Washington

           After our wonderful adventure in Glacier we headed West to Washington. We stopped at a campground north of Spokane after leaving Montana. This Thousand Trails had seen better days and it was obvious that the KOA side of it was way better maintained but its free for us so we stayed. The second night of our stay we had a pretty bad storm that had lots of thunder and lightning but nothing we haven't seen before all over the US. While I was working the power went out so we had dinner with the Traviglino's and I set off with Laura to find out when the power would be back on. Now we knew there was wind, rain and lightning but we had no idea that the whole park was literally in shambles after the storm passed. We attempted to go out one road to find three trees blocking our way. Another road had cars, tents and trailers crushed by huge trees and of course our way was blocked. We finally found a road we could use by dodging trees and when we got to the main road we could see the front of the park was worse hit than what we had come through. This place looked like a war zone and we were the only ones not affected. Needles to say we moved to the open field by the main gate just in case another storm came through all the while Laura was trying to push a a tree over onto our rig so she could have that wonderful used toy hauler.

        We decided to cut our stay short there and headed to Quincy Washington to another Thousand Trails where we there was supposed to be river access from the campground. This part of our trip had been a little interesting already but when we arrived we were told it was $1000 fine for going near the river because the damn had a 30 foot crack. I was a little concerned about this to say the least but we were high enough on the valley floor that any failure on the damn MIGHT protect us all. The heat in this canyon was at 100 Degrees and of course they had closed the pool because some parent didn't notice their kid tacking a huge poodle. Our little Wildcat air conditioner just cant keep up with cooling the trailer if the temps are over 95 so without the pool we all decided this was not where we wanted to be.

            The group decided to head to an encore park just outside of Seattle where we spent a several days with several other families and the weather was just right. Anything over 78 degrees and the love of my life turns into a raging nightmare so this was the perfect spot. Now that we were stable for a few days we could go see some sights in the Seattle area. A bunch of families decided to use the Seattle  public transportation and hopped a bus into downtown.

Our first stop was the Pike street market where we wondered around and looked at all the wonderful sea food. We were also delighted to see the famous fish throwing which Laura and I have come back to see several times in our stops to Seattle.

While wondering around the market my lovely wife had to stop and play with sasquach for a bit and of course the famous wall of chewing gum. Now this was really more than a little disturbing to me but its kind of a trademark of the market in downtown Seattle. In the mall below the market we found some wonderful stores and came across this stop with a life size photo of the largest man.

We had a wonderful lunch of clam chowder and hot dogs with a little ice cream to finish off the visit before jumping another bus back to the RV park. Seattle is one of my favorite cities, during the summer but I don't know if I could handle the lack of sun in the winter. Due to my work schedule we only had one trip downtown and would have to do the rest of our sight seeing when we came back to spend with my mom in Auburn.