July 8, 2017 Saturday Day 21 Federal Way WA to Eugene OR

After a hearty breakfast and hugs all around, we had to say goodbye to Aunt Alice.

The skies were blue and we were heading over to see Mount Rainier, which is visible from Seattle and Federal Way. 

It was supposed to be about an hour and half drive from her home.  Or so we thought.  We plugged Mt. Rainier National Park into our GPS and headed off on our way.  It didn’t seem to Dick to be the way we went before, but “Joanne” (our GPS voice) assured us “You are on the fastest route.”  So we drove.  It still didn’t seem quite right, as the roads got smaller, and eventually became gravel.  We had misplaced our large map, and so had only a small atlas map.  

But we could see Rainier and it was getting bigger, so we journeyed on.  

The scenery was so lovely and the air was cool and smelled of pine trees.  As we climbed into the hills surrounding the mountain, we could see so many wildflowers.  What a treat!

We found a sign welcoming us to the park.  Yay!  At last.  And expected to soon join the major main route through  park. After a time we saw lots of cars parked along side the gravel road and thought, “at last!”  However, finally, after seeing the hiking path trailheads where these cars and hikers were headed to, there was only a turnaround and a dead end.  This road stopped.  But we were no where near the core of the park, and so had to retreat and drive back on that gravel road about 15 miles.

We did throughout all of this keep having magnificent views of  Mt. Rainier.

 At last we came to an area with larger roads.  By this time we decided we would not try to go into the main part of the park, but would drive a lovely road that would loop around the park and then take us down to the Columbia River Gorge.  Great idea!  We found the route number on our map, found what we thought was the road and resumed driving.   We actually made it into the Park itself a couple of times, just not to the major tourist areas.

A lovely drive!  Great views of the Mt Rainier.  More wildflowers.  And, not many people.  We then decided to change our route again to take a more direct route to the Columbia Gorge, having found on our map a road that would go straight south to the River.   This was an even quieter road with many fewer people. The canopies of the trees covered the road. The light and shadow were gorgeous.  We drove and drove.  We stopped seeing our expected route numbers along the road.  We were now seeing signs for a Forest Service road.  We had the feeling of deja vu from the morning but the road was consistently a good asphalt highway, so we kept driving.  We weren't actually lost but were certainly unsure exactly where we were.

We finally saw a mountain that we thought was Mt. Hood.  Great!  A clue that we were going the right way. 

We also got some great views of Mt. St. Helens.  Wow!  We were fairly close to that mountain, but again on the opposite side of the main tourist area which we had previously visited.

We were still a bit nervous as to where in the world we were, when, at a lovely overlook of Mt. St. Helens, we met a great young couple.  They were able to give us not only some good information about where we actually were (the large mountain we saw was Mt. Adams, not Mt. Hood), but we still had been going in the right direction.  They were so kind to give us their National Forest map with all of the roads on it saying they would just get another pone when they got back to their campground.  Such kindness!

We made the decision that we really had had a great experience on this drive and chose to revisit the Gorge on another trip.  So we turned west for an hour and a half to get to the interstate.  Lovely driving, beautiful trees and a very pretty set of lakes.  What a nice area.

Not what we had planned for the day, but it worked out great.

From there we had another 3 hour drive south until we reached Eugene Oregon.  We really had the sense that we were on our way south to home.  A quick dinner at Denny’s restaurant next door and then we settled into our hotel. A great day, but time to rest to keep driving tomorrow.