Announcing New Website: NwVacationSpots.com

I've started up a little family business, NwVacationSpots.com. My twin, 14-year-old sons and I are going through 8 years of digital vacation photos, making travel articles about them that we post on NwVacationSpots.com. This section of the website is meant to attract visitors off of search engines and eventually make the site a well-known destination for travel information about the Northwest. We'll orient our travels over the next few years towards gathering new photos for the website. For example, I love Ohme Gardens in Wenatchee - my favorite garden in the Northwest after Butchart, but I only have one old, grainy photo of it. We'll have to go back.

NwVacationSpots.com has two more components. It offers free listings to Northwest vacation rental owners. We then post a daily ad on Craigslist.org, rotating among our listed properties and the nearest metropolitan area. This is the principal draw of visitors to the site currently.

Lastly, the main point of the site for us is to promote our new vacation rental marketing service. This grew out of an arrangement we made with an owner in Moclips, WA on my NorthBeachVacation.com site. He was impressed with the marketing and advertising efforts I had made for my own house (BobsPacificBeachHouse.com), and asked how I might help him. Between his busy travel and work schedule, he hasn't had time to effectively update and promote his vacation rental website. We agreed that in exchange for a free weekend visit to his house (when it wasn't booked anyway) and 10% of rental income we generate, we would do the following:

1. Take new photos. We came away with 210 good photos. We also made these available to the owner, who is replacing some photos in his advertising.
2. Put up a new website (MoclipsCliffHouse.com). This is entirely separate from his current website. Our 10% fee only applies to leads we generate.
3. Post daily Craigslist ads promoting the new website.

We are starting this effort in the off-season and during a recession, but we have generated four leads and one New Year's booking in the first six weeks of operation. We figured that there must be more owners out there who need the same assistance. The program is explained in detail here:

http://www.NwVacationSpots.com

Grays Harbor County Courthouse in Montesano

We returned to the Grays Harbor County Courthouse in Montesano on a Monday before Thanksgiving in order to turn in our passport applications. We had tried to apply for passports the year before at the Bellevue Main Post Office, but the line ran out the door. At this courthouse we strode right up to the county clerk's desk (room 203) without any waiting. It was such a pleasure.

The other reason I planned this visit was to take a look inside of the building. My younger son and I had driven by on a weekend visit to Lake Sylvia State Park, when the building was closed. I had read that there were murals inside. Indeed, the interior of the courthouse is very lovely. The major murals are found inside the front entrance: a scene of Captain Gray landing to meet a party of Indians on Grays Harbor and a Governor signing a treaty at Cosmpolis with another group of Indians. The core of the building is taken up by three rising tiers of wide stairwells. The interior is richly decorated in marble, mosaic tile, brass light fixtures, and fine woodwork. From the second and third levels you can view the ceiling frescoes inside the dome with allegorical female figures of justice, prosperity, and others.

I asked the clerk whether tours are ever given of the building, but she didn't know of any. Still, you are free to wander about during public hours. She recommended attending a trial - always open to the public - because the courtrooms are also beautifully decorated.

More about Montensano:

http://www.northbeachvacation.com/montesano_and_lake_sylvia.html

New partnership: MoclipsCliffHouse.com

We agreed recently to help out the owner of the Ocean Cliff vacation rental house in Moclips with marketing. In exchange for taking new pictures of the house, putting up a new website, and promoting it on Craigslist.org and elsewhere, we were allowed to stay in the house for free one weekend and we'll get a 10% booking fee for any reservations we generate. The owner lacks the time to market the house on his own very effectively.

I'm teaching my teenage sons how to build the website and post ads on Craigslist. If this first relationship goes well, we may offer it more widely as a little family business. We'll offer the service to homes in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and British Columbia that we could reach in an extended weekend.

The Ocean Cliff house in Moclips sits on a magnificent two acre site. Through a few windswept trees at the cliff's edge, you have an unobstructed view of the Pacific Ocean and the wide sands of Sunset Beach below. The owners have landscaped the backyard beautifully with a cliffside deck and benches and a masonry fire pit. The fire pit becomes the communal focus of the house as we gathered there each evening.

The house has five bedrooms: 3 up and 2 down. The two floors can be rented separately or else the whole house together. Each floor provides 1,300 square feet of space to spread out in. The highlights of the interior are the two king size beds in each master, the luxurious tiled bathrooms, the modern full kitchens, and the marvellous ocean view from nearly every room.

