We said farewell to our hosts in Seattle, rented a car, and headed off for our drive down the Pacific Coast to Oakland.
We took the same ferry from Edmonds to Kingston that I took when I visited the Bottleheads. The weather was overcast and gloomy so we did not linger outside on the deck to enjoy the views.
Once we landed at Kingston we headed north towards Port Townsend. Marianne was in charge of the camera and took a lot of photos through the car windows.
There was much less traffic than back near Seattle and much more relaxing to drive.
I had stayed in this hotel in Port Townsend back in 1998. Fifteen years later, the bar and restaurant on the ground floor was no longer there.
As the name implies, the town is a port but apart from the ferries there is not much large vessel activity.
Fire escape at the back of the hotel.
The town has quite a few attractive buildings and is very much a tourist destination with the appropriate shops that sell stuff I would never need.
I wonder how somebody dreams this up.
Now this is a real hisser of a building.
Murals on the side of the building.
At one time, this place must have been quite wealthy to afford these buildings.
We continued on towards Port Angeles and the sun finally made an appearance.
One of the features of the day's drive is Lake Crescent which is a few miles west of Port Angeles.
It's a beautiful drive beside the lake, especially when the sun is shining.
The guard rail on the right goes the entire length of the lake.
We stopped at Forks so that I could have a brief nap. When I do a full day's drive I always take a short power nap which revives me. Fortunately there was a nice park where we could stop.
Eventually the road (Route 101) reaches the west coast of the Peninsula.
The Pacific coast line can be really attractive with the little off shore islands.
We didn't take any more photos since after we headed inland again, the scenery was just trees lining the road. We stopped at Ocean Shores for the night and although the motel was fine, there really wasn't a lot to see there. I was quite tired after the long drive and walking a few hundred yards to the beach was not appealing.
It's a pretty good drive, not as spectacular as Route 2 going out to the Grand Coulee Dam, but worth doing.
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