New Year Day Trip

We had been wanting to head out to a Washington beach for some time. We've now lived in Washington for four years and I thought, this is it. We're finally gonna do this ... or so I thought.

We left the house around 10:00 am. I knew of two ways of getting to the beach. One cutting through Olympia and the other is up North along the Straight of Juan de Fuca. I wasn't aware of the route Jacob took through the Olympic Mountains.

We packed a bunch of snacks and water and we began our day trip. We drove past Tacoma and Bremerton. As we continued driving I was surprise to see snow on the side of the road, obviously never been this way before.

To keep Riley entertained we played I Spy and since Jacob tries to make everything funny we were cracking up at all the silly things he was saying.

The drive was pretty though. Seeing so much snow on everything made it look so magical like something out of a Christmas movie.

We stopped in Sequim Bay to get gas and to check out what their market had to offer. We were surprised at how big and cool this market was. They had a good size deli that offered a wide variety of food. We got a couple of hot sandwiches to go. We continued on, drove past Port Angeles and then stayed on Olympic Hwy for a while.

It was such a pretty sight once Lake Crescent came into view. This was my first time seeing it. The snowed trees around the lake made it look beautiful.

Then out of nowhere we saw two emergency vehicles. We pulled over so they could pass us and about five minutes into our driving we saw a line of cars stopped on the road. One lady came up to us and said that a tree was blocking the road and that Rangers were already working on removing it.
It was about 2:00 pm by this time and we were hungry so while we waited we decided to eat our sandwiches.

What we thought was something minor quickly changed to something serious. I could see a white vehicle that was very close to the down tree. I figured it was an accident. The same lady that initially told us was just a tree blocking the road told us that the tree had actually fallen on top of a vehicle. Within minutes we began to hear more sirens.

We were just about thirty minutes from reaching the beach from this point. Although it was a big bummer that we didn't reach our destination it was sad to know that a 5 year old boy lost his life. A young girl got paralyzed from the waist down, the 2 year old child is expected to make a full recovery, the grandfather was driving and he too had a broken back, and the grandmother was unresponsive and still in a coma a few days after the accident.
This was such a freak accident and sad that so many from the same family were affected. So devastating. May God provide comfort and peace to this family.


Well, I hope one day we'll be able to visit the beaches.