Alyson Gagne

Alternate Title I Also Considered: I go To Washington And Live the Ferry-Tale Life

My time in Washington was possibly the most active, probably the most hectic, and definitely the most social stop I’ve had in a very long time. At the beginning of my trip way, way back in early 2020, I got to meet up with friends in Nashville and New Orleans; then you know what happened next, and I spent the rest of the year completely solo. By the time I got to Washington, I was fully vaccinated and the state even started to drop the mask mandate while I was there. I had like eight distinct stops (depending on how you count “stops”), got to meet up with friends on two separate occasions, and even did social things like visit a crowded hot mineral spa, and work out of a co-working space! For the briefest time, it felt like things had Gone Back To Normal.

This period of time started to feel like a tipping point for me. When I left Oregon, that would turn out to be the last time I spent a whole four week stay in a single accommodation. In Washington, I jumped pretty abruptly back and forth around the state without spending more than a few days in one place. My stops included:

• Two weeks on the Olympic Peninsula, hiking in the Olympic National Park and Forest and exploring the coastal town of Port Townsend
• A holiday weekend in Seattle, where I met up with my friends, went to a baseball game and drank a beer at the top of the Space Needle
• A week camping and island hopping in the San Juan Islands where I met up with my other friend and travel buddy (who you may remember from my trip to Alaska a couple summers ago)
• A night in the North Cascades National Park
• A week in Tacoma chilling between national park stops
• A night in Mount Rainier National Park

All in all, I stayed in two Airbnbs, two hotels and five campsites. I (sort of, close enough) completed my pilgrimage up the coast road from California up the whole West Coast. I also took five separate ferries, which no trip to Washington State would be complete without.

I also did a lot of hiking, and in the process I feel like I learned a lot about Washingtonians. I think as a people, they are pretty fuckin hardcore. For example, in most of the national parks where I’ve gone backpacking on this trip (Yellowstone, Big Bend, the Channel Islands) the backcountry sites that require the shortest and/or easiest hikes to get to are the ones that book up the fastest (that’s how I ended up giving myself altitude sickness in Yellowstone). When I went to book a campsite in Olympic National Park, the opposite was true – all the sites that require double-digit mile long hikes to get to were all taken, and the site I got, which I booked the day before, required just a 2.5 mile stroll along a flat riverside trail. As I was gearing up in the parking lot, four young men were coming back to their car after having been on a multi-day hiking/skiing (??) backpacking trip that took them up into the snowy mountains and back.

The very funny (to me) outcome of this general mindset is that I learned that I could barely rely on reviews of trails for anyplace I wanted to hike in Washington. At first I was confused about why all the trails I considered on AllTrails.com were rated so meh. Then I realized: these people are just very hard to impress! Take for example the following direct quotes from AllTrails reviews of hikes I ended up doing and enjoying:

Maybe I’m easy to impress but I thought all these hikes were amazing! Because it is Washington, I had to deal with some weather; you can see, for example, that the mountains were peeking in and out of the clouds on my hike in the North Cascades, which I personally thought was all the more beautiful. But even without uninterrupted long-distance views on that hike, I still enjoyed a beautiful forest setting with like a hundred little waterfalls, some cool birds and even a deer that walked right in front of me on the trail. What’s disappointing about that??

In general, my time in Washington felt a lot like the beginning of the end for me. I have spent a lot of effort over the last 18 months trying to conduct my trip and my life with my own sustainability in mind – which is why I did things like tried to keep my stays at four-week minimums. In Washington, it felt like all that went out the window. I spent the whole time bopping back and forth to different destinations. By default I ended up living out of just a handful of my clothes and things, and didn’t bother taking most of the things out of my car that I rely on to make my life more comfortable and normal. It meant I got to see and do a lot of stuff, but it also meant that I pretty much exhausted myself by the end.

I also have to admit that the week I spent in Tacoma was a pretty significant low point for me. I didn’t expect Tacoma to be all that interesting of a town (and against all odds, it isn’t), but I needed a place to crash for a few days in between my stops in the North Cascades and Mount Rainier and it was convenient and had availability. I’ve mentioned this before, but over the months that I’ve been doing this, the availability of suitable and affordable short term rentals has plummeted. As a result I’ve been staying in places that over time have gotten much worse and more expensive. For example, I have not had a full kitchen since I left Santa Barbara. But despite that, the place I stayed in Tacoma really set a new low bar. It was so bad that for the first time ever, I had to go find a co-working office space to work out of for the week, because my Airbnb was so grody that the thought of spending the whole day there made me despair. It was so bad that I feel comfortable saying this will most likely be my last Airbnb for quite some time.

I say all that not just to complain but for one thing, to be honest about my experience. And for another, to document my experience for other people (or a future me who has forgotten) who are interested in doing the same thing and need a realistic expectation set for them. Living the nomad life is not always glamorous, and in fact it’s often pretty shitty.

Despite all the things I just said, I really did love Washington quite a lot, rain and all. It is so beautiful in so many unexpected ways. It’s also the place where I finally came all the way out of quarantine – in Seattle my friends and I attended a Mariners baseball game and once we showed our vaccine cards we were able to do it with no masks! I think that was the moment that it felt real for me – moreso even than getting my final shot a couple of weeks prior.

There is a special irony about the fact that I am finally vaccinated and thus now able to do all the things I wanted to do on this trip, just in time for me to completely run out of steam and start to wind things down. But the long winded, Spotify Wrapped pontificating on my whole trip will have to wait for another blog post. After I left Washington, I made my way briefly back to Oregon and then started making the long drive back east.

This post describes land that belongs to the people of the Coast Salish, Suquamish, Puyallup, Nisqually, Quileute, Samish, Stillaguamish, Sauk Suiattle, Skagit, Tulalip, Muckleshoot, Chimacum, S’Klallam, Duwamish, Lhaq’temish (Lummi), Á,LEṈENEȻ ȽTE (W̱SÁNEĆ) and Hul’qumi’num Treaty Group tribes