Quiet day round Brinnon

Tuesday
Having had a down day on Monday and the weather being pleasantly warm, we used today to visit some local spots. Brinnon is a very small village on the east coast of the Olympic Peninsula. It is on Route 101, which clings to the coastline all way up the Pacific coast, from San Diego to the the Canadian border. Here it is doubling back south towards Olympia, the Capital of Washington, so when you are on 101 North, you are actually travelling South! The inlet that Brinnon is next to is called the Hood Canal, for some reason some the inlets on the Puget Sound are called canals. We had been told of Whitney Gardens, which is famous for its Rhododendron garden. It is literally a few hundred yards from the Dosewallips State Park, so we started there and spent a lovely couple of hours walking among some beautiful rhododendrons as well as azaleas and many ornamental trees. The photos of course do not do the flowers justice, still we try.

One of the people who worked there suggested we go a little way up the road into the hills, as there is a waterfall that is quite easy to  get to, so we drove off, there were no signpost, but we found the path to the waterfall, which was smooth enough for Sally to get her chair along. We found the waterfall and judged it to be magnificent. It was tucked away in the middle of a bit of temperate rainforest, very quiet. We clambered round the base of the waterfall and found a rock in the middles of the stream to eat our picnic. We had a lovely time there.

We had also been told to visit Mount Walker to get some good views of the area, so we now returned to the 101 and traveled north about 5 miles, where there is a forest road which climbs to the top of Mount walker, now the road was a four mile gravel road, though the mountain is only 2800 ft, when we got to the top the views were amazing. Though not very clear we could see Mt Rainier, which is 82 miles away, though we could only see the top half as the bottom half was hidden by haze. The mountain seemed to just float in the sky. We could also see Seattle across the water.

After our little sightseeing tour of Brinnon we were ready for tea, so stopped in at the Halfway House Restaurant for a very nice meal. In all a pleasant day.