It has rained, on and off, all day. Normally I wouldn’t mind so much, but the car is full and it’s practically impossible to keep wet and dry separate.

The rain had been so loud in the tent that I could only hear my alarm at its loudest. I tried to let Robert sleep in a bit, but I didn’t wan tot wait too long. The rain wasn’t letting up and I wanted to get going (why, I don’t know). We took down the tent inside of the rain fly, somehow managing to keep it and the footprint pretty dry. The rain fly was another matter. Dripping wet, I piled it up in the back on top of the plastic totes to let it dry a little and keep it from dripping on everything. I succeeded in keeping the water off everything else, but when I checked later, there were very large puddles on the plastic totes.

We went up to the Hoh Visitor Center to ask about short hikes, since it was very cloudy and we wouldn’t be able to see any of the mountains. We took a nice hike through the Hall of the Mosses. It was very cool and the maple trees with club moss and their leaves turning continued to remind me of the east coast in fall. I was a little tired of the wet and struggled to stay in a good mood at first, but the trail brought my spirits up a bit.

We then headed back to 101 (at this point we’ve gone north, west, and south on US 101, all without repeating any part of it) and headed south to the beaches. We only stopped at Ruby beach to really look around. The beach was pebbly and there were very large piles of drift wood (entire 30 ft trees!) laying around, which was pretty cool. We wandered around a little bit, I dipped my toes (again) in the ocean, and headed back. We were both not in great moods at this point.

We went past all the beaches except the last one, South Beach, where we went down to the sandy beach for all of a minute or so since there wasn’t much to see. Robert grabbed an empty crab shell.

The rest of the day was a bit of a wash. We missed the Kurt Cobain memorial park in Aberdeen (we both thought that it was further south and didn’t check until we were 50 miles south of Aberdeen). The Lewis and Clark National Historic Site was closed when we got there (after 5 pm). We got some tasty dinner and looked for a place to stay on the coast, but we didn’t check anywhere in Astoria, so we had to go all the way down to Newport and go by all the coastline in the dark. This is what put me in a foul mood. We had made our route so that we would go down the coast, and I figured it was so we could SEE the coast, but Robert had assumed that I hadn’t found any accommodations in Astoria so he just kept looking south.

We had a smoking room in the Roadway Inn and it reeked. I hate cigarette smoke and the stench of stale smoke is no better. So on top of missing all that coastline, I had to hide under the sheets so that I could fall asleep without being bothered by the smell. Ugh.