Olympia, Washington

Continuing our second tour of the Pacific Northwest, we spent the week of August 20-27 in Olympia, the capital of Washington State, visiting our friends Deb and Chuck. Like so many of our other RVing friends, we first met them when they attended an Escapees Hangout that we hosted.

Deb and Chuck spend their summers on a beautiful lot that they own at Lost Lake Resort, a private RV park deep in the conifer woods of the Nisqually Valley on the east side of Olympia. Like most of the other lots, their site is perfectly designed for outdoor living, and even though the temperatures were warmer than usual for the area, we still got to spend plenty of time enjoying it.

One of their neighbors was kind enough to let us stay on an empty pad on a site they own just around the corner. Look at those beautiful trees–quite different from our place in the Arizona desert!

Deb and Chuck took us on a day trip to Vashon Island, a large island in Puget Sound between Seattle and Tacoma. To get there, we drove onto the Vashon Ferry for the 20-minute trip from Point Defiance on the mainland to Tahlequah on the island.

The short crossing gave us just enough time to walk to both ends of the ship.

From the ferry, we got our first look at Mount Rainier, almost 50 miles away.

From the ferry terminal, we drove up to Point Robinson Park, on the east side of adjacent Maury Island. A short walk brought us to one of the area’s giant troll sculptures, Oscar the Bird King.

Oscar is part of a series of six whimsical, hand-built troll sculptures in the Pacific Northwest collectively called “Northwest Trolls: Way of the Bird King“. The sculptures are the work of Danish artist Thomas Danbo, who creates them out of recycled and reclaimed materials, hoping to inspire people to have fun and think of “trash” as a valuable resource. Danbo’s publicly-accessible creations just beg you to interact with them.

We noticed that Oscar‘s eyes were designed in such a way that they seemed to follow us no matter where we stood. Cool and just a little creepy (in a fun way) at the same time.

Leaving the troll sculpture, we walked out to the shoreline of Point Robinson, where another spectacular view of Mount Rainier greeted us beyond a pile of driftwood.

The Point Robinson Lighthouse has served vessels on Puget Sound since 1885. The lighthouse has been fully automated since 1978, and today the two former keepers’ quarters have been restored and are available for use as vacation rentals. (And there’s Mount Rainier again, peeking up between the lighthouse and the shed.)

The next day, we visited the Olympia Farmers Market, now in its 50th year of operation, where a wide variety of produce, meats, cheeses, baked goods and other fresh foods were available.

The market boasts eight different restaurants along with live music, so we took time to enjoy lunch and some entertainment while we were there.

With our bellies full, we headed over to Olympia’s Brewery Park at Tumwater Falls, a 15-acre park along the falls of the Deschutes River. The “brewery” in the name refers to the building of the former Olympia Brewing Company, which was founded in 1896 and brewed its Olympia Beer with the fresh water from a nearby artesian spring that flowed into the river. Their marketing slogan, “It’s The Water”, adorns some of the buildings in the park.

We walked the half-mile-long path that starts at the brewery and Upper Tumwater Falls and passes by Middle and Lower Tumwater Falls. Footbridges span the Deschutes at both ends of the gorge to make a loop for the return trip to the brewery.

Back at the RV park that evening, Chuck fired up their pizza oven, and Deb turned out four incredible gourmet pizzas that rivaled the best pizzas we had earlier this year in Italy. Seriously, they were that good!

The outside temperatures were unusually warm, even into the evening, so on this occasion we opted to eat inside our RV in the comfortable air conditioning.

On our last full day in Olympia, we drove up to Tacoma. We had hoped to visit the Tacoma Museum of Glass, but it was closed that day.

However, we were still able to enjoy several outdoor installations by famed glass artist and Tacoma native Dale Chihuly. His 500-foot-long Bridge of Glass, a pedestrian bridge that links the Thea Foss Waterway to the Museum of Glass, holds three of them: the Venetian Wall, which contains 109 Chihuly sculptures along its 80-foot length…

…the Seaform Pavilion, the ceiling of which holds more than 2,000 blown glass objects (just a fraction of those are shown in the photo below), eliciting the feeling of being underwater at a colorful coral reef…

…and a series of translucent blue-green crystal towers at the center of the bridge, which call to mind chunks of cool glacial ice.

We crossed the bridge to see Tacoma’s old Union Station, a landmark 1911 railway station that is now a federal courthouse. We arrived after closing time, but Deb and Cheryl were still able to snap a few photos through the glass doors of the exhibit of Chihuly glass sculptures inside.

We capped off the day, and our week in Olympia, with a delicious dinner at Katie Downs Waterfront Tavern, where the food was just as good as the beautiful backdrop provided by Puget Sound.

The next day, we said goodbye to our dear friends Deb and Chuck, and turned our wheels eastward toward Mount Rainier National Park.