Trip to Yakima

We started thinking about how busy tomorrow is going to be. We'll be moving to Bothell, doing our laundry, and packing for our cruise. We thought it might be better to move to Bothell today and get a head start, but when we called the park, we found out that they are full, so we stayed at Big Pines.

Our adventure today was a trip to Yakima. We hoped there might be something there worth seeing, and we had a few things to pick up. We drove to the "historic district," where we found an interesting little shopping area called the Track 29 Mall. The old train station houses a couple of dance shops. A series of box cars, each from a different railway, forms the rear section of a series of shops. The facades have been designed to look like an old west town. We browsed through an antique mall (actually antiques and collectibles).

Here are the store fronts...

And here are the boxcars on the backside of the stores.

When we returned to our campground, we noticed that there was splintered wood around the entrance and the stop sign had been knocked down. After a bit a highway maintenance vehicle showed up, and a worker reinstalled the stop sign. We stopped to chat with him and found out that someone had been turning into the campground when the vehicle behind rear ended the camper. He had only second hand information. We talked with a fellow camper who had not seen the accident, but he reported that two tow trucks had loaded up a camper and its undercarriage. Someone's vacation was definitely ruined, but no one was hurt.

One of our neighboring sites is occupied by a very old VW van with a fancy striped tent attached. It has fringe around the top, and looks very cool. We stopped to talk with the family occupying it and found out that they had found both the van and the tent at different times by checking the classifieds (the guy said, "you remember, when the classifieds were printed in newspapers....").

After dinner Ken built a campfire. We sat and listened to the birds and watched the flames dance. When the fire had died down to some great coals, we toasted marshmallows and made s'mores. We don't do this very often, especially if we don't have any grandkids around. It was very satisfying to relax and get in touch with the trees and hills and the evening air and the campfire and the birds. We spend so much of our time indoors and looking at screens....


We were surprised to see several Class A's pull in to the campground today, when there haven't been any before. In fact, most of the sites have been occupied by tenters. We've decided that these units are just the forerunners of the weekend campers. We'll be leaving in the morning, so we won't know if the place actually fills up on the weekends.