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.