DAY EIGHT
Did I say yesterday that we had just eaten the best breakfast of our lives? Scratch that. Today we had an even better breakfast. We started with an orange pull-apart mini loaf, followed by baked banana with caramel salted yoghurt, then smoked salmon and cheese souffle with herb roasted potatoes, and finally chocolate dipped strawberries. Charlotte and Olaf have created something really special with this Red Caboose Getaway and we are sorry to have to leave.
Our first trip of the day was a short drive along the North Coast to Lake Crescent — a great place to stop for lunch and to take in some amazing views.
It was also a perfect location for a brief hike so we went off on a walk through some spooky woods trying to find the nearby Marymere Falls. Iain read aloud from the trail guide, explaining the finely balanced eco-system we could see all around us.
It really is a beautiful trail and a nicely relaxed walk up to the falls. There were tourists and hikers of all ages along the path so we never quite felt that we were escaping into the wilderness but it was exactly what we wanted after a long hike the previous day.
While the Marymere falls were very nice, it was the spooky and mysterious woods around us that were the real attraction — they really are quite spectacular — and it was a perfect way to prepare for the drive to our next location, a literal ‘cabin in the woods’ in the nearby Forks.
The place used to be best known for its logging industry (the main tourist attraction is a lumber museum) but more recently Forks has built a reputation for something quite different. It is now best known as the location where Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight books and films were set. This meant that the cabin we had rented was not only a great wooden cottage surrounded by beautiful woodland but it was all themed around Twilight (albeit with the inclusion of a lot of bear-themed decor, reflecting its pre-Twilight life as the ‘Bear Mountain Lodge’!)
This place definitely deserves its own gallery.
We had a great night’s sleep in the cabin — the best of the holiday so far — and we enjoyed all the little touches our host Diana had added. It was nice to see so much thought had gone into the cabin. Even the shower gel was Twilight themed. And while we didn’t knowingly meet any vampires on our trip to Forks, we did discover a family of bats living in the cabin roof — something that might normally have freaked us out a little, but here it seemed strangely appropriate.
