Life at Camp

Since we've been back, we've had lots of things to do - company at the site, appointments in Puyallup, rearranging our self storage so we know what is there, rearranging our storage shed and Craig's garage (enclosed trailer) so he could get the Harley out to ride, etc.

We've also been helping Craig's Mom and Dad get ready for their garage sale - now that I have a little experience having one in Dallas with my Mother's estate and then two of our own in the last year.

We are both adjusting well to retirement, not missing the work schedule at all but do look forward to catching up with friends and family as we get time.  Attended our great niece and nephew's birthday party in Portland and had a great weekend with Craig's brother and sister-in-law and his parents this last weekend.

We are also working with the park to make a few adjustments to our site as it is a little uneven and this will make it more usable when we have company.

After returning from out trip in Wyoming, I needed to repot my "traveling pots" of flowers, as the hail had sheared them off just as if someone took a weed eater to them.  So I now have flower pots at the site - not quite like my 18 rose bushes and 15 pots I had at home, but the color definitely helps make the site more
homey.

Traveling Back to Washington

We decided to travel back to Washington going through Yellowstone and Jackson Wyoming, then across Idaho, up through Washington wine country and then back across the mountains to Chehalis.  We had a small detour in Casper Wyoming as we had issues with our coach air conditioning system so we spent three nights in Casper, waiting for Monday morning to arrive to have someone look it over.  Didn't find much to do in Casper, so we spent time doing more laundry in our washer and dryer in the coach, started designing our blog and updated our change of addresses to our Escapee mail address - since they now forward our mail to wherever we are.  Of course now that we are on the road, I've been looking for places to wash the "girls" and even though it wasn't quite bath time for them, we discovered that they are putting dog washes in with car washes - I'll now be on the lookout for them.

After more hail, thunder and lightening in Casper, we decided that Wyoming has now been crossed off of our bucket list - except for the very Western tip as we would really like to spend time in Jackson, Grand Tetons and Yellowstone.  We drove through this area on our way home, but would like to come back and spend a month or so as it's had been about 25-30 years since our last trip through this area.

I also found out as "navigator" that I may need to do a better job of looking for our routes as I found great routes, also the quickest routes but not necessarily the easiest as we climbed some pretty high mountain passes coming out of Jackson.  But to my defense, I definitely didn't think Craig was going to keep driving - now that we are retired - but he drove over 350 miles that day, and we didn't get started until 2 pm.  When we got into Idaho Falls at about 9:30 at night, the host educated Craig on how you travel in retirement - no more than 200 miles a day, leave at 10 and stop by two and stay at least three nights t every stop.  Not sure we'll make all of these, but I definitely like the 200 mile limit.

From there we travelled Hwy 20 across Idaho and then stopped north of Ontario at Farewell Bend State Park.  It was very hot - about 106 degrees and the air conditioner had a hard time keeping "our metal box" cool but we enjoyed the great view of the lake from our campsite.

We the went onto Prosser Washington, did some wine tasting and then back to our campsite.  We were met by some of our friends for the weekend to welcome us back from our trip.

Our first Escapee Rally

From Sundance we went back to Gillette, Wyoming to attend our first Escapee Rally.  This was much smaller than the FMCA rally with approx. 600 vehicles in attendance.  Again, we attended many seminars and enjoyed meeting people from all over the country.  Again, we experienced some interesting weather to include a great Fourth of July fireworks show competing with God's thunder and lightening which was directly above us.  The thunder was so loud that you couldn't always tell what was thunder and what was the boom from the fireworks.

The "girls" were in a pet parade and got lots of attention in their little costumes.  Not something I do to them very often - but they were so cute.