Giant trees in Mount Rainier National Park & return to Seattle

Friday July 6th.

Sun and wonderful forest air around our nice motel! Really good breakfast and a little chat with the Vietnamese owner about his homeland, and already at 8:40am we are rolling from the yard.

After three miles, we turn off to the Mount Rainier National Park and drive to the Stevens Canyon entrance. Just beyond, there is a trail to huge trees up to 1,000 years old.

We hike along incredibly thick trunks, although many giants have died in the crown. Some giants have fallen and the roots show us how small we are.

We cross a suspension bridge over the wild, clear, and very beautiful Okana River, and on an ensuing boardwalk, we reach a giant tree and an ensemble of two thick trunks growing directly next to each other.

The light that falls through the high foliage creates beautiful patterns. Mosses, ferns, and small flowers grow on the ground and on the tree trunks. After about an hour, we're back at the car and drive to Sunrise. From Sunrise Outlook, we have an incredible panorama of the Cascades, Mount Adams, and the towering peak of Mount Rainier next to us. Below us, we can see an almost completely frozen lake. What a gigantic beautiful nature!!!

Sunrise Visitor Center

At the Sunrise Visitor Center, we look around and through a large pair of binoculars, we see a group of climbers just below the summit. Yesterday, the Sunrise Visitor Center and this area up here were closed. 10 days ago, a ranger fell and died while trying to rescue a few skiers. All the national parks we've driven through have been flying flags at half-mast. Now we know why.

We sit in the sun in front of the Ranger Station with a cup of coffee, watching the clouds build up over the peak of Mount Rainier. Around 4:00pm, we start driving down again and make a quick stop at White River before leaving the park to the west.

At around 6:00pm, we reach our hotel in Sea-Tac, a suburb of Seattle. Very helpful people at the reception and we maneuver our incredibly large amount of luggage to the room. We drive with the empty car to Redondo at Puget Sound and treat ourselves to a delicious fish dinner at sunset for the end of our vacation after three weeks. We sit outside in a restaurant built above the sea and enjoy the fact that the last evening is so beautiful.

OMG!

Then we quickly go to the airport, drop off the car, and I pick up the compact car that I rented for the coming week. As usual, we are pressured to buy all sorts of upgrades, but I don't want to do that. And when we get to the cars in the smallest class that I rented, they are all gone anyway, and I have to pay an additional $77 for an upgrade to a midsize car... The people at the car rental know about the inventory and that they should have given me a midsize car anyway, but they always try to rip people off. The lady who rented us the large car three weeks ago said that midsize would be "very basic," without cruise control, power windows, or anything like that. Then there were no midsize cars available, and we got the next higher class, a standard car. It had all those things. Now I'm driving a real midsize, and it has them too! So three weeks ago, that threat that midsize would be "very basic" was also a lie.

G. struggles through her luggage in the hotel room, and I load a bag into the car. My beach chair comes with me, and we give the found umbrella to the Alamo lady who takes our big car. At 11:00pm, after our "work" is done, we sit in the room and I look forward to a week in Canada, but I'm a bit restless because I've never crossed the border with a rental car before.

Driving distance: 140 miles