22/05/10

(reporting on the 23^rd)

Yesterday we head off from Aberdeen to go up to Cape Flattery, the most north westerly point of mainland USA. On our way up we went through Olympic National Forest and National Park. According to the USA guide that I have, Olympic National Forest is actually a rainforest. The forest is an incredible lush green and more dense than any forest that I have seen back home, which made it quite odd to have two huge deer jump out of the trees and walk across the road in front of us before disappearing again. We passed through the town of Forks WA, which apparently is the setting of the Twilight books although we only realised this was the case after we had been through.

Cape Flattery itself is on some tribal grounds and unlike the Navajo people, we could access the land without having to pay extortionate fees. We had to walk to the actual headland, which was quite fun as the forest there is amazing and much of the pathway is made up of wooden boards raised up from the ground level by a few feet. These wooden walkways went out to viewing platforms along the headland that provided nice views of the coastline and finally a larger platform at the very north west end itself. From the cape you could see Vancouver Island and the dark scary world that is Canada.

From the cape we headed towards Seattle following our Tomtom route, all was going fine and normal until Gladys said “go straight ahead then take the ferry”. Ferry!!??!? First time I had every heard that one. We did actually take the ferry across Puget Sound as it saved us a lot of driving and it was nice to mix up the transportation a bit. We had to hunt around for a place to park up for the night as the Seattle area seems pretty hot on towing. Everywhere we went seemed to say “no overnight parking” and have towing company signs. When we eventually found one that didn't we had a look round the area to see what was on offer. We found a cool sports shop that sold frizbee golf equipment. You have 3 frizbees: a driver, a midrange and an accuracy frizbee and ,like normal golf, you have to get your frizbee into this net thing in as few shots as possible. I decided to get myself a driver as I have been in the market for a frizbee for quite a while now and I like the gratuitously over engineered style of the golf ones. The store also sold these helium filled balls that could bounce ridiculously high. A store employee was using one outside and he managed to bounce it higher than the shop, which is one of these enormous warehouses. Pretty cool.

Cube out