We didn’t know it yet at the beginning of 2025, but this would be our last year of full-time RV living. (Read to the end to find out why!) Looking back at everything we did, though, we definitely didn’t slack
Our 2025 Year in Review
Mount Rainier National Park
After several years on the road, Cheryl had almost caught up to me on our checklist of visited U.S. National Parks. The only one that I had been to, but she hadn’t, was Mount Rainier in Washington State. So we
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
Olympic National Park: Beaches and Hoh Rain Forest
After a week in Port Angeles, we drove to the west side of the peninsula, not far from the coast. With several days of rain in the forecast, we headed out early in our stay to explore two of the area’s scenic beaches and the Hoh Rain Forest, one of the finest remaining examples of temperate rainforest in the United States and one of Olympic National Park’s most popular destinations.
Olympic National Park: Hurricane Ridge and Sol Duc Valley
Our RV park near Port Angeles, Washington gave us a good base from which to explore the northern side of Olympic National Park. The huge national park occupies most of the center of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, but there are no roads within the park connecting its various hiking and sightseeing destinations. It can take several hours of driving to get between these points on Highway 101, which rings the park. So instead, we planned to visit Hurricane Ridge, Lake Crescent, and the Sol Duc Valley from Port Angeles, and then move around the peninsula to visit other parts of the park.
Laying Low Before Heading North
In the almost two months since we left the Los Angeles area, we’ve been on a steady march up the West Coast. The longest we’ve stayed in any one place during that time was one week, and many of our stays have been only two or three nights. We knew that we needed to be near Seattle for a flight back to Dallas for a few days in early May; we chose that location so that after we returned, we’d be ready to cross the Canadian border for our summer trip to Alaska.