Beachin' It

This weekend we did our first overnight backpacking trip of the year. We headed over to the Olympic Peninsula bright and early Saturday morning and started our hike near Ozette Lake. We hiked about 3 miles into the forest before getting to the shore. The rest of the hike for Saturday was just to head north about 3 miles along the beach, so we weren't in any hurry. A couple of weeks ago we had taken a photography workshop to better learn how to use our semi fancy camera. We used this time along the beach to try to practice a few of the things we learned. Although we were lucky that it didn't rain on us the whole hike, we unfortunately did have overcast skies the whole time, so the lighting wasn't the greatest for photography.

One of the things that I've been wanting to get a good picture of up here is a bald eagle. I see them all of the time, but never have a camera on me! We ended up seeing quite a few on the beach and snapped a few pictures, but it looks like I'll have to wait to get that once in a lifetime amazine eagle picture. All of ours were a little too dark, but we tried!

Right before we left on the hike we ordered a new awesome zoom lense for our camera (free thanks to credit card reward points!). Once we figure out how to set all our settings on manual mode and figure out which lense to use for what, hopefully we'll be getting some really amazing photos out here! Can't wait for that sunny Seattle summer too...I can feel it being almost here!

At the end of the beach part of our hike, we found a cute like spot under a tree right next to the beach to set up camp. After warming up a little bit, we cooked up a delicious tortellini dinner complete with severl glasses of wine in my new titanium wine glass! I think that along with the sound of waves hitting the shore really helped me sleep that night, which I often find difficult to do sleeping on the ground. We stayed out on the beach watching the sun set, although the clounds blocked most of it. We were still able to get a few good shots of the sun peaking through the clouds.

Sunday morning we woke up and had a little coffee and breakfast on the beach before packing up and heading back into the woods to find our way home. As soon as we made it back to the car it started raining, so we really lucked out on that! Unfortunately the beach didn't allow dogs on the hike, so we had to leave our little kiddies at home, so that's always nice to come home to wagging tails after a weekend of hiking!