This evening, we gave the girls glow sticks and let them stay up until 10pm so they could see the stars. Hopefully this is a great memory we’ve given them of the great outdoors and what beauty there is to be seen, as opposed to two feral kids being deprived of sleep and raging all of tomorrow.
Earlier, we went for a walk in the rainforest. First, at 11 we went to eh visitor center for a talk about the rainforest and why it gets so wet there, before setting out on a 1.2 mile walk that took a couple of hours to complete. That’s less because it’s hard terrain and more because of the number of times we had to stop to look at the majestic trees. A Sitka spruce will grow to 400′ high if it doesn’t fall down first, and there are thousands of these trees in the forest. The Hoh Rainforest was lucky to avoid ever being logged, so walking around it things are much as they would have been a millennium ago.
After that, we came back to the tent and everyone had lunch and a nap. Well, except me; I foolishly eschewed a nap in favour of reading the last hundred and twenty pages of Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle, and then taking a nap on the ground outside the tent. I woke about 5pm, legs numb and useless, and fought my way back to life.
We walked down to the river to explore a bit more, then played a few card games while waiting for the stars to come out. I’m still not sure if the girls were excited by staying up late, or the glow sticks my wife had bought them. Did we just make a couple of ravers?