Wednesday, June 08, 2005

Neah Bay at Olympic

On day 3, we drove to the Native Indian Makah reserve at the north western tip of the park. There is a nice Native Indian history museum, with great artifacts and stuff from digging at a nearby lake. They have a whole Makah house that you can walk into and see how they lived. Its nice and informative, reading everything in the museum takes a long time. The drive to the reserve is somewhat worth, it has a totally different feeling, especially if you wander around the streets, look at houses and stuff, its very different locality from anything you would see in urban US. It was also sad in a way, you can see how they destroyed the native Americans, their way of living and snatched all of their land, leaving then to survive on worst parts of the forests.

We ate at a nearby restaurant, surprisingly it has good vegetarian options, like omelet for breakfast and some sandwich, pasta for the lunch. After that we planned to drive to the westernmost tip of the US mainland. Most of the drive was through dirt road and it was scary, bumpy and quite uncomfortable. There is a small hike in the end to get to the point. We did not go there, no one really had any enthu, but other who went said the view was worth the hike. We drove in further till the car would take us to another point from where you can see some island with a light house, that was nice too. On the way back we made a small ice-cream stop at a cafe place close to the restaurant. Nice ice-cream. After that we just rushed back home, I so much wanted to get back fast, took the 8:15pm. ferry and were home by 9:30.

Olympic National Park 2005

Another trip to Olympic National Park, this time on May long weekend and no camping, so no bears, and no hiking too, so in all not that exciting. I was kind of bored by the end and just wanted to get back home.
Most exciting part: I got to drive a lot and that too at 70+ and there did not seem to be much consideration of speed limit anyway. I also did my first 2 overtakes on a single lane road, that was indeed exciting.
More exciting part: Did some boating in Lake Cresent.
It was a family trip with large group and plan was basically to hang out at the beach, see some places and take a relaxed driving trip.