Beach access is found by a short walk nearby: either down the stairs at the Ocean Crest Resort to the north or the Analyde Gap Road to the south. You can also drive down this road and park or drive on the beach.

Here's the new website we are working on:

http://www.MoclipsCliffHouse.com

Here's the owner's original website:

http://www.OceanCliff.us

Point Grenville at Low Tide

I returned to Point Grenville on 11/23/2008, bringing my family along to see the place. I had visited alone the previous April. We arrived at low tide, which made for a different experience. An extensive field of low rocks and tidepools were revealed that were covered up on my last visit. We saw hundreds of starfish in every crevasse and clinging to the bottom of the rocks. This rock with the arch shown above was the limit of what you could see to the north at high tide. Now, we could walk out beyond it, skipping from rock to rock.

New pictures:

http://www.kodakgallery.com/ShareLanding.action?c=snaroin.9i0imlqj&x=0&y=fu1dmv&localeid=en_US

More about the beach house:

http://www.BobsPacificBeachHouse.com

New partnership: OlympicCircleTour.com

Bob's Pacific Beach House has partnered with two other luxury beach houses around the Olympic peninsula: the Rialto Beach House in the northwest corner and Triton Cove Beach Home on Hood Canal. We offer a 10% discount when two or more homes are booked together. The idea is that these homes can be booked together as a package to cover all the sights of the peninsula and Olympic National Park. If any particular house is booked, we have a list of alternates and will help you plan your trip.

The outstanding features of each house are:

Triton Cove Beach Home

Located directly on the water with a big deck and hot tub looming over the beach. State park's boat ramp located immediately adjacent to the property. Collect your dinner right off the beach at low tide or out of Hood Canal with a crab pot.

Rialto Beach House

Gorgeous log home located just three miles from famed Rialto Beach. The house sits on ten acres directly on the Quillayute River. The nearby Rich Wine Bar is a great spot for fishing and its unobstructed view of Mount Olympus. Gather in the evenings around the fire pit.

Bob's Pacific Beach House

Set on a bluff with wide view of the ocean. Half mile walk or drive to the beach. Driving, bike riding, and evening bonfires allowed on the beach. Seven miles to incredible volcanic reef and seastack rocks at Point Grenville. Half an hour to Lake Qunault.

http://www.OlympicCircleTour.com

Montesano and Lake Sylvia State Park

My little boy and I needed a break from the drive home between Aberdeen and Elma, so I pulled off the highway and followed a sign to Lake Sylvia State Park. It turned out to be a delightful park. A bridge crosses the lake and brings you to a lakeside picnic area and playground. The playground attracted several families on a sunny Sunday afternoon in September. My little boy enjoyed playing with all the other kids. The park has a campground, two boat launches for human-powered boats, and three trails heading off into the woods. We saw canoes and a fisherman out on the lake.

Next, we drove around the city of Montesano and stopped outside the historic courthouse. Montesano is the county seat of Grays Harbor. The courthouse is a lovely old building. I've read that there are murals inside, depicting the discovery of the harbor by Captain Gray. Nearby are historic neighborhoods with many old, attractive houses.

See more pictures at:

http://www.BobsPacificBeachHouse.com/pictures.html

Sunset Visit to Copalis Rock at an Extreme Low Tide

At sunset just before heading home to the Seattle area, we stopped by Copalis Rock. This is located four miles south of Pacific Beach by road, and another three miles south driving down the beach. There's a stream one mile north of the rock, but today it was low enough to drive across.

We arrived at the rock both at sunset and at an extreme low tide. On my last visit, the water kept me a few hundred feet away. This evening we could walk right up and touch the rock. The first thing you notice that close is that the rock is really a collection of about four rocks - perhaps more if you could see around the other side. There are also a few sizeable rocks further out on the ocean, which are perhaps mostly submerged by a higher tide.

The lower ten feet of Copalis Rock - the part that is normally submerged - is covered in big purple and orange starfish, tightly closed anenomes, and mussel shells. This coast doesn't have any tidal pools that I'm aware of, so the low tide is a special opportunity to see these animals.

I'll post more pictures here:

http://www.BobsPacificBeachHouse.com/pictures.html