20241116 Camano Island State Park and Time to Winterize

20241116 Camano Island State Park and Time to Winterize

Camano Island State Park’s camp ground was quiet and peaceful with no noticeable traffic or noise.  The RV’s furnace kept us comfortable although its thermostat allows for a considerable temperature swing between when it comes on and turns off.  

The RV’s lithium batteries discharged to about 50% overnight running the furnace and refrigerator, in addition to running the induction cooktop to make last night’s dinner and providing lighting and entertainment for a couple of hours. 

Since we are heading into possible freezing weather, and aren’t likely to be using the RV again for a while, we decided to shower in the RV to use the freshwater since it will need to be completely drained as part of the winterization process.  

After making coffee, we broke camp and made a daylight walk around the campground loops.  The open loop was supposedly nearly fully booked according to the WA State Parks online reservation system, but walking around the campground, it was apparent that the campground only had a handful of campers.  While there were “Reserved” tags on about 1/4th of the sites, only one out of 4 sights that were reserved actually had someone camping in the site, and more than half of the sites were both not marked as reserved and unoccupied.  There is definitely something wrong with the WA State Parks online reservation system.  There may be scalper robots booking up all the sites for resale on a secondary market.  

The weather rapidly took a turn for the worse with blustering winds and rain, so we drove the RV down to the beach area.  There is a small boat launch with a steep ramp, but the floats have been pulled for the season.  We didn’t get out of the RV because of the weather.  There were white caps on the water.  

We left the state park around 11:30am and drove to the Angel of the Winds Casino to fuel up the RV.  We had planned to spend some time in the Casino but the RV parking area is a long walk from the Casino, and it was raining hard, so we decided to pass on visiting the Casino, and take our money to Costco instead.  

We had also attached our cargo basket to the rear of the RV with 10 buckets for transporting some compost from LaConner, but because it was raining so hard, we also decided to pass on the compost as well.  

Costco in Burlington was an absolute zoo.  The parking lot was nearly completely full, so even finding a spot in the farthest corner of the parking lot where RV’s and vehicles with trailers usually park, which is usually empty, was challenging.  

We will be having our Thanksgiving dinner early because our daughter will be visiting this week, so we picked up fixings for our feast, and Costco did have their turkeys out.  

We stopped at Deception Pass State Park on the way home and used their trailer dump site to empty our holding tanks and finish draining our fresh water tank.  The main campground loop was closed, but fortunately the trailer dump facility was still open.

We got home and unloaded our Costco merchandise as well as dirty towels and gear from the RV and then Ben took the RV back to the Barn to finish the winterization process by flushing out all the plumbing with RV antifreeze, draining the hot water heater and plumbing, and blowing out any residual water with compressed air before backing the RV into the barn and plugging it into shore power. 

20241115 Camano Island State Park

20241115 Camano Island State Park

We had planned to go razor clam digging on the Pacific Coast this week but the weather forecast was for severe onshore wind.  This would have pushed the surf up the beach and make it hard and potentially dangerous to dig for clams around sunset, so we called that off.  However, the weather today was so nice that we couldn’t resist taking the RV somewhere close by to do some exploring.  Our Senior Off Season pass will let us stay at Washington State Park campgrounds for free, but there are only a few that are open through the winter season. One of these is Camano Island State Park, which is on the opposite side of Saratoga Passage from Whidbey Island where we live.  As of this morning, there were two campsites on the Washington State Parks camping reservation site that were available, but no longer reservable because it was within 24hrs of the stay. This would mean they are available on a first come first served basis.  Since it is just an hour and a half away, if we weren’t able to snag either of those sites, we could just head back home.

We left home at noon after bringing the RV from the barn and provisioning it for the overnight trip and stopped at Dairy Queen for lunch.  We drove onto Camano Island around 3:15pm and headed down to the State Park which is on the south end of the Island.  Geographically, it is very similar to Whidbey Island, and although there is no direct connection between the two, they are both in Island County.  

We arrived at the Camano Island State Park and were pleased to find both sites #1 and #37 unoccupied.  Site #37 was considerably larger and fairly level so we backed into it and set up camp.  

This state park is quite hilly and forested.  We had just enough time to walk around one of the closed campground loops and to a viewpoint of Elger Bay before the sun set.  The campground had nice well lit bathrooms with hand soap and XLerator hand dryers. There were a pair of shower rooms on the opposite end of the building with separate entry doors which were free to use, but there appeared to be something wrong with the thermostat for the heater in that part of the building because it was probably nearly 90˚F in the showers. 

We made ramen with green beans and shrimp for dinner. There were no over the air TV channels at the campsite but there was 1- 2 bars of cellular signal on both Xfinity Mobile (Verizon) and Mint Mobile (T-Mobile) networks, so we were barely able to stream some YouTube videos with low resolution and periodic buffering.  Ben did install a portable Blu-Ray & DVD player that can read mp4 files off USB drives so we watched the pilot for Gilligan’s Island before calling it a night.  The temperature outside was 40˚F so the furnace would be getting a workout tonight.