20260302 Monday, March 2, 2026 Heading Home

20260302 Monday, March 2, 2026 Heading Home

The new LP tank that we got at Walmart was supposed to be sold full, but without weighing it, it’s hard to know how much LP was in the tank.  However, it ran dry last night after running the generator for only 3 hours.  Fortunately, we had just finished processing the clams when the generator sputtered to a halt.  During the night, we had to switch back to the main LP tank to run the furnace.  The temperatures have been dropping into the lower 40’s during the night, so having the furnace has been essential.  

We broke camp after running the generator for a bit to make coffee and tea, and to put some charge on the batteries which had gotten into the mid 40% charge state, but since we were headed home, we had shut down the generator with the batteries till below 50%.  

It took about an hour to get everything set to leave.  Ben had to use the Bronco to jump start another camper’s truck with a dead battery, but we had to move the Bronco anyways to get the RV out of its site.  We drive both the RV and Bronco to an adjacent parking lot for the State Park that serves a walk in beach access, which is flat and has long spaces suitable for parking long trailers to hitch up the RV and Bronco.  

The weather and traffic were quite pleasant from Westport to Lacey.  We did stop at the Montesano rest area to dump the black and grey tanks, and then made a stop at the Lacey Costco to add several gallons of diesel to assure getting back to the Samcor in Anacortes.  The diesel at Costco was $0.50/gal more expensive than Samcor, but still less expensive than other refueling stations in the area.  We did pick up a pizza for dinner tonight, and Costco hot dogs for lunch, as well as frozen vegetables that we need at home.  Having a freezer in the RV is handy that way.

There is a prolonged resurfacing project involving the University Bridge north of downtown Seattle that caused traffic to back up for about 5 miles, but despite traffic being quite heavy, it only slowed to a crawl and not actual stop and go.  

It was nice to get home with plenty of daylight to get things unpacked and put away. Ben was pleasantly surprised to see that the batteries had charged up to over 90% on solar during the drive home, which was largely under sunny skies.

 
This was a very pleasant RV trip.  We had pretty decent weather for the most part and didn’t encounter any major problems with the RV or Bronco.  We did end up with a pretty decent haul of cleaned clam meat and 2 quarts of clam guts which make really good shrimping bait.   

It’s nice to have this winter fishery to keep us busy and also give us an excuse to do some winter camping.  We’ll probably make one more razor clamming trip at the end of March/early April, when the low tides switch to sunrise.

20260301 Sunday, March 1, 2026: Twin Harbors State Park Clamming Day 4

20260301 Sunday, March 1, 2026: Twin Harbors State Park Clamming Day 4

The weather has been surprisingly nice this weekend, with frequent sun breaks and little rain since Wednesday and early Thursday.  Today, the sun was out for much of the day with broken cloud cover, and a mild breeze.  Our batteries were just a little below 40% in the morning as the solar panels began to register energy.  We ran the generator to make coffee and tea, and allow the batteries to charge up at 9:45am, as most other campers were out and about.  We had a group camping in an adjacent site with a strange plastic bubble enclosure around their picnic table and a small pup tent on the ground.  They had the unfortunate habit of cutting through our campsite, walking right behind our RV, to get to the bathroom and shower building, rather than walk on the driveway.  FYI, it’s poor campground etiquette to cut through anyone’s camp site.  

We went for another walk on the beach.  It was near high tide.  There were a couple of tire tracks heading north of the park high on the beach with two spots that looked like someone had tried to park, but got a bit bogged down in the softer sand.  But they had managed to successfully get turned around and out of there.  Janet collected a few more sand dollars for her collection.  There are some impressive waves with breakers up and down the coast as the ocean swell meets the shallowing beach.  

The campground seemed to largely empty out as most of the tent campers and pop-up campers packed up and left, presumably to go home in time to return to their Monday to Friday work lives.  Ben got in a shower since there was nobody around using it.  

Lunch was simple cup of soup, Cheeze-Its and rotisserie chicken.  We headed out to the beach at 3pm, even though the low tide was at 5:26pm.  The tide was at 2’ and dropping, and we did find clam shows developing a hundred feet above the splash line.  We were able to be a little pickier about looking for larger shows and did end up with our limits of 15 each by 4pm.   

We got back to the camp and Janet got in her shower while Ben started cleaning up the clamming gear and preparing it for stowage, since this was our last day of clamming for this trip.  

There was just enough time to get things put away and back into the Bronco to drive to the Westport Library to use their Wifi to Zoom the family in our Sunday ritual.  The library’s Wifi was not connected to the internet again, but there was ample cellular signal to use our cell phone hot spots to do the Zoom meeting using an iPad on the dashboard of the Bronco.  

When we got back to camp, we had a quick dinner with Ben eating another baked cod, rice pilaf and carrots dinner and Janet having a bowl of Ramen.  Then we processed today’s clams.  

Tomorrow, we’ll head home.  We’ll need to hit the rest stop in Montesano to use the dump station.  On this trip, since the campground bathroom is so close by, we only use the RV’s toilet for number 1, and treat toilet paper like in Mexico- into the trash, and not into the holding tank.  This makes dumping the black tank pretty quick and painless.  We also try to dump clam processing water down the campground drain, so our holding tanks last longer.