Doug’s World

Megan’s Birthday Weekend

We were planning to go away for the weekend. For Megan’s birthday, and to get away from the Seafair Festival, which brings thousands of people to our neighborhood (southwest Lake Washington) for the hydroplane races, the Blue Angels, and everything else. The plan was to spend Friday and Saturday night at cheap motels on the Olympic Peninsula, and play golf a few different places.

Well, Friday we both had too much work to do, so we didn’t get out of town before rush hour. So we went to Tyee for a twilight round, and took some pictures.

Then Saturday we were going to go play Gold Mountain, the acclaimed public course outside Bremerton. But they were having some type of event and couldn’t get us on until 5:00PM, so we played McCormick Woods instead. It’s a great course, and I haven’t played it for years so that was fun. And it was Megan’s first time playing with a stranger we got paired up with, but he was a nice guy named Jim who played fast, didn’t over-analyze anything, and had the same demeanor whether his drive went 50 feet into the water hazard or 250 yards down the middle. My kind of player, and after Megan got used to him she was really hitting some great shots. (Check out the photo of her ball high in the air soaring toward the middle of the fairway.)

When we walked off the course at 6:30, we decided to drive up to Sequim (”skwim”) on the Strait of Juan de Fuca. They have a golf course there, and that way we’d be near Hurricane Ridge for a nice drive in the Olympic Mountains on Sunday. Megan had never been to the Olympic Peninsula, and the drive up across the Hood Canal Bridge was spectacular, heading into the setting sun. We got to Sequim Bay and I took a photo I liked so much I made it my new blog header, above.

But all the motels and hotels in Sequim were full. As were all of them in Port Angeles. As were several others along the route back to Bremerton. Even the La Quinta in Tacoma was full, which we stopped at just on principle. So we made it back home by 1:00AM, after seven hours of driving around on the way home from the golf course. Next time, I need to plan ahead a bit more; in hindsight, I hadn’t been on the Olympic Peninsula during summer vacation season since I was a kid, and I wasn’t thinking of what that might be like.

So Megan has seen a glimpse of the peninsula, and we need to go back some other time. She did spot a Tsunami Escape Route sign near Sequim Bay, though, which is a sign you don’t see around Berkeley much.

Oh well, off to the local driving range …

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 6th, 2006 at 12:41 pm. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.