for sunset. It’s certainly called the golden hour for a reason! And we got lucky with several deer walking right across the path and posing for photos.

We slept one more night on the boat and the next morning saw us catching a ferry headed to Vancouver Island!