On Sunday Bryan, Gary and I made a mini-road trip out to Bryan’s family in Westport. Westport is a seaside town on the west side of the Olympic Peninsula. It’s about 2 hours one way.
It’s not a straight shot out to Westport since the Puget Sound is ‘in the way’. We went south on I-5, and then used an assortment of State Routes to get to Aberdeen and then to Westport.Here’s the Nisqually River bridge on our way south on I-5, a ‘polygonal Warren through truss’ bridge that was constructed in 1967.This is a draw bridge over the Wishkah river in the city (town) of Aberdeen. This bridge was constructed in 1924. The town of Forks is further north on the Olympic Peninsula, now a tourist destination for ‘Twilight’ fans (a TV and movie series about teenage vampires, with the town of Forks as its setting).
And is this a light house? Nooo .. it is the Westport Winery, in fact. We made a stop here to pick up a carrot cake for a dessert to the lunch we were planning, at the bakery inside.We’re done with lunch, and here is what the Westport beach looks like. It was great to walk on the sand and smell the sea .... and check out the sand dollars that are plentiful! I picked up these five on the beach in no time. They don’t have the ‘key hole’ slots of the ones we have in South Africa, but the five leaved ‘flower’ pattern is the same. They are called ‘pansy shells’ there, after the flower with the same name. (It’s not really a shell, since its the skeleton of a flat urchin. In the live urchin there is a velvet-like covering of fine bristles on the skeleton).And here is a real lighthouse : the Grays Harbor Lighthouse close to the beach that we walked on. It was built in 1898 and is adjacent to the Westport Light State Park on Coast Guard property.
