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.