So yesterday we took a road trip up to Washington's Long Beach peninsula. The first destination planned was the Ocean Park Annual Garlic Festival. I found myself as disappointed as British fur trader John Mears in 1788 when he named nearby Cape Disappointment [link] after his inability to locate the Columbia River's mouth. Because you know it's only several miles wide and a few nautical miles south of where he was! I counted three vender's selling anything garlic related and two guys walking around dressed up as bulbs of garlic. So if this is what constitutes a garlic festival these days I'll stay home and roast my own. I was looking forward to garlic ice cream...no such luck.


After walking around the other vendors selling their typical Sunday market kind of stuff we ventured back south a little. This brings us to the city of Long Beach. Touristy town with t-shirt shops and carnival rides, enough for the girls to be interested in for a while anyway. We started off with a horse pulled carriage ride through downtown. The main attraction here of course is Jake the Alligator Man. The questionable mummified remains of a creature with an alligator body and the head of a small human (shrunken maybe). [link]

OK, our seashell souvenirs in hand from Marsh's Free Museum [link] we headed across the street to the bumper cars. Woo Hoo, you know how that goes.
Off to the bakery and then the beach, tide was too high and coming in so we couldn't drive far on it. Unfortunate, it being "the longest beach" and all.


It was quite the whirlwind day of traveling after a couple of hours on the beach we headed further south and homeward stopping for a short hike to the North Head Lighthouse [link]. This is at the Cape Disappointment State Park [link]. It's a short easy stroll to this lighthouse and there is another nearby only slightly more strenuous of a hike to get to. Una and I (Dad,duh) got to take the tour inside and up to the top. What a view! Kaya could not go because they have an age limit of seven and our friend Sara couldn't either because she had on sandals. But we waved to each other and took pictures of each other from the ground and the top of the lighthouse.
View our photo album online. [link]

I think it was pretty much coffee break from there and then the ride home, girls slept on the way and woke up when we pulled into the driveway so then it was a late night of watching the BBC's Planet Earth series. I highly recommend this series now on DVD. The world we live in is amazingly incredible and how little we are aware of it is astounding. Get out and explore it!