Trips

Deception Pass: Other Bits

June 2, 2015 By drpaddle Leave a Comment

There were other hikes to be scouted. Would any others be Wally-friendly (stroller-able)? The team did some reading and Sudokuing while I checked out one of them.

Lawn, bay, picnic tables, trees, not necessarily in that order.

All the Bowman Bay area hikes start right around here. Tempted to just sit and stare at the water. That structure in the background was built in the 1980s or 90s — an interpretive center for the Civilian Conservation Corps. Too bad it was closed (off-season, I guess) while we were here.

On my way to the trail, I stopped to watch these boats in action. Their “skippers” were up on the pier, running back and forth, gesturing with their remote control units. Looks like fun!

Radio-controlled model yachts as a hobby? Why not? I think it would be fun.

The trail map and guide promised close-up views of Deception Pass and its bridges, at the cost of a mere 100 feet in elevation change. It was about a two-mile walk, much of it vertical. I think I went up and down the same 100 feet about 40 times. Much too steep for Wally and his stroller.

So where are my pix of the view? I saw it, I guess. It was highly filtered by trees and brush, and I was certain I wasn’t “there yet.” By the time I realized that must have been “it,” I had gone up and downhill a few more times and didn’t want to backtrack.

So I stopped at a high point and grabbed this shot instead.

On my way back, a pod of kayakers prepared to head out into the bay. They did stop to ogle the model yachts for a while.

It was, for your reference, the Lottie Point Trail. I liked it. It passes a lagoon in which a few harbor seals frolicked. Those pictures don’t look so good either, so I’ll spare you.

On our last morning before breaking camp, we made our way to the Rosario Beach area for another look at scenery and a short but unsettling hike for me.

Rocks and water far below the top of Rosario Head.

This was the unsettling part. I went up 150 feet on this short trail, past signs warning of high cliffs. They weren’t kidding! I was on my hands and knees to make this picture. My sense of balance and my proximity to ledges enjoy an inverse relationship.

Coming back down the trail I checked out this lovely maiden. It’s a carved “story pole,” created by an artist to capture a Samish Tribe legend about a young woman who, eventually, went to live with a handsome prince of the deep — underwater. Her parents were against the union, but the prince arranged for lousy weather and famine in order to change his mind. I was going to say, again, that you can’t make this stuff up, but in this case I think someone did.

The Maiden of Deception Pass story pole.

And next I saw…

Wally greeted me as I rejoined the Team. As always, he made me smile.

Deception Pass State Park… 5 stars. Every time I return to this part of Washington — around the San Juans — I am newly impressed with its natural beauty. I still haven’t had enough, and the Team seems to agree. We’ll be back.

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Deception Pass: Watch for Crocs

June 1, 2015 By drpaddle Leave a Comment

It was the day after Memorial Day, so the hordes had departed.

Ahhhhhhhhh.

Good thing, too, because this made it easier to hear the roofers. There is nothing like the smell of bacon cooking over an open camp stove, with the sun glistening through dew-laden cedar needles, and the staccato of hammers, mercilessly attacking roofing nails, to complete the scene.

Even with roofing noise, cooking outside can be fun. Just pretend it’s a woodpecker!

What to do? Enjoy breakfast and depart for other environs. We piled into TinMan and made for the park’s West Beach area, which promised an American Disabilities Act-compliant trail gentle enough to accommodate Wally’s stroller. Yes, Wally has a stroller — he was born with a neuro-muscular problem that precludes long walks for him, and I was born with a laziness problem that precludes me carrying him for long distances.

We enjoyed a picnic lunch — and an air show put on by jet fighters from the nearby Whidbey Naval Air Station — at a weathered picnic table right on the white sand. Then, we took off — all of us on foot, at first.

Wally and Tyler prepare to cross leashes.

Wally always leads. Tyler always crosses under Wally’s leash. They are trying to tell us something, but what?

Our walk took us first past a small swimming beach on freshwater Cranberry Lake. There plenty of birds about — we heard kingfishers and spotted some killdeer — and this fellow was there, with plenty of siblings and a parent or two.

