Olympic Peninsula for Mama's Birthday Weekend

 We had a special weekend visiting the Olympic Peninsula to celebrate mama's birthday.

 We loved exploring and hiking through the trails of the Hoh Rain Forest in the Olympic National Park.

 This temperate rain forest gets 140 to 170 inches of rain a year which creates an amazing lush, green canopy...and lots of "spooky trees" as we call them.

 I had a blast climbing on nurse logs and trees on our hike.

 We visited the interpretive center and each held an elk leg.

 We also got a kick out of visiting the Olympic Game Farm again. I was brave feeding the animals wheat bread this year!

 Karen squealed..."Mama, a zebra outside our window!"

 We were glad there was a fence between our truck and this bear.

 Sometimes the animals were a bit aggressive sticking their heads in our window to get some bread! We had LOTS of laughs.

 We found a beautiful, small campground overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca. This is a view from our tent. We had the beach to ourselves and had a blast when the tide went out in the morning!

 My sister had to learn to return this sea star to the rock she found it on. She really wanted to bring it home to our fish tank.

More biking on this camping trip!!!

 We explored and went wading in the Hoh River .

 Here is a little bug I found at our campsite. I named him "Blackie".

 We went hiking near Lake Quinault and found this waterfall in the background.

 We of course had to cool off and go swimming in Lake Quinault after our hike. The weather was a lot warmer than when we visited this lake in the winter!

 We also explored Ruby Beach along the WA coast. It had really cool sea stacks, boulders to climb, and lots of drift wood.

 I made a "sand angel" instead of a snow angel!

We're so thankful for the many special memories we made this weekend!! We're sad the camping season is coming to an end for our family as the cross-country season starts next week...but we're excited for that too!