We had planned for a couple of days in Seattle so we drove into the heart of the city. We found street parking and headed off to get the National Park stamp for the Klondike Gold Rush. Unfortunately the visitors center was closed on Monday and Tuesday. We headed towards the Famous Pikes Place to watch the fish throwing. It didn’t take long to find the crown watching the show and we joined. We walked around the market for a bit and then decided to find a place to eat. We ended up at Kells, an Irish pub. We shared a NY strip steak and some crab dip. The dip was spicy, not a traditional Irish recipe we suspected. But overall the meal was good.
We heard about the Gum Wall so we strolled down that way to check it out. You can smell it before you get to the corner. It’s really gross, but is a unique piece of artwork that only a city could create. We proceeded to head back to the truck and browsed the shops along the way. A particular map store caught our eye and we tried to find reasonably sized country stickers for Howie. Unsuccessful today. We also failed our world geography as we could not identify France on the chalk drawing challenge. Oh well.
Our next task was finding a place to camp. Cities suck for this and we could not find anything reasonable so we drive the two hours to Mt Rainier NP thinking we’d find a campground or wild camp along the way. No such luck. We did end up crashing a spot at the Cougar Rick campground that looked empty; but had some hikers stashed away in the trees in a tent. They were cool. I ended up paying for a new spot for tonight. We have to get back to Issequah outside of Seattle tomorrow to pick up a fedex, and head into Seattle again to get the stamp. We will head west toward Olympic NP and I’m hoping I can scout a free camp.
I am finding that this late in the season, lots of national parks and sites are closed or have reduced schedules. We planned Olympic NP next, but have to route to another visitors center that is open. Tomorrow will be a long day of driving due to the rerouting. Gas up here is STUPIDLY priced at ~$5 per gallon.