Saturday, August 2, 2008

On to Washington--August 1 & 2, 2008

Time to leave the state of Oregon and move to Washington! We got our usual slow start--10:30. We stopped at the park entrance to dump our holding tanks, then headed to Astoria to cross that bridge!

Once across the bridge we were in Washington. The rest area just beyond the bridge had brochures and maps, but not for taking. The man running the rest area did not want to part with his material unless you could verify you were going to the area covered in said brochure! We finally got him to part with some info on Olympic National Park and a map of Washington.
On the road again, we headed for Ocean Shores, Washington. Quinault Casino is located near the ocean north of Ocean Shores. Bob had read about free camping near the beach so we went to check on it. Sure enough, the gravel lot for rvs was within sight of the ocean. We found a place to park and headed to the casino to make ourselves welcome (put a bit in the slots and had free coffee). We returned to the rv and checked on geocaches in the area. Bob couldn't wait to get our first Washington geocache. He found one located in front of the casino so we set off down the beach (away from the casino) for a walk with the casino as our stopping point on our return trip. This is our rv from the beach.
The Washington beach was different than Oregon beaches--no rocks and no huge piles of driftwood!
The most abundant thing on the beach was pieces of broken sand dollars! I have never seen so many in one place. There were a few clam shells and even some red crab shells.These birds flew around us trying to find a new spot to walk the beach.
Once at the casino, we found the area where the cache was located. We didn't find the cache.
We returned to the rv to check the clue and found that the cache blends in well with its surroundings. We will try again tomorrow to find it.
Saturday we went to the casino for morning coffee and to use the rest of our $10 ticket in the slots. We stopped outside the casino to look for the cache, located it, but couldn't get it out of its spot. We decided to return later in the evening with tweezers to make the grab.
Bob had read about a navy resort near Pacific Beach about 10 miles north of us. We drove up to check it out and have lunch at the resort restaurant.
We found the campground and it looked good. There was no beach access at the resort (on a cliff), you had to go about 1/4 mile into town to get beach access. We drove into town and saw some kites flying. They were larger than kites we are used to seeing. They also had some different shapes. The one in the bottom right corner is a panda!
This kite--yes, it is all one kite--had a weird tail configuration.
And then we saw an enormous kite flying just above the beach. I guess if the wind is really howling this kite might go higher. Hopefully you can get an idea of the size by comparing it to the people in the picture!
We enjoyed our trip to Pacific Beach. When we returned to the rv it was time to update this blog and plan the next leg of our adventure.
By the way, for those of you keeping count, August 1 was the one year anniversary of our retirement!

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