2024 Highlights: Olympic Peninsula

At the end of August, after I finished off my busy work period with the Writers Festival, we took one last family trip for the summer and headed across the border to the Olympic Peninsula. We’ve done several trips through Washington over the years but had yet to explore this area of the state. We caught the very first ferry leaving the Sunshine Coast on a Wednesday morning. (6:20am; one thing our kids said they wanted to do for the summer was be woken up early in the morning and carried to the car in their pyjamas to catch this ferry.) We crossed at the Peace Arch, made a stop for snacks at Trader Joe’s, and drove out of Bellingham via Chuckanut Drive. It was a lovely scenic drive. We stopped for lunch in Anacortes and made it that evening to our hotel in Port Townsend.

One of the things we were curious to try was the Washington State Ferries. Living in a ferry-dependent community as we do, we have a lot of experience with and opinions about the ferries. Tourists seem to like BC Ferries and I’ve heard visitors exclaim over how nice the amenities are but after 9 years living on the Sunshine Coast (and Vancouver Island for 7 years before that), I’m a bit more jaded. So maybe residents of Washington don’t love their ferries but we were impressed.

While the ferries themselves were definitely older than ours, they were clean and had what you needed. Sailings were frequent, punctual, and cheap! Our minds were blown that it only cost a bit of $20USD for all 4 of us and our car to travel! We did have a one sailing wait when we crossed to Port Townsend but took the opportunity to explore an old military base nearby.

Port Townsend is a smallish, old-fashioned town with lots of beautiful architecture. It’s the kind of town with a typewriter store on the main street, if that gives you any sense of the place. Lots of old brick buildings and lovely views around various corner. We stayed right downtown at a place called The Palace Hotel, a lofted room in a historic building. It was the perfect place for us to relax in and use as a home base for explorations.

Scenes from Port Townsend:

We took a day to drove to nearby Port Angeles and explored this slightly larger town in the rain, visiting a nearby lighthouse and aquarium.

Obviously, I had to do the Rocky pose at the top of the stairs.

While home to some really beautiful landscapes, a highlight for me was that this is a region full of bookstores! I stopped at Pelican Bay Books in Anacortes, William James Books and Imprint Books in Port Townsend, and Port Book and News and Odyssey Bookshop in Port Angeles. Check out my book haul!