Habituated Mountain Goats (Aug 3)

Woke up, packed up the tent and drove to Olympic National Park's visitors center. When we first got to Olympic I wasn't very impressed by the scenery, probably because it was dark and all I could see was that there were trees. By the time we had driven to the top of the mountain I understood why it was a national park. It was a beautiful view. You could even see the snow on top of the mountains. There was a funny notification posted at the visitors center that talked about how the mountain goats were starting to become habituated and would follow people around and wait for them to urinate because they enjoy tasting salty things. I'm glad that didn't happen to us. But, if it did I would know to make lots of noise and scare it away and hope that it didn't charge us. We left the park and drove down the coastal highway which I also wasn't very impressed by at first until we started driving closer to the shore. There was so must fog on the water but it was still gorgeous to take peeks at through the trees as we whizzed by.

It was a long trip from Olympic but we wanted to see the sea lion cave before it closed so we didn't make any stops along the way except for dinner. We made it just in time, I was a little surprised that there were people behind us yet. Because it was evening most of the sea lions were outside the cave on the rocks. It was so neat to listen to them roar! Inside the cave there was a few rolling around on a rock and I liked watching them on the TV that they had connected to a camera zoomed in on them. They had a lot of good information about how the cave was discovered in the 1800s and sea lions in general. There was also a light house that was under renovation so we were not able to see it.

We weren't sure where we were going to sleep that night, and Nate said that he was tired and just wanted to get a hotel, and I wasn't about to complain! Priceline has been great for giving us good deals and didn't let us down this time. We got a Marriott Renaisance business suite. So it had the normal bedroom and bathroom of a hotel, plus a kitchen and living room. We enjoyed relaxing on the couch watching the Olympics with the rest of the world before going to bed.