Taidnapam Park

Thursday July 7th - Sunday July 10th (Days 507-510)


Marilyn and Gene invited us to join them camping at Taidnapam Park, which is a Tacoma Public Utilities park near Randal, Wa...Mt St Helens territory. It was a good trip, almost the exact opposite of our last outing...Montana was HOT, and while Taidnapam wasn't cold, it did rain a lot over the course of the four days.

Marilyn's friends, Al and Sharon Brown also came along....Judy's taking refuge under their fifth wheel during a rain storm.

We walked every morning along logging roads, following streams that fed into Riffe Lake below the campground.

One of our campsites. We used the screen house here more for the rain than for the bugs.

Guess this little guy wanted out of the rain as well.

Harris cooked dinner over the grill on Friday night....very tasty chicken!

Marilyn's granddaughter, Maddy, wanted s'mores for dessert.

We left Sunday morning, leaving in plenty of time to stop in Kirkland on the way home for River's 3rd birthday party. The cake was beautiful, but she was really only interested in the frosting.:)

Off to Montana

Sunday June 26th -Friday, July 1st(Days 501-506) 

Candy and Rick were eager for us to come see the improvements they've made to their house in Hamilton, MT, and even more eager for us to see their new camper van. So, on Sunday we left our house and started east. We were surprised by the amount of traffic on the road. It  usually thins out for us once we get over the pass, but this time it didn't seem to let up until we were in Idaho.
We left early, drove all day, and arrived about 7:30 pm, just in time for a quick tour and a game of cards before bed.

This is a picture of 2 vans we saw ahead of us on the road. The one on the right looks like our Howie, and the one on the left looks like the Lubansky's new rig, minus its pop top. It's a Ford Transit that has been modified into a camper. We liked the side by side comparison here.

On Tuesday we took our rigs and went camping at a forest service campground about 30 miles or so from the house.The weather had turned HOT...in the nineties, with no plug ins for any air conditioning! Luckily the nights weren't too hot to sleep.

Our hors d'oeuvres for the afternoon snack.

Candy's relatives  Dave and Cyndee came along for the trip. The bugs were so bad we spent a lot of time under the screen house.

Wednesday morning Harris and Judy got up early and took a walk/hike up a nearby trail. The other campers loitered over their coffee and hiked later in the morning. By the time they left, we were coming back...melting again in the heat.

We had planned to camp for 2 nights, but the heat and bugs drove us home after just one night. Did we wimp out? Yes.

On our way home, we stopped to find an easy geocache at the veterans park in Darby, a town just south of Hamilton.

There was a fire just up the ridge from Darby, and although it wasn't close to Candy and Rick's house, the smoke from it filled their valley as well.  Between the heat and the smoke, we decided to leave a little early from Montana as well. Guess you could say we wimped out again. We were glad to come home on Friday to a bit of a drizzle and cooler temps!