Where’s Nico?

I realize this may be a bit of a stretch when it comes to 80’s songs, but in 1984, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin teamed up with others as diverse as Jeff Beck and Paul Schaffer to create a cover band called The Honeydrippers. They put out a super fun EP called Honeydrippers – Volume 1, and sadly there would never be a volume 2, but the biggest hit on that EP was a cover of a 1959 Phil Phillips chart topper, ‘Sea of Love’. It’s a great version. Cat Power did a killer version in 2000 too, with the sole instrumental backing performed on the autoharp. If you’re really into the song, there was even an Al Pacino movie in the late 80’s called Sea of Love that not only dug out the original Phil Phillips version, but even scored a nice cover of it by Tom Waits. I don’t recall much else worth remembering about that movie though.

But enough about Robert Plant side bands… where the heck is Nico?

Olympic National Park!

After a great visit to Mount Hood, we headed up to one of our favorite spots in the world, South Beach at Olympic National Park in Washington state. South Beach is a first come/first served campsite, and in a lot of ways it just looks like a big dirt parking lot. But if you can score one of the spots along the coast, you can angle your trailer so you can’t see the campsite at all and instead you just end up with this amazing ocean view.

The Washington coast is littered with little beaches, several of which have such romantic, evocative names as “Beach 2” or “Beach 4”, interspersed with places like Kalaloch Beach, South Beach, Ruby Beach, Rialto Beach and the like. If you go a bit north, near La Push in the upper left corner of the state, they have beaches named “First Beach”, “Second Beach” and “Third Beach”. not to be confused with “Beach 1”, “Beach 2” and “Beach 3”. And for some reason, the beaches are numbered from south to north on the southern coast, and north to south on the northern coast.

But despite the lack of creativity in the beach names, the beaches themselves are pretty amazing. There are some beautiful hikes through old growth forests in the area, and we got some of that in during our stay at places like Lake Quinault, but most of our time in the area was spent walking up and down the beautiful beaches, collecting cool agates and sand dollars, checking out tidepools, encountering washed up whale skeletons and shipwrecks, and watching and ocean absolutely full of seals, otters, dolphins, and humpback, grey and orca whales off the coast.

We’ve often debated whether Nico was more of a mountain dog or a beach dog, and I think this trip finally sealed it – he’s a beach dog.

The night we arrived, we got Nico down on the beach and he just grinned from ear to ear and ran around like a fool. If you’d like to see his reaction, here’s a short video

Before I get to the pics from Olympic National Park, I did want to mention one thing from the end of our time at Mount Hood. Two years ago, we encountered some forest fires in both Idaho and Oregon, which were interesting experiences. This time, there were some fires on the south and east side of Mount Hood. That didn’t affect us at all until the final few days in the area. We were never in any danger, but the winds changed directions, and the sky really changed. Here’s a pic from a nightly walk we would do from our campground earlier in the trip:

Here’s the same spot on our last night in the area:

The mountain completely vanished! We had a fair amount of soot built up on our truck and trailer the morning we left:

Anyway… back to Olympic National Park!

While in the area, we drove over to Quinalt Lake to get in a nice hike through old growth forests.

But the vast majority of our days were spent walking the various beaches (and the short trails through the woods to get to the beaches).

(bad case of tree acne…)

(A poor man’s rendition of the Lion King scene where the monkey holds out Simba as a cub…)

I mentioned all the sea life we spotted in the ocean, and I’m not going to share any pics of them, because frankly, there are just much better pics on the Googles if you look there. But we did see some cool tidepools and a few dead young whales that had washed up. I realize this may seem a bit morbid, but the dead whales were really fascinating.

(young humpback whale on Beach 4)

(young grey whale on Beach 4)

We also saw the remains of what was a very not ideal day for some local skipper…

Kristen also found a live sea star that had gotten beached (as opposed to being part of a tidepool). She snapped into action and saved the little guy under Nico’s close supervision…

And of course, as with every stop we make, Nico made some new friends.

And Nico had plenty of time to bond with his old friends, Mama and Papa, too…

We have a few days left here in Olympic. This will be the farthest point we make it to on this trip, as we’ll start working our way back towards KC next week, with hopefully some fun stops along the way!

ANA (Ask Nico Anything)

Nico, I saw Salvy got the Royals career home run record! How did it make you feel to see him achieve that?

Salvy ees lejen – eet makes Nico vury hap. Salvy ees Nico fav bal playur. Go Royal!

Nico, Vegas set the over/under in Vegas for the Chiefs is 10.5 wins this year – which way should I bet?

Nico tink eet krayz to have dat line – you can’t ween .5 game! How dey do dat? But wile Nico tink Cheefies do ver gud dis yere, he tout de Royals ver gud too, so maibey he not bes sorce for bet advises.

Nico, I know you enjoy life on the road but are you excited to get back to Kansas City?

Wel, Nico do mis his frens in KC and want to sees dem. But Nico do prefers to liv de lifes een de trailer wid mama and papa and spend all days wid dem.

– Ken 8/15/2026

(and Nico, the beach dog)