A poster about Chez Cascadia caught my eye last night. Apparently, there’s an independent hostel in Olympia. It looks like it’s new, not something I just managed to miss.
At $16/day, that’s a great option for visitors to and travelers through Olympia. It’s not clear to me if they have online booking up and running because no date I selected randomly had “online availability” but it’s still something worth keeping an eye on.
Is Olympia a leg on the green tortoise? (No, it appears not. Too bad.)
Update: Jacob Rosenblum of Chez Cascadia contacted me with corrections to this post, which I’ve made above. Looks like the direct link is now the first result at Google and even though the link at HostelWorld I originally offered is in the Google results, Chez Cascadia no longer appears at HostelWorld’s site. Somebody has been busy.
Either way, it’s great news that there’s a hostel in Olympia. My partner and I stayed in hostels for almost our entire trip in Ireland, and they were mostly wonderful, especially the independent hostels. Interestingly, in Germany, Austria and Northern Italy, I don’t remember seeing hostels, but there were Zimmer Frei (Available Rooms) in every town I was in. Apparently, although I didn’t see this for myself, there are also free shelters all the way over the Alps from Germany to Italy, which travelers can camp out in if they want to hike the whole way.
The opportunity to travel, and stay in new and different places, is an important part of my personal experience of the world. I have a hard time imagining a life without travel, though I recognize that quite a lot of people don’t travel.