On To Chehalis

We continued our trip this morning on I-84 driving down the Columbia Gorge. It was a misty morning -- and our windshield is very dirty! -- but the springtime greens in the Gorge were beautiful.

I always get a kick out of these "haystack" rocks --

We eventually turned north on I-205 which led us to I-5. The drive north is always very pretty with lots of rivers and bridges to cross.

At Exit 71 we turned off to Chehalis RV Park, which is listed in our books as an Encore Park. I began to get suspicious when all of the signs started saying Thousand Trails. These are my very least favorite parks. They are generally quite large and sprawling and they DO NOT assign campsites! You have to drive around until you find an unoccupied one. Then you get yourself parked and then you let the gate people know your site number.

We wanted a pull-through site as we did not want to unhitch, plus we want an early start tomorrow. The gate guard showed me a couple of possible sites on the map. The roads are narrow and poorly marked, but we did find one way up at the far end of the park.

We had gotten a message from the Park Manager before we arrived, saying that he'd like to visit with us about membership... Sure enough, long about four o'clock this fellow showed up, knocking at the door, anxious to tell us about their "Zone" membership!

Sturbridge Campground

I'm not sure what the history of this campground is. It's part of Thousand Trails, but the sign and the literature all say Outdoor World. It functions like one of the Thousand Trails. You are supposed to figure out and pick a site before you actually register. When we arrived, they told us the only area big enough for our motor home was in the "D" section -- up on the hill.

They told us to walk up and pick out a site. There were actually only two possible spots. The RVs are parked back to back with less than a foot between them. There is a bit of grass between sites, but they are really close together. But, there is enough open area for Auntie Violet's satellite dish to get its fix. (Not so sure that's a good thing as we have been watching golf all day...)

The sites are all back ins and there is no escort to or assistance at the site. We are using Passport America for five of the seven nights of our stay (they don't honor it on Friday and Saturday.). Even at the 50% discount for PA, it's a lot to charge for a rather old run-down looking place with rutty dirt roads and no gravel or concrete pads. And then they add a $3 per day "resort fee!" We will use it for a base camp while we explore Connecticut and Rhode Island this week as well as a road trip to Salem, so we thankfully won't be spending much time here.

We did drive into Sturbridge late this afternoon to pick up milk and orange juice.

We stopped at a small local fresh market that had homemade meat pies. We picked up a chicken pot pie, stuck it in a 325 degree oven for half an hour and had a great meal. I wonder what one would be like if you froze it...?

Movin' On

We got up and got going fairly early this morning and pulled out of Bee's RV Park by 10:30 even with putting all of the Christmas stuff away. We really didn't move to far, just a couple of hours south to Peace River RV Park near Wauchula. I don't think we've traveled a single leg of all our travels this year without running into this --

Road construction is just part of the game -- and in this part of the world they don't have to stop for snow and ice!

We definitely were in orchard country today! We passed miles of orange groves --

And lots of trucks full of oranges --

These mesh sided trailers looked really neat all filled with fruit --

I think we passed a juice processing plant. There was no signage that we could see, but there sure were a lot of trucks heading that way --

It sort of reminded me of home. Instead of wheat or potatoes or onions along the road that had bounced off of the trucks, there were oranges.

Then we began to see the empty trucks heading back out to the orchards --

We actually drove past the RV park which was on the other side of the four-lane divided highway and had to make a U-turn at the next corner to get back to it. We made reservations at Peace River RV Park through our Resort Parks International (RPI) membership, but it actually is a large (400 plus sites) Thousand Trails facility. It's the only park we have ever been at (except for a couple very small self-service parks in the west) where we were NOT assigned a site!

The lady at the desk showed us the park map, showed us the areas that "were pretty full," and the sites where we "might get satellite service," and then told us to "call her and let her know what site we parked in..." It reminded me a bit of flying Southwest Airlines with the people evidencing the same kind of rather rude pushy behavior.

There were two rigs, and then a third, rig that pulled in behind us. While we were unhooking Toad (as advised by the lady in the office) so that we could check out the available sites, they pulled around us with their tows still attached. Keep in mind that this is an older park with fairly narrow roads. They went racing up and down the roads looking for sites. I watched one of them come around the same area three times...! There are actually quite a few empty sites, I counted at least twenty as we drove around in Toad. And there are fifty or sixty more in the area with only water and electric hookups.

In the meantime, we had found a spot down towards the end of the sites with sewer hook-ups. All of the sites are back-ins as the pipes in between are not buried very far below the surface and are vulnerable to breaking if driven over. While I waited in Toad at the site for Forry to drive Auntie Violet down to it, I watched one of the later-comers actually pull around and pass him on that narrow road!

We are sitting in a site that is oriented north-south, so we could look out the Auntie Violet's and watch this gorgeous sunset tonight.