The drive up to Port Angeles on the north coast of the Olympic peninsula was beautiful. Part of it reminded us of driving to Ticonderoga, NY, last summer along Lake George where the mountains meet the water. The roads are threaded between a rock bank up one side and a bank down to the water on the other. Very scenic but a bit nerve-wracking to drive when towing a large trailer.
Hood Canal on one side and a rock wall on the other, accompanied by a really curvy road.
Looking across Hood Canal from Hwy 101 near Hoodsport.
Another view of Hood Canal looking northeast. The clouds disappeared as we got further north.
We passed through several tiny towns along the canal including Hoodsport. Its "Chamber of Commerce" description on gonorthwest.com calls it a lovely town with multi-colored houses giving the appearance of a necklace around the water. We must have missed what they were describing because what we saw was more like this.....
This probably wouldn't have been featured on a Chamber of Commerce brochure. Maintenance on wooden houses in this environment has to be tough to keep up with.
Today's drive of 145 miles took a little over three hours.....not bad considering the terrain.....but it seemed really long. Following long strings of traffic didn't help. Washington has a law that if you're holding up a string of 5 vehicles you have to pull over to let everyone pass. There are numerous "slow vehicle pull-offs" so there's no excuse not to do it.....unless the driver is one of those people who never looks in the rear-view mirror so is clueless that he or she is holding up a line of 20 cars. That happened for an extended part of our drive so we gather there are plenty of people who can't or don't read the signs.
This is in the mountainous section between the Hood Canal coast and the north coast along the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The road cuts off the northeast corner of the peninsula.
Believe it or not....and we had a hard time with this....one of our traffic backups was caused by the two motorcycles in the picture above. We had just caught up with them when I took this photo. It turned out they couldn't (or wouldn't) keep up with the 50 to 55 mph speed limit and collected a very long line of vehicles behind them. Go figure.
One more picture of approaching the northern section of the peninsula. By this time all the clouds had gone but the mountains were still hazy. We haven't found out yet what's causing the haze but it looks a lot like air pollution. Port Angeles has a paper mill so maybe that's where it's coming from. Made us feel right at home.
We haven't seen much of Port Angeles yet....just the roads to the Olympic National Park Visitor Center in town and the nearest Safeway, both of which we went to this afternoon....but it seems like a nice little town. It has a population of around 19,000 and must depend heavily on tourism. It's also the port for a ferry going across the Strait to Victoria, BC. We saw Port Angeles from our whale-watching boat a couple of weeks ago but didn't realize it at the time.
Obviously, I can't get an off-shore or aerial picture of Port Angeles which is what it takes to give an idea of its location between the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Olympic Mountains, so once again I've borrowed one off the internet. We'll have to see later if the town lives up to its spectacular setting. At this time of year the mountains have very little snow on them but there's still some left.
No comments:
Post a Comment