writer / artist / shameless goof
I have traveled extensively across the U.S. and a fair amount outside the U.S. I have lived in Boston and San Francisco; I have visited many parks and places within California, Florida, Massachusetts, and Hawaii; I have been to France, Germany, Belize, Guatemala, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Canada. I have seen many National Parks, including Death Valley, Badlands, Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Teton, Glacier, Olympic National Park, and others. In 2013 I drove across country from San Francisco to Boston and visited many parks along the way. I was an avid caver for many years and have photographed many caves in California, New York, and Puerto Rico. I hope my next destination is tropical!
I took a road trip across country and stopped at many National Parks, including Olympic National Park. It features unbelievably beautiful lush, mossy rain forests.
In my first post, I confused Quinault and Hoh and called it Qoh! Oops.
Gloomy looming large figures! So much moss.
So many ferns! Ferns all the way down.
My second national park on my epic San Francisco to Boston road trip was Glacier National Park. I started on the main road into the park. It was the main road. Full of cars. Nothing remote about it. I was still wearing flats, not boots. I pulled over into a small parking lot to put the boots on. A marked parking lot! Cars all over! Main road! People and stuff!
So there I was next to my car with no shoes on when this guy shows up. He was on the other side of the car at first. You’ll have to imagine that he’s LOOMING next to me (I only started photographing him from the safety of the car). I jumped into the car, shoes in one hand and boots in the other, climbed into the driver’s side, put on some form of shoes (I forget which), and took a bunch of photos. At the time I thought he was a fox because he looked like a small dog.
Later on I showed a native american nature guide my photos. Apparently he is a coyote. Hah hah, double-dumb on you, Kristen.
Never leave the house without your boots on!
I saw this rainbow after a big rainstorm somewhere in the middle of the country, during my road trip. What’s amazing is that every time I saw a giant rainbow, people would pull over and exclaim about it. There’d be a tiny gathering of people in some parking lot, chatting up about the rainbow.
Then they would start talking about where they came from, what they were doing just before. It turns into a little party by the side of the road, focused around the colorful thing in the sky. I love that part of the trip. Makes you wonder how our cave people ancestors reacted to rainbows.
Another photo from the extremely mossy Olympic National Park in Washington State. I really could have spent a month in this place. So tropical! Everywhere I went it was crazy-thick ferns, moss dripping off giant trees, strange frondy things that probably only grow where it rains all the time.
I love jungles. I want to visit Costa Rica. I’ve been to Mexica, Belize, and Guatemala. Not bad. I would love to see some sloths either in the wild or in captivity. I’m not a big fan of captivity but what are you gonna do, those animals need help. Also they look like muppets. How can you not want to help an animal that looks like a muppet, and moves so slowly.
When I was in Olympic National Park I was getting nervous about how much of the country I had to cover before hitting the east coast. I had spent a good week already going straight north through California, Oregon, and Washington. I did not want to short-change the trip east. The country I had to cover looked pretty large.
I also made a mistake in booking the hotel inside Olympic National Park. I meant to reserve a hotel room in the center of the park, but instead I reserved an RV hookup. Whoops! I didn’t realize this until I drove around the wiggly edges of the park all night through dense fog and arrived at 7am, exhausted. All rooms were booked. My disappointment was almost as bad as my exhaustion. I wanted to take a shower and sleep in the worst way. That is when I developed my second rule of the road trip (first rule involved no hiking with the hood up): don’t drive more than 8 hours in a row, ever.
The guy at the desk took pity on me and tried to book me in the nearest nice hotel, but that was also fully booked, so he booked me at the Hungry Bear Cafe, Motel & RV Park an hour away. It turned out to be very cozy and cute. Each room was its own self-contained cottage. Very reasonably priced. Aside from the hour drive, which I obviously wasn’t keen on, the motel was just grand. I’d stay there again.
Key part of this story is that they lady that ran the motel/diner insisted that I see the very far northwestern point of the peninsula, Cape Flattery, before I head east. I was a little concerned that I would not have time, but there was something terrifically charming about this grandmotherly lady who ran the diner like a champ and gave me inside information about the best local places to see.
“Oh you’ll love it! I know you will!”
So off I went, driving several hours even further west. And… sure enough. First there’s this:
A super-lush gentle forest with an adorable little path goes on for a maybe one or two miles. WHERE DO THEY KEEP THE HOBBITS? Adorable. Just adorable.
Then there’s this:
Whales! Seals! Water fowl! Some kind of… HAWK!
So thank you lady, that was a good find. In terms of ease of hiking, while other parts of the park might be a little more strenuous, this is gentle for all ages and quite picture-book-esque.
Cape Flattery was the farthest northwestern point of the U.S. excluding Alaska. On the way back I was so far north that my cellphone beeped “WELCOME ABROAD!” with instructions for how to dial back into the United States. I had to call AT&T and instruct them to lock off Canadian cell towers. I definitely recommend July as the time of year. I was comfortable in a light jacket. As I got closer to the coast, a thicker jacket.
In terms of booking rooms, my sense is that you need more than a week in advance to get something inside the park for prime-time July. I had no trouble finding something on the edge of the park (such as the Hungry Bear place). Since I was doing a road trip I had to wing it a bit, but under other conditions you might want to plan it out more.
It is hard to describe how unbelievably hobbit-like Olympic National Park is in July.
