Thursday, January 23, 2025 Exploring Cape Disappointment with the RV and Bronco

Thursday, January 23, 2025 RV Trip to Cape Disappointment and Portland Shopping

There is a daylight razor clam opening starting Sunday, January 26th on the Pacific Coast.  We have trips to Egypt and China coming up this year.  Ben’s iPhone is in need of upgrade due to a failing battery and Janet’s iPad is running intolerably slow.  Ben’s iPad is also too old to receive the latest security updates.  So we have plenty of excuses to head down to Portland to do some sales tax free shopping and do some razor clam digging in Long Beach while we’re at it.

  
During a prior RV trip down the coast, we failed to find the Cape Disappointment State Park Campground because we weren’t familiar with the roads and didn’t want to get trapped somewhere we couldn’t turn around.  Now that we have the Washington State Parks Senior Off Season pass, we can camp for free during the winter months, so we want to get our money’s worth out of the pass. 

We were out late last night playing trivia at the Bastion Brewery in Anacortes.  We managed a clean win this time- no sharing the first place prize.  We won a nice boxed Scattergories game, along with some Play Doh, busy slippery toy and candies.  The Play Doh and busy slippery toy will go towards entertaining children at Ciara’s August wedding. Normally, Ben would have gotten the RV all set up the day before leaving on a trip, but Janet had a medical appointment yesterday afternoon, which is how we ended up playing trivia.

So Ben headed over to the barn to pull out the RV, hitch up the Bronco to it, and load up the razor clamming gear.  It took an hour to end up back in front of the house where we then spent a half hour loading clothes and provisions for the trip to the coast and Portland.  We have dental appointments on Tuesday, so we’ll have to head back on Monday.

Our first stop was to refuel both the RV and Bronco at the Angel of the Winds Casino in Arlington. Since we ended up arriving in the U District at noon, we stopped at Chiang’s Gourmet for lunch. It was fortunate that their parking lot was pretty empty, so we could park along the back wall of the dry cleaners.  In addition to lunch specials, we ordered extra to go for dinner, instead of our usual Costco Pizza.

The next stop was another fuel stop at the Lacey Costco for diesel.  From there we made a bee line for Cape Disappointment State Park, arriving at 4:30pm.  This gave us just enough time to be able to set up camp in daylight.  

This state park requires reservations year round but a list on the ranger’s booth at the unmanned entry showed only 6 sites with reservations who had not yet checked in.

Any others should be available for drop ins.  Instead of the usual paper envelopes, this particular park has a yellow telephone mounted on the unmanned ranger registration booth with an express line to the park’s reservations.  

We were able to find a nice basic site very near the beach trail, site B100, which was also very close to the bathroom.  We were able to stay in the site for the full 4 nights, and the Senior Off Season pass made it free.  Without the pass, it would have been $30 per night.

We were just able to check out the bathroom and beach access before night began to fall.  There were several boats visible on the water fishing for squid. You can tell this because they were lit up with huge floodlights.

  
We ran the generator for 10 minutes to exercise it and used the microwave to reheat our take out Chinese food dinner.

Tomorrow, we’ll head to Portland in the Bronco to hit the Apple Store and Costco.