Murdoch Beach

During the last full day of any given Olympic Peninsula visit, I tend to get a bad case of end-of-trip blues. I start panic-searching for the best sunset views nearby to make the best of a last evening, but to my frustration, the beaches around Port Angeles were tough to navigate during our most recent trip. They tend to lie at the end of dark, winding, and often unmarked gravel roads, and often there is no indication that a beach is not public use until you’re pulling up to its trailhead. Originally I had a different beach in mind for my peninsula sendoff, but one such “no public access” sign forced us to turn away.

My angel of a boyfriend took it upon himself to try out a difficult switchback-heavy road a mile away and make sure I got my sunset views in for the day. We ended up at Murdoch Beach in Clallam County - a modest, hidden spot just beyond a lush stretch of greenery.

Cape Flattery

It’s been a long-term project of mine to learn how to drive a manual…and when I say long-term, I mean it’s been gradually happening since at least 2016 or so, and I keep chickening out of practice because I just don’t seem to have the mental bandwidth to think about the clutch and 6 gears on top of everything else. Until this past month, the most manual driving I’d ever achieved was zigzagging a parking lot in the watchful presence of a nearby police car. A couple weeks ago, I embarked on a trial-by-fire kind of manual driving practice round and drove nearly 2 hours of winding, coastal road toward Neah Bay.

It was nerve-wracking. In a good way. The speed limit on most of those low-guardrail, curvy roads is a very reasonable 40mph, but judging from the testy tailgating I experienced, most other drivers tend to prefer 55. So I white-knuckled the entire way, trying not to think too hard about the cars backed up behind me or the mountain on one side and the sheer drop to the Strait of Juan de Fuca on the other, flat and glaring angry white in the afternoon sun.

One thought helped immensely, and it was the knowledge that the payoff on the other end would be spectacular: the distinctive wind-bent trees and sea stacks of Cape Flattery, looking like some kind of prehistoric landscape.

Astoria, Oregon

Across an elevated bridge from the southern border of Washington state is the picturesque town of Astoria. If you’re lucky to make the trip through river mist so thick the bridge before you is rendered invisible, the town emerges as a surreal, gorgeous surprise. A must-see: the view from the Astoria Column, from which the river valley below is like a Bob Ross masterpiece.