The thick verdant nature of everything is really hard to capture on camera. I was lucky it wasn’t raining. Everything was covered in moss. Electric poles: moss. Electric lines: moss. Everything: moss. I could imagine houses get quite dingy if you don’t keep them dry. I would not want to live here, I think I’d feel damp too much of the year, but it was quite resplendent mid-July.
It was also not very busy. I hiked Quinault Rain Forest. I must have been happily marching along for two hours by myself without hearing a soul in the world, lah lah, my head meandering about how nice the green stuff is and whether I’ll see an elk, when all of a sudden some dude briskly walks past saying EXCUSE ME. I also had my hood up to keep the bugs off, so I really didn’t hear him coming. Sheesh I nearly had a heart attack. After that I stopped hiking with my hood up.
To get from San Francisco to Boston, I took a six thousand mile circuitous route through many national parks. I started in mid July 2013 from San Francisco, having sold or given away all my furniture, and rolled into the Boston area during rush hour on August 17. I travelled alone because I like to eat on my own schedule, pee on my own schedule, fill the gas on my own schedule. I don’t like chatter in the car while I’m trying to drive. I’m in the zone when I drive. I concentrate. I hiked alone except when there might be grizzly bears. Maybe I’m a loner? I don’t know but I had a blast. I was never afraid. I took precautions regarding wildlife.
My first destination was Lassen Volcanic National Park in California. It was full of evergreens and redwoods typical of the forest you’d see in California. I took a longish hike in new boots, luxuriating in the hot weather outside of the city.
We visited the ruins on the beach in Tulum. I like ruins, but honestly, I was more interested in taking photos of the iguanas that were all over the place. The iguana shown here made it into this photo quite accidentally. This photo reminds me that the waters of the Mexican Riviera are turquoise and beautiful.
The first thing to do if you are travelling to Cancun is to rent a car and drive southwest on route 307. The map below covers our destinations: Playa del Carmen, Akumel and Lagoon Yal-ku, and Tulum south of the next juncture. We also visited Coba and Punta Laguna to the west.
I highly recommend stopping at ALL the cenotes. We swam at Cenote Kantun-Chi, Cenote Aktun Chen, Dos Ojos Cenote, and Gran Cenote. See the travel photos and pictures of cenotes. Cenotes are caverns with freshwater pools in which you can snorkel or dive. They are not very well protected or secured. While this is probably not great for the environment or the cenote, it was convenient for our vacation. Tread lightly!
If you drive a half hour or so south from Cancun on route 307 you’ll hit Playa del Carmen, which is very nice, full of open-air restaurants and cute little motels and some quantity of culture. South of that is Akumel, which is nicer still, particularly because of the snorkelling in Yalku Lagoon and the lovely beaches. Tulum is maybe 2 hours south of Cancun, on the map it is just south of Club de Golf Puerto Aventuras. Tulum is extremely excellent, mostly because you can rent a little cabana on the beach and eat awesome Yucatan-flavored seafood while watching the waves come and go. Coba has some fantastic ruins, and is more full of jungle (we saw monkeys there).
At the end of December it was amazing sunscreen & shorts weather. All the beaches we hit were very swimmable.
I really liked the area south of Cancun, but I recommend against staying in Cancun itself. It’s a big city of enormous, absurdly priced hotels. We stayed at the Holiday Inn there our final night, probably would’ve gone back to Tulum if we’d been less tired and hungry. We had to wear plastic bracelets so that the security would know we were okay to come and go. An hour later I wanted to gnaw my wrist off. My boyfriend had to cut the bracelet off with a key.
The water didn’t look very swimmable. The whole place was crowded and urban. It was a giant, faceless hotel, with no character. Hugely overpriced.
Akumel, Tulum and Coba all get an enthusiastic thumbs up.
We took advantage of the $20 midnight bathing deal at Esalen. If you make a reservation, you can make use of all of their tubs (wonderful geothermal tubs overlooking the ocean and open to the sky) for $20 between 1am and 3am. Being natural night owls, we took advantage of this.
The next morning we hiked to the beach at Andrew Molera State Park.
Windy Hill Open Space Preserve is a beautiful park in Portola Valley next to Skyline Drive, in the SF Bay Area. See my pictures here. There were lurking frogs, lizards, and tons and tons of wildflowers!
And I took a ton of photos. You can see them here.
I acquired a TICK on my hip sometime during the trip (probably when I squatted to pee off the trail.) I found it hours later and yanked it out, and it tried to craw away. ICK!
There were lovely amounts of wildlife to see and hear. I heard tons of frogs croaking, I heard a very loud turkey gobblin’, I saw a turkey (not sure if it was the same one), Peter saw 5 turkeys himself, we saw deer, and we saw turkey vultures swooping overhead.
The hike was 4.5 miles round trip for me — 2.9 miles to Frog Lake (along Frog Flat Trail), then 1 mile back along Hobbs road (very steep!), then .6 miles back along Monument trail.
I went caving up in the mountains last weekend. (Lilburn Cave).
It wasn’t snowing on the hike in, but there was plenty of it on the way out.
I managed to bruise and cut my knee, make a hole in my BRAND NEW pants, and twist my ankle something fierce. Ow!
I twisted my ankle… getting DESSERT on the way home.
Kristen Ankiewicz 