(written on the 16th from notes taken previously)
I failed to mention that the gas station we stayed at was a Love’s. I should probably give them some love because sometimes Love’s isn’t very friendly.
After waking up, we drove over to the Denny’s in Centralia so that my mom could visit with one of her friends from her mission from a few years back. Last year, I think we met her at the Denny’s in chehalis.
We pulled into the parking lot, and they ate and hung out for 3 or 4 hours while I was supposed to work but just ended up wasting my time because I didn’t want to work. 😅
I just stared at my little phone screen looking at one thing or another until they were done.
From there, we headed Northwest over to the Olympic peninsula. As we were driving over, we were headed toward Ocean shores which is where my brother-in-law’s father lives, and where my brother-in-law and sister used to go on a regular basis when they used to live in Washington.
I figured for fun I would send Hans a couple pictures that might clue him into where we were, so I sent him one of a market on the highway into Ocean shores, and then I sent him a picture of a sign that had the word ocean shores on it.
He replied Back quickly, I think actually calling me, and we chatted for a bit, and he asked if we were going to go over and visit his dad. I had thought about the fact that he lived out there, but I hadn’t really thought about stopping until my brother-in-law mentioned it.
I looked at my mom, and we both decided that we might as well head on out there and say hello instead of just driving on by, so w welcome to e headed west on a less direct route because there was construction on the regular route.
So we headed off West toward the coast toward Ocean shores, a place which, upon arriving, looked a heck of a lot more like Florida to me than it did the West Coast. I remember being in Cocoa Beach Florida and driving around and having all the little canals and what not, and that’s exactly what I felt like I was seeing in Ocean shores. There were little canals between neighborhoods, and people had docks and boats in their backyards.
What was even more interesting to me was that even though they were right on the ocean, it was all freshwater canals.
I’ll put fresh water in quotes, as it’s pretty murky water. 😅
We hung out with my brother-in-law’s father for maybe an hour, and he showed us all the little projects that he’s working on, showed us around his house and his yard, let us fill up our water jugs from his purified water dealy, and then we were off again heading north.
Of course, being at Ocean shores, it didn’t make very much sense for us to be right on the Pacific Ocean without actually going out and touching the ocean itself, so as we headed north, we found ourselves a little beach, use the restroom, and then drove out onto the hard packed sand of the beach and then walked the rest of the way to the water.
The tide was basically completely out but just barely starting to come back in, so the beach was, I’m going to say maybe 200 yd long? Whatever it was, it was an absolutely massive expanse of sand between the vegetation and the water itself.
As expected for the late time of the season, the water was quite cold, but that’s normal both for the season and because that part of the ocean is pretty much cold all the time anyway.
We round our way up North, through a Native American reservation And into the foothills of the Olympics. It was getting on toward evening at that point, so we decided to start looking for a place to stay for the night. I looked at the map and found what I hoped might be a good place to stay. That is, I looked on the map and saw a road that went out in the middle of nowhere and figured we could probably find ourselves a little spot to camp for the night off of that road.
So we got off the main Road, and headed up into the Foothills, and then we took another side road off of that side road, and started looking for our sleeping spot. Finally, we found one last little offshoot of the offshoot of the offshoot, pulled down into what had apparently been a fairly recent logging operation, pulled up the hill just a little bit, and parked between two large mounds of dirt or perhaps just a hill that had been cut out in the middle by bulldozers as they were doing their work.
We were both a little nervous, this being our first night back in the woods after the experience with the super heavy evil feeling up by Rainier, but we figured that we needed to just push ourselves to do it so we didn’t get in the habit of having that fear.
It was late enough and wet enough and we were tired enough that we didn’t bother trying to make any kind of a fire. We just did our normal nightly stuff and crashed for the night.
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 