We're On Our Way Home (for just a little while)

Well this time we are heading East for another extended stay up and down the coast. The trip, as we have been on it, is close to being over. I stood outside the motorhome this morning today in Sam's RV Park as I was making the necessary adjustments to get on the road. I stopped for a few moments and offered up my gratitude for this trip that we have been fortunate enough to have been on for the last 9 months, aware of the freedom and space that we have realized, the great people we have met, including each other and the spectacular and sometimes overwhelming beauty that we have witnessed and I got all choked up and tears of joy and gratitude flowed abundantly. This was a very happy moment. It has been a great enlivening, clearing and enriching segment of my life, our lives together and especially for Jasper.

We have traveled 16,000 miles in the RV and so have the rear tires of the Prius and another 19,000 in the car on all four wheels. That's a total of 35,000 miles of America that we have visited and I hope this can go on for years to come.

For now we will make our way back to CT over the next 10 days. 3,300 miles in 10 days, you can do the math. We are going to be doing a lot of driving each night and taking the daylight hours to play along the way back in a new site each day.

Tonight we will make it to Moses Lake, WA - Tomorrow we will make to Missoula, MT. By next Saturday night we will be once again in the embrace of our Iowa friends for a days stay before we shove off again on the easterly path. All of this, of course, depends on the fact that we will get out of this traffic jam on 101 here in Sequim, WA before September.

Below are a few photos of a few days, including yesterdays journey around northwestern Washington state.

We stopped at the Quinault National Fish Hatchery and received a personal tour of the place

The Kids got to feed the 8 month old King Salmon - These salmon are raised in creek water that runs along side the hatchery - so... this is cool, in April they will be released back to the creek and they will head out to the ocean for about 3 years before they make their way back to the creek (and right into the hatchery with a little guidance) where the eggs and sperm will be collected by hand and the whole process will begin again.

A lot of planned forest clear cutting takes place up here and a lot of replanting as well.

There are signs all over the place that say when the areas were cleared and replanted. This replant is 20+ years old. Some of the trees they are still cutting today our over 400 years old. I'll show you those in a minute

But First, I wanted you to know that I visited my place in Aberdeen, WA. Your welcome to come on down anytime

The fish hatchery was great but the highlight of Friday, on the way up to Clallam Bay was the Olympic National Park Temperate Rain Forest

The trees in here are OLD and enormous, like lost world enormous. They average 200 feet tall

And walking in here is like no place I have ever been (especially when the sun is out)

Hers another set of examples of size of these Douglas Fir Trees. It makes me wonder how we could ever cut these down, they are so majestic. I can relate to all those folks who try to stop them. Once you see them you want them to remain where they are.

They say that strong wind damage takes out the most of them every year.

You can see below that they produce a lot of sap as I became stuck to this one as I backed up to it to show scale. No one recognized that I wasn't the SAP.