Ryan the Gosling. Sorry.

Toward the end of our stroll, a tree was presented for our inspection and edification. A placard informed us that the tree is more than 800 years old (or some big number like that). I swear it doesn’t look a day over 575. But in front of the tree, wait, what’s that?

When we saw this off to the side of our trail, we both thought “crocodile.” Or maybe it was alligator.

By now, both of the boys were gassed.

Tyler is visible in Wally's red stroller.

Wally is in here, but you can’t see him, because Tyler’s in front. Tyler doesn’t really like the idea of Wally riding while he walks. The humanoids bow their heads in despair.

Back at Bowman Bay, the roofers had finished for the day and we poked around. We saw this:

Paddlers, rowers and other drivers of human-powered boats can camp at dozens of sites all over Puget Sound, collectively called the Cascadia Marine Trail. It involves sleeping on the ground, so we don’t do it any more. But it was fun, back in the day.

… and this:

This guy is not, and was not, a real person. He is an imagined person, created by the sculptor to represent the Civilian Conservation Corps workers who built many of the roads and structures in the park. Sooz did not say that I don’t seem to be in this kind of shape any more. But she was thinking it.

If you don’t know about the Civilian Conservation Corps, and I’m not suggesting that you should, you can learn more here.

The next day there was hiking, reading, napping and being puzzled. There was also significant experimentation with our Wilson Electronics Sleek Cellphone Signal Booster, with some further puzzling results. Stay tuned for details.

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Team Toto visits Deception Pass

May 31, 2015 By drpaddle Leave a Comment

Forced by work obligations to forego a planned trip to the annual Escape Trailer Customer Appreciation Rally in British Columbia, we consoled ourselves with an unplanned visit to Deception Pass State Park near Anacortes, Washington.

I found two campsites available at the park’s Bowman Bay campground. It’s a big park, straddling both sides of a bridge over, uh, Deception Pass, a narrow body of water that separates Fidalgo and Whidbey Islands at the southern end of the San Juan archipelago. I always wanted to use that word in a sentence. Anyway Bowman Bay is the smaller campground in the park, on the north (Fidalgo Island) side.

Deception Pass and Deception Pass Bridge

Head for the North Beach portion of the park and you can see both the Pass and its lovely bridges (there’s an island in the middle of the waterway, and technically the other side of the island is called Canoe Pass, but let’s not split hairs).

Bowman Bay is real purty.

The day-use area at Bowman Bay is huge and green. That fog burned off before noon.

Now, about those two campsites. The online reservation site made site 286 look better than 290, even though 290 has hookups and 286 does not. On the site, 286 has a nice water view, and 290 sports a “poor” privacy rating. So we decided to dry-camp and reserved 286.

Two days, 3.5 hours and one expensive ferry ride later, it looked like we had been… Deceived! The shrubs had grown up and eliminated site 286’s view — it was anything but private, with narrow sites hugging it on either side.

There was a lot of noise — I mean a LOT of noise — coming from the nearby day-use area. It was, after all, Memorial Day here in the States, and that’s America’s cue to get out there and display unmitigated gall. Hundreds of people around, making picnic and volleyball noises — really, nothing galling at all, just a lot of people. And noise.

And another lesson to learn: when you dry-camp and you want to fill up with water upon arrival, you might need something other than your hose — because the campground might not have threaded faucets. You might need a Water Bandit, an inexpensive gadget for attaching a hose to a smooth, un-threaded spigot.

We did not have one. (But we have one on order now!). And, not a threaded faucet in sight — EXCEPT at site 290, which was, for the moment, empty.

Befuddled, I pulled TinMan and Toto into 290 to think. Well, hey, we could just grab our water here at 290, I realized, then squeeze ourselves into 286. But then another thing happened. I remembered that 290 had been available for our three-night stay… two days ago. Could I call the park office and switch sites?

No, I couldn’t. 1X service, one bar only, dropped call after dropped call.

By now, of course, Sooz and Wally and Tyler were walking around, stretching their legs and. We huddled. They stayed, and I drove back across the bridge (see above) to the park office to see if I could switch sites. Lucky us! For a mere $15 extra, we got site 290. I returned, heroically, to Bowman Bay. And we made camp.

