Sparkly Vampires

I woke up with Katy this morning around 8am. For going to bed early, the kids must have needed to catch up on sleep. Joey got up around 8:15, Lily around 9, and Mary around 9:30.  After a quick tidy and getting seating from sleeping back to passenger status, we headed out for the morning at 10am. It was about 20 minutes into Forks, WA to stop for groceries, and another 45 beyond that to get to the Hoh Rainforest Visitor Center.

While coming into Forks, we began to see all sorts of references to the Twilight vampires. “Edward Cullen lives here” on a motel sign, cardboard cutouts of the movie actors, whatever.  Now I know nothing about the Twilight series, so while checking out at the grocery I asked the woman working the register. She must have been a huge fan or something because she was telling me all sorts of things about the series. I thought maybe the author was from here or something, but apparently the story is based in Forks due to their rainy and cloudy climate. Mystery solved I guess, although if I were a resident I would get real sick of seeing all these references all the time. Maybe the actual residents are glad to have the boost in tourism due to the fictitious sparkly vampire family living here.

The Hoh Rainforest was very interesting to me, and I guess Mary as well, but I had nothing but complaining from the other kids the entire time we were here. I gave them lunch as soon as we parked, so it wasn’t hunger.  I don’t know what their problem was, but after a short .8 mile loop on the Hall of Mosses trail, we packed up and headed back to Mora (with a quick stop for gas).

Joey spotted a few little fish, everyone is checking them out

One of the biggest trees we found!

Once back at our site at 2:45 I left everyone to play outside while I had a short rest in the van. No sleep, but I got a little bit of yesterday’s blog done (takes forever to add the photos with the bad cell service here).  Mary wanted to go back to the beach, so around 4 we headed back down. Instead of staying right off the parking lot, we started walking down the beach sort of North? Melissa’s cousin had told us about a little jaunt called the ‘Hole in the Wall’ that was up that way.  The five of us walked a good distance, but when I checked my phone it looked like we were only about halfway to the location google said was the hole in the wall. The girls all wanted to head back but Joey wanted to continue. We ended up splitting the group. Boys went on, girls played on the driftwood trees and looked for rocks. As far as I could tell, the “hole in the wall” turned out to be a kind of sea arch in the cliff, although the tide kept us from getting very close. There were several sea stacks that were very cool to see up close. And we ended up getting a pretty good workout walking on the beach sand/stones for probably 2.5 miles round trip.

kids found this fish (shark?) and thought it was cool

"Hole in the Wall" - we couldn't go into it due to the water levels

"Hole in the Wall" from further away. You can kinda see it to the right of the tallest rock pillar

Katy flying back to the van

We were surprised that it was already 7:15pm when we got back to the van to head for the camp site.  We started a quick fire, made more hotdogs, and then cooked s’mores with our newly acquired, official “Twilight” graham crackers and Hershey bars (ok not technically official but they are from Forks, they may as well be official). After bathroom trips and a moderately early bedtime, I’m working on writing today’s blog. We’ll see how long it takes me to upload today’s photos though.