Long Northwest 2026

From Tula:

The next day, we woke up to a huge amount of farm animal noises: quacking, bleating, cocka-doodle-dooing, and a lot of squawking from Tony.

Wylder: me and Tula loved feeding Bruno the goat. The goats love to eat willow. We took off branches, or pulled off leaves, and they ate out of our hands. They had already stripped all the branches they could reach.

Mama: our tiny home was built into the goat barn, so as soon as they stirred we did too. The chill of the morning was amazing. The farm was in a sandy river valley not far from the sound, in a town called Olalla.

Tula: We decided to go outside to say good morning to everyone and as we were walking around, Mama thought we should go say hi to Tony, so we went over to him. (Can you guess what happened next?) Out of nowhere, Tony started to nip at Mama’s legs and honked loudly, so he got put back in his prison, aka… the garden bed.

Mama: Luckily Christina was right there checking the pigs and garden, and when Tony attacked she yelled “just kick at him!”. I stood my ground, cause I knew running away would be worse and gave him a gentle kick. He stopped, ruffled his feathers, and waddled off until he was put back in jail.

Tula: Then Ryan and Christina (the owners of the farm) came out of their house and offered to give us a free tour. We gratefully accepted and it was so fun! The baby goats and pigs were so cute! (Here are some pictures.)

Also I forgot to tell you that we brought these little felted fairies to put on any plants that we see.

Mama: The garden were so vibrant and lush – lupine, Mullien, poppies, calendula, borage, plantain and clover volunteers everywhere, sunflowers, and more. Walking the gardens taking fairy pictures we found a duck on a nest of seven eggs and right next to her there was an unoccupied one of ten eggs!

Wylder: Christina told us about her rescue Frenchies, and one of them used to be fat, until she came to the farm. One day she discovered the duck eggs on all around, and started munching them. Now she is thinner – she runs around excitedly eating duck eggs.

After the tour I cooked everyone eggs from the chicken, and we sopped up the goo with focaccia. We added some fruit for good measure and I managed a matcha. Chris came on the tour and we of course then had a good geology talk about the land with Ryan the farmer.

Then it was time to go to Lake Crescent!

Mama: We headed out, and stopped right after a floating bridge to picnic – walked the beach a bit and found a driftwood raft, and Wylder climbed some trees while Tula yearned to climb them too.

The kids enjoyed the ride with Tula giving Wylder drawing lessons when she saw he was frustrated, and them posing and taking pictures of their fairies gazing out the windows.

We got to Lake crescent!

Tula: First we hiked to Marymere Falls, which I was super scared of because of the height on the way down. It was challenging with my foot but not too steep. (Mama: she took her time and made it well! It has hand rails the whole way near the top.) Here are some pictures:

This was a huge log near the head of the trail- it was bigger than a bathtub, and totally hollow! Wylder really enjoyed climbing up as high as he could and got into the roots of a tree on the slope to climb up for a better view.

The hike was lovely and full of nursery trees – they are trees that have died and the stump or log or root ball became home to seedlings and then fully grown trees, and then sometimes even another set of new seedlings. We even saw a bunch of trees that even mama or papa could climb inside of.

After that hike we found a beach on the other side of the lake. It was rocky and the water was so cold!!! We had to just wade, no jumping allowed. We waded through the water to a large log, where we found a duck family! They were so cute Mama and I saw a cool rock and decided to wade out to it! It was super fun.

After that, Papa and I walked around, while Mama and Wylder found a stream coming down the hill that went through a tree!!!!!!!! On the side of the stream they found a banana slug! So interesting! They thought they should find the letters of Wylder’s name in nature when wylder found a stick that looked like a Y, so they hunted for that the rest of the trip. We will show you later.

It was getting late, so we drove to check into our new air b and b, an Airstream on another small family farm. They provided potatoes and bananas to feed to the pigs, so Wylder, Mama and I went to feed them while Papa went to charge the car.

Then it was time to eat. We had eggs from the chickens and veggies, and Mama had lentil daal with a fried egg like usual. It was pretty tasty!
Next we had to convert the seating booth into beds for me and Wylder. It was so hard and the instructions were super confusing, but we managed to get it done. Then we closed the curtains, but it was still so bright so we had to use sleep masks which helped until the sun peeked through the curtains in the morning.