Close-up view of restrooms from our campsite

Yeah, so, not the best campsite. A tad close to the restrooms.

But hey, look at that architecture! Many of the buildings all around the park were built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s. They don’t make ’em like this any more. Not often, anyway.

The only other site at Bowman Bay with hookups was back behind us… occupied by the friendly campground host.

Our campsite, number 290 for your future reference, was sort-of okay.

As I say, it was a bit noisy that afternoon, so after all the racing around, we relaxed into a wonderful evening. Gradually, the day-use area emptied out, though I swear the volleyballers were still going when it was surely too dark to see. Whatever. We toddled off to sleep.

I woke up late — around 7:30 — to what I thought was the sound of someone splitting firewood.

Well, no.

Roofer hammering new cedar shake shingles onto a kitchen shelter.

You build a kitchen shelter in the 1930s and at some point the roof gives out. So the State Parks upend their piggy bank, buy the materials, and expand a ranger’s job description to include… roofing. About 70 feet from our campsite.

Yeah, with Memorial Day past, why not do a roofing job before next weekend’s crowds show up? I can tell you why not.

So, not exactly an auspicious beginning to our getaway. Would we have fun anyway? Yup, we did. I’ll return tomorrow with the proof.

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Upscale, yes. Camping, no. But a sure bet.

April 18, 2015 By drpaddle 2 Comments

(Zero feathers were harmed to create this blogpost.)

On our way home from California, we stayed a night at the Seven Feathers RV Resort in the hill country of southwest Oregon. It is the most luxurious setting (in the human-made sense) Team Toto has experienced to-date.

We waited behind a shiny, 787-sized coach in the registration lane. After I checked us in, a friendly fellow in a golf cart led the way to…

Fabulous semi-natural landscaping as seen from our pull-through site.

Site #seventy-something. We parked. We trotted out our cushy chairs. We poured a glass of friend Pat’s homemade chardonnay, and drank in the view.

Even the bathrooms and showers were seriously luxe — so nice, in fact, we were actually willing to use them.

There’s a big indoor pool and spa. There were “barbecue pavilions,” complete with grills of varying sizes and styles, ready for our use (we didn’t). Every parking pad, every patio table, every lawn is spotless, manicured, and impeccably maintained. And the hookups were all functional, safe-looking and well marked. That never happens! Well, yes it does.

These places usually have horseshoe pits, but this one looked to have bocce courts. I didn’t look, though.

The resort is in a canyon, or ravine, or small valley, nestled a good half-mile from the I-5, so it’s reasonably quiet. And, since there are ridges all around, you can enjoy a bit of view even if you’re surrounded by 787-size coaches and fifth wheels.

(Another life lesson illustrated by Toto: At home, huddling next to our modest estate property, Toto looks reasonably sized. Not large, but not tiny, either. Reasonable. But in RV parks and campgrounds — at least so far, here in the western USA — Toto looks like he should have had HGH shots when he was younger. Perspective is everything.)

Oh and there’s a free jitney that comes by every few minutes to take you to and from the reason this place exists: the Seven Feathers Casino Resort. If we weren’t traveling with the boys, we would have taken a ride over there for a dinner out. But we haven’t left the boys alone inside Toto yet — not sure we ever will — so that wasn’t an option.

Instead, I took a ten-minute stroll down a mood-lighted, meandering and shockingly clean concrete sidewalk that hugged the bank of a gurgling stream (of course!), to arrive at the Seven Feathers Travel Center, which promised restaurant, mini-mart, and deli along with the rows of diesel pumps and semis. I would order dinner to go, walk it back up to our site and we would enjoy a light, nutritious, refreshing meal.

But the deli looked… unappealing. It was probably fine, I just didn’t see anything that called to me. The restaurant had closed after lunch. And the grocery choices were sub-optimal. I did the best I could.

We did not starve. But there were no raves about the imitation pepperoni pizza-flavored Hot Pockets — just a sharp intake of breath from Sooz and a wary look from Wally.

