Yep, there's nothing like finding a beautiful patch of nature and just parking the ole family truckster right on top of it. Drip a little oil on those huckleberries. Rip up a little of that cryptobiotic crust. Scare some wildlife. Make fun of chipmunks. Burn your Sierra Club membership card and carve statues of James Watt out of old-growth timber.
Must get out of the van. Going crazy. Must get out of the van. Heeheehee!!! Out of van! Out of van! Heeeeeheehee!
| We rolled out of bed fairly early, our first night of sleeping more than two folks a rousing success. Technically, Otto sleeps four. However, this has always seemed more of an abstraction than any kind of reality. I mean, sure, there are two bunks, but four people? C'mon. It's a van. Nonetheless, Marcus was game, and so were we. Kristanne and I took the top bunk and Marcus scored the bottom. Despite the usual gymnastics required for entering and exiting the top bunk, the experiment was a rousing success (especially for Marcus, who seemed to be rubbing in the fact that he could roll around all over that big lower bunk). We woke up ready to drink Tang and hit the beach. |  |
| After breakfast, Kristanne attended to her daily hygiene regimen while Marcus and I headed down to the beach for a little frisbee and frivolity. After building a small fort, writing our names in giant size on the beach, and just generally having a good ole time, we headed back to the van with a bet on whether or not Kristanne would be done with her ablutions yet. Marcus had no faith -- he said she'd just be getting to the part where she scours off her dead skin with a chunk of pumice the size of a grapefruit. I disagreed -- she'd be way past that. Heck, she might even have already covered her cuticles with bits of toothpick and Elmer's glue to prevent them from tanning overmuch. | |
 |
It turned out I had the call -- not only was she done, she had also done the dishes. Wow! We buckled up the campsite and headed into Ilwaco. Ilwaco is a tiny little fishing village of a couple hundred folks on the mouth of the Columbia. It also has the distinction of having been my grandmother's home town for a spell while she was teaching school in a one-room schoolhouse down there around 1919, or so. Back then, she worked at a place called, "Dupay's Hardware," right at the center of the town. Well, the names have changed, but the game's the same as it was so long ago -- they still sell hardware in the same location. They even had the old cash register my grandmother used to operate way back when. That's me standing next to it right there. |
Alive with the glow of history, we did a hobbyist genealogy right there in the parking lot before heading out to the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. Marcus and I started a game where we alternated sentences in telling stories. Most devolved into goofy, snot-filled, pseudo-rap songs fairly quickly. However, our hands-down favorite was the story of the cow who escaped his would-be butcher and made it to the Cow's Paradise. And, yes -- that was all sung to the tune of Coolio's, "Gangster Paradise."
12 year olds only have so much tolerance for multi-hour drives, though, and soon Marcus faded off to sleep as we headed into the Cascade Range. Having once again consulted our careworn copy of "Guide to Free Campgrounds in the US," we had found a likely sounding spot some 30 miles up a forest road near the base of Mt. Adams. With this being the Friday before Labor Day, and all, we felt like we needed to hit the boonies a little bit to get a spot.
It paid off. There was a lot of driving on dirt roads, but we eventually sidled up to the flanks of Mt. Adams, one of the more picturesque peaks in the Cascade Range. As an aside, does it rankle anyone else that all these goofy Euro-American names got dropped on a bunch of beautiful Northwest peaks? What the heck does President Adams have to do with a land that was nowhere even near being part of the US when he was president? In fact, what does George Washington have to do with this fair corner of the country? I'm not checking my dates, but I'm pretty sure the Louisiana Purchase was a couple decades away when he died. Much better, I think, if we had preserved the names of the people who are actually native to this region. That's why I'm learning Coastal Salish in my spare time. That and Esperanto.
The camp site we found was wonderful -- isolated and verdant, with huckleberries all around. We did cause ourselves our first harm of the trip getting into this site, though -- scraping a stump slightly while angling between trees. Then, we managed to bend our awning a bit, too. See those trees surrounding the awning in the picture at the top of the page? We were convinced we could get the van a little closer to those trees without taking the awning down. Two of us would just lift the awning while the third went back and forth in three foot increments to get the van closer. Lazy as I am, those kind of ideas always sound so good to me. Unfortunately, they rarely fail to do grievous harm to my stuff. Needless to say, we bent the awning just a tad. No big deal, though -- it bent right back.
Settled, we sat down for some cards. However, since we were at about 4000 feet, it got much colder than we expected. We retired to the van early, but not early enough to avoid being woken up by the folks who rolled in next to us at about 1:00 AM to comfort their crying toddler all night. It was kinda amazing to go from complete quiet to complete bedlam in under ten minutes.
Nonetheless, it was a fantastic campsite, good cards, and good company. Tip for the day? If you see Marcus coming, don't suggest gin rummy -- he comes to play, as you can see in our shot below.
Catch up with us next time as we leave the mountains and head into Tacoma, Washington. Yep -- it's full-circle time on the Odyssey.
Total Miles for 8/29 = 188