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.