This is the kind of cooking I was born to do.

So, aside from the merely adequate meal, and short of being in one of those completely natural settings, surrounded by wilderness, that appear to be reserved only for production companies filming RV adverts, the Seven Feathers place was really, really nice. Interestingly, the nightly rate was less than other, less comely RV resorts we encountered. We got a 10% discount with our Good Sam Club membership, and we could have snagged another 10% off by joining the casino’s Players Club.

I think it likely that the Cow Creek Band of the Umpqua Tribe of Indians are not trying to make a bundle at the RV Resort. They just want us to visit, and perhaps hit the tables and slots for a few hours. (More power to them!). Whatever their motivation, they run a first-class RV park. Okay, RV Resort. I’ll concede it, this time.

Would we choose it as a destination? Maybe not. But maybe. Because just look at those hookups! So clean! So well labeled! We’ll probably be back here, on the way to or from some other place.

But we’ll make sure we have something for the grill before we park.

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They call it Blowdega Bay. But why??? Oh.

April 16, 2015 By drpaddle Leave a Comment

In life, you get some valley time, you get some beach time. We completed our valley time on Monday morning and headed for the beach. It was kind-of windy on the way. Felt like a headwind. TinMan’s estimated mileage calculator indicated “keep working, bub, you’re gonna need to buy a lot more gas.”

Yeah. We got to Doran Regional Park, on a sand spit in Bodega Bay, and sure, it was breezy.

Kite-surfers, bay, whitecaps, you get the idea.

Sure, THEY liked the steady, 25-knot wind. But it made the Maxxfan moan all night.

The wind was much, much worse the next day. Fortunately, we weren’t there that much — we were being lost on a dozen different Sonoma County country roads. We got rewarded though: friend Pat gave us four bottles of wine she had made herself (already tested… already loved), and we got to spend time with her fabulous Cairn terriers Runa and Rosso.

Runa, brindle-colored Cairn terrier. Gorgeous.

Runa and I are going to be good friends, I could tell.

Rosso the Cairn terrier, yawning, or smiling, I can't tell.

Rosso kept popping up onto my leg to say hi. Maybe he likes me. Maybe he thought I had a treat to offer.

Pat knows all about Cairn terriers. We are Cairn terrier novices compared to her. But it is our privilege to care for two of them, and that is enough. Pat gives us suggestions when we get puzzled about them, and all four of us are better for it. But Pat gave us something even more important than Cairn terrier advice on this trip. She took us to lunch at a charming, small-town eatery. We took two bottles of her own hand-made wine to sample. Dogs stayed behind and played or chilled, we’ll never know.

This is Pat’s wine. She made it. Our job was to drink it. Success!

The next morning, it was time to head back toward home, and we all know what that means… the weather improved. Observe.

When the wind abated, our lives were transformed. For two minutes. Then we had to pack up and head home.

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Bunnies, not snakes. Whew.

April 14, 2015 By drpaddle Leave a Comment

Our four-night stay at Folsom Lake State Recreation Area near Sacramento, CA, was snake-free. They may have lurking out there, watching us, be we didn’t see ’em.

However.

By the third night, I was having nightmares about jackrabbits roughly as tall as the Empire State building. You sit in your camp chair, thinking you’re going to relax, and then the ground starts shaking. Your visiting family member points toward what passes for the woods in this part of the world. Pairs of ears, pointing toward the Milky Way, and nearly reaching it.

Looks kind-of thoughtful, doesn’t he? What do bunnies think about? Oh, that’s right, never mind.

I didn’t really have nightmares, but gadzooks those bunnies are tall. We had fun watching them until Tyler and Wally spotted the from their napping location in Toto’s master bedroom. Ever heard a Cairn terrier bay? It’s hilarious, and maybe a little creepy. The bunnies high-eared it outta there. Note: friend Pat says these are hares, not bunnies. Okay.

They are having a drought here, possibly because they’re bored with the weather. It’s always nice here! But now it’s been too nice for too long. Time to get out of there before they shut the water off. Off to Bodega Bay.

We’ll miss the bunnies.

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