Mt.Rainier Blog
This morning I was determined to squeak in as much as I possibly could. The time change from Alaska to Seattle caught me off guard again though, and I ended up getting up at 6 instead of 5 AM. I was able to film the rest of the ship tour for Youtube before the rest of the ship was up and about. Ben and I grabbed breakfast from the buffet and ate on our balcony for the last time. It was bittersweet. We had to be out of our stateroom by 8AM, and our disembarkation time was 8:15AM. The disembarkation was relatively easy, we lined up on deck 6 with the rest of the people with that time slot, headed through the check point on the jogging track, and walked off the ship. I wasn’t sure how long it would take us to get through the baggage pick up area and ended up ordering our Uber a little too soon.
We made the decision this morning that we weren’t going to stick with our original plan, to store our luggage and explore Seattle. Our new plan is to rent a car and visit Mt. Rainier. We rented our car through Enterprise again, but the pickup location was on the outside of Seattle due to the holiday weekend. We got our Starbucks and began the journey to Mt. Rainier National Park.
The views approaching Mt.Rainier from Paradise were breathtaking. We don’t have those sorts of views in Maine and I couldn’t stop staring. Our first stop in the park was the gift shop, obviously. I had to get my National Park stamp for our book, and a few stickers. The main goal for our visit is to do the Skyline Trail, so we are going to drive by the other stops on the way out there and catch them on the way back if we have time. The parking lot was already filling up and we had to park at one of the lower lots. I was thankful we were even able to get a spot. The weather today could not be better for visiting Mt.Rainier and I thought there would be more people here to be honest.
We hiked all the way to Glacier View on the Skyline Trail. I wanted to return with enough time to see some other spots. I also made the mistake of hiking in a sundress and white sneakers. The trail was a little bit muddy from snowmelt but otherwise it was fine. It also caught us by surprise that it was SO hot out, It was about 80 degrees with direct sun and no wind. We took a bunch of pictures and turned back for the visitor center. I could have hiked here all day but we were on a tight timeline. On our way out of the park we stopped at Christine Falls, Narada Falls, and the Trail of Shadows. The Grove of Patriarchs was closed on our visit, but the Trail of Shadows is the next best thing. The giant trees were beautiful, and we had the trail entirely to ourselves.
The return trip is never as fun as the trip out. We stopped at Panera Bread for dinner, with all intentions of stopping at another brewery before heading to the airport. By a stroke of luck we checked the return details for our rental car. The Enterprise drop off location at SeaTac was not actually at SeaTac. They offer a free shuttle service to the airport. We skipped the brewery and booked it back to SeaTac. This part of the trip got a little bit stressful, we were going to be cutting it close for time. Turning in the car went fine, but waiting for the shuttle to arrive, then transfer us to the airport was like waitting for paint to dry. The shuttle dropped us off at the international arrivals terminal for some reason…and there was absolutely no signage as to where we were.
After finding the Delta baggage check we were only able to take one deep breath that we were at least in the airport. This experience makes me never want to check bags again. There was one person checking people in and almost every person needed to rearrange the weight in their bags. Getting through security took almost a third of the time it took us to check our bags. We got to our gate with only enough time to get a beer at the bar and wait for the rest of the plane to board before us. Our boarding time was 10:47 PM, take off at 11:30 and landing in Boston at 7:30 AM. This was my first ever true red-eye flight and I now know where the name comes from.