Wednesday, Cindy and Terry came over from the Tri-Cities with their motorhome and toad (pulled car). We had permission from the neighbors to the south to allow them to park in the driveway. We had a pleasant evening and then Thursday we all headed out to our camping adventure. The campground of choice was called "Bay View" and is located about 45 minutes north. Bay View has a similar environment to what we have here at Camano - but you can't see the beach from the campsite. We had suggested that they just come to our house for a couple of days, but this outing is somewhat of a tradition and there were other families involved. Cindy's daughter, Sheila, and her family; and a couple that had traveled to Alaska with them were to meet us at Bay View park.
We got to the campsite in the early afternoon. It was typical to Northwest camping sites: an open field commons on one side and a heavy brush on the other sides. The commons looked upon about twenty campsites. We arranged to have four sites in a row, the fourth site was too small for Sheila's family, but we were close to being all together.
We got all set up in the campsite when it started to rain. The consensus among the locals was to ignore the rain and just do your thing. After the first day, the rain was really mostly a threat and was best ignored.
Friday we bicycled. The guys went north and the ladies went south. I have my new bike, but with all the hills around the Camano house, I haven?t developed all that much stamina. The land north of the campsite was mostly flat as a table. I kept up for about six miles before I reached my halfway point and got back to the site without permanent injury. Nancy and the girls rode south along the top of the Skagit River dike. They did about seven miles total. The nice thing about riding along the dike is there are no cars. The fun thing to do was to drive over all of the slugs on the road - ugh!
We had great campfires both Friday and Saturday nights. Dinner had been planned in advance (everybody contributed) and the weather cooperated. We picked up a load of firewood off the beach here at Camano and Sheila's Jay had just recently removed over 20 trees at their home and brought some more. We had a really good supply of firewood. Gathering firewood at state campground is prohibited.
Saturday, everybody except Nancy walked the beach and the woods. Jay has a handheld GPS (Global Positioning System) device and Sheila and Jay's daughters, Katie (age 9) and Ally (age 7), turned the walk into a big game called "Geo Cashing". People go out in interesting places and hide small boxes with lots of little treasures. They then post the location of the box, latitude and longitude, on the Internet with some hints. It"s sort of a high-tech treasure hunt.
The girls found the first box on the beach. The box was a small Tupperware container filled with really cheap toys. The protocol is that the kids can pick one toy from the box and each toy has to be replaced by something of equal value. The box is then replaced for the next hunters. It turned out that there were two different treasures in the area and so the girls couldn't wait to get to the next.
The reason that Nancy wasn't with us was that she had to teach one of her classes in Mount Vernon. Mount Vernon was only about twenty minutes away. The beginning sweaters class was well attended and although I can't attest for the people who attended, I know that Nancy had a good time.
Sunday, we rode our bikes again. Headed south along the dike and then around the oil refineries. As soon as I saddled up, I remembered Friday's ride and limited my ride to about eight miles. After biking and lunch, we packed out and headed home to Camano. Since we were only 45 minutes from home, we were there by early afternoon.