Day Trips To Seattle & Mount Rainier National Park

Between our trip to NC and our fridge debacle, we didn’t spend nearly enough time exploring western Washington and it will certainly be a summer destination another year. However, this time around, Rainier View RV Park was about an hour’s drive to both Seattle and Mount Rainier National Park and we were determined to spend a day at each of those.

It rained the entire week that we were there in May, but couldn’t let the rain stop us on a weekend day. We started at Pike Place Public Market for breakfast…and stayed for lunch. Since we rarely eat out for convenience, but as more of an activity, we researched beforehand what we wanted to try and had quite a list. Some are touristy, but we are tourists. It’s a very fun place to walk around.

Seattle is known for its coffee and we decided on Storyville. I had a latte with housemade cashew coconut milk and Michael had a mocha.

At Pike Place, we also had marionberry pie greek yogurt from Ellenos, smoked salmon mac and cheese from Beecher’s, and a chowder flight at Pike Place Chowder. We will come back one day when the sign is fixed and eat all these things again.

We skipped the “original” Starbucks (it’s not really even the original) at Pike Place and headed to the Starbucks Reserve Roastery in the Capitol Hill neighborhood because it’s more like a coffee museum. The place was huge and very cool. We had pour-over coffee liquor drinks instead of coffee which was kinda neat but a once-and-done thing for us.

Also in Capitol Hill, we ate at Chukis Tacos (didn’t really like) and had ice cream at Salt and Straw (loved), which is a chain that started in Portland, OR.

We went to Kerry Park to get a view of the skyline twice. The first time was so foggy we couldn’t even see the top of the Space Needle. If the mountain was out, it would be on the right side of the photo.

That was all we accomplished. It started raining too hard to walk around, we didn’t feel we had enough time to go to the interesting-sounding museums, and we couldn’t physically fit any other food/drink in our stomachs.

Upon our return in June, we had another week booked at the RV Park. The weather was perfect this week, but we spent most of our time sorting out our fridge.

That weekend we made it to Mount Rainier National Park. Mount Rainier is so much more impressive than we imagined. This Washington icon is the highest peak (14,410ft) in the Cascade Mountain range, has the most glaciers of any peak in the continental US, and is an active volcano. The National Park is a huge circle around the mountain and has 5 entrances. The Nisqually entrance on the southwest side is the only one open year-round and the one we used to visit the Longmire and Paradise areas of the park. All the roads inside the park connecting the different entrances were still seasonally closed at the end of June.

Paradise is on the south-facing slope of the mountain at 5400ft and was still completely snow-covered. There are people braver than us that explore this place in the snow but we will have to come back sometime in late July/early August to hike and see these subalpine meadows covered in wildflowers. We have bucket-list hikes in both the Paradise and Sunrise (northeast) areas of the park.

We drove as far east as we could at this time of year and then turned around at Reflection Lakes.

There is so much more to see and do in this lovely part of Washington but our plans and reservations are keeping us on the move.

Next up is the North Cascades!