Twilight in Forks

We had the opportunity this past weekend to go on a little mini-vacation which as you know, I just love to do. It seems we can’t let a month go by without at least going somewhere.
Unfortunately Sarah wasn’t able to come on our trip as she had to stay back with the Walsh family for the weekend due to dance commitments.

On Friday afternoon, when I was done working we loaded the three boys and the dog in the car and headed to Forks, Washington.

The directions to Forks are rather simple. You drive SW for two hours until you are in the middle of nowhere on the Washington coast. Forks is about 110 miles north of there.

This is a part of our state that is just gorgeous but people don’t get there very often since it is very remote. It is funny in that is only a little over 100 miles NW of our home as the crow flies but there are major bodies of water (aka The Puget Sound) and a mountain range (The Olympic Mountains) in the way so it took us about 4.5 hours to get there.

Valerie was excited to visit Forks ever since she devoured all books in the Twilight series which for the most part is set in Forks. I hadn’t read the books myself but I did go see the Twilight movie in the $2 theater with Valerie a few weeks back.

The story in the first book is basically about an angst-ridden teenage girl who moves to Forks and falls in love with an aloof 100-something year old Vampire who goes to high school with her, looks like he just stepped off the cover of GQ and makes a lot of Zoolander faces. She also meets his vampire family who all live in Forks since it is the rainiest town in the Continental United States and they don’t like sun what with them being vampires and all. She then runs around in the woods with her new vampire boyfriend who speds his free time climbing tall trees really really fast and playing baseball with his family. (BTW: Vampires love to play baseball in old-timey outfits - who knew!) Then while they are playing ball, a bad stranger vampire comes who wants to eat her and wrecks their whole game. Thankfully all the good vampires beat him up on a road-trip to Phoenix, then rip off his head and burn his body in a ballet studio. Now they are free to be in love again! It is all very sweet.

I’m not sure if it is a true story or not but for some reason teenage girls (and my wife) just LOVE it. I give the movie a C+. I’ve just started to read the book but I’m not sure I’ll make it all the way through.

Anywho – Valerie was excited to see all the places in Forks referenced in the books and it seems that Forks is welcoming visitors with open arms. The town is flooded with Twilight-hungry visitors. There is even a store in town called “Dazzled by Twilight” that sells nothing but souvenirs of the series. The store does a very brisk business.

We actually stayed a few miles outside of Forks on the Quileute Indian Reservation in the town of La Push. This is also an area mentioned in the book. Oh, I left that part out. The Quileute Indians are apparently werewolves or are descended from them or something like that. Vampires aren’t allowed on their land or something bad will happen but I'm not quite clear on what that bad thing is. That part was kinda fuzzy in the movie.

Our boys were happy that there were no vampires allowed at the Quileute Beach Resort although they were less happy to learn that it was teeming with werewolves.

We were a little worried about our accommodations going in. The lady Valerie talked to on the phone when she made our reservations made sure to let Valerie know that there was no TV or phone in the rooms which kind of enhanced the feeling of remoteness.

We were very pleasantly surprised when we checked in though to find our little two bedroom suite to be super nice. It was modern and very clean. The best part was that we were right on the beach. You could hear the waves crashing right from our room and could even see the surf breaking right from bed.

(Excuse the mess, we toolk pics while we were packing up to leave.)

This was a great setup for us since it was quite cold and windy on the coast. I could walk out the door and onto the beach with the kids and goof around until they were all frozen and apple-cheeked at which point we could retreat to the room to warm up for a bit before doing it all over again.

The beach there was pretty cool to. There is a lot of driftwood since we were right at the mouth of a river that came out of the Olympic Rain Forest. Trees fall in the river, wash out to the Pacific Ocean and then wash up on the beach. Did I mention that there was a lot of driftwood?

Ben and Josh had a blast here as there was no shortage of exploring to do, climbing over giant logs building forts and shooting each other with improvised driftwood guns.

The weather kept things interesting too with rain followed quickly by sun then hail, etc. On our last night there, it actually snowed a little bit which was very beautiful on the beach.

Valerie did get to see all the Twilight stuff around town as we moved about actually setting up a very neat Twilight themed geocache. Click here to see our actual cache listing on geocaching.com which we did a great job on if I may say so.

We took a lot of pictures and did the math to get this all set up. Valerie even spoke with the head of the Forks Chamber of Commerce to get their approval for the location where we hid the actual cache and they were excited about us setting this up and will advertise this to visitors.

Getting this all set up was one of our prime missions on this trip.
As far as geocaching ourselves, we didn’t do much, just a handful here and there and a couple of stops on the way home.

All in all, it was a great weekend away and we will certainly add this to our list of favorite places to visit in our home state. We already can’t wait to head back.