Bremerton, Ferries, Seabeck

Diet rule #1: If nobody sees you eating it, it doesn't contain any calories.

As mentioned in my previous blog, we did move.  We moved a little closer to the dive site that Sandi was going to be visiting over the weekend.  However, we still were close to 50 miles away. That didn’t stop us though.  Off we went from the Bremerton Elks to just north of Tacoma and Redondo Beach.  Our route to the beach was via the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.

This beach is definitely set up for dive classes.  The waterfront was marked off, divers scattered over the beach and canopies were set up marking the different dive schools.

Congratulations to Sandi.  She's now a certified scuba diver !!

Right next door was Salty’s Restaurant.  That’s were we decided to have lunch and chat before we headed back to Duchess and our RV.  The location was fantastic.  The food so-so and not what you’d call especially inexpensive but then again, have you ever known a restaurant with a great location being cheap? 

After a little lunch and lots of talk, we decided to head back via the ferry.  We had two choices on ferries.  We could take the one from downtown Seattle directly to Bremerton or we could take the one from West Seattle to the Port Orchard area.  Since we had taken the Seattle-Bremerton ferry many times, we opted for the one we hadn’t taken before. 

That decision was not a great one.  Even though the distance was about 12 miles shorter, it probably took about ten times longer as the freeway was packed, the route through West Seattle slow with red lights, city speed limits and traffic hampering our travel.  We actually missed the first ferry by several minutes.  Thank goodness they run often. This ferry is definitely different than any we'd been on.  There were two stops on the way to the Kitsap Peninsula and the Southworth Terminal.  The first stop was at Vashon Island.  Cars were loaded depending on destination.  I figured they’d just unload and not take more cars on.  That’s not how it worked.  They definitely had a system.  Cars were loaded heading both directions.  I’d never seen this before but then again, we’d never been on this ferry before either.

It ended up being a much longer trip than we had planned … definitely, but we made it back and didn’t do much else the rest of the day.  Duchess was sure happy to see us.

I’m always amazed at how different each Elks RV park is.  We really like the Elks.  They are inexpensive and usually in great locations. Some of them have Camp Hosts and some do not.  Not all members realize that it really is an RV park. There are specific sites and the RVs are pretty close to each other.  It's not the BLM.  

We had two neighbors with dogs.  The one on the right had a long, long leash.  Their dog was tethered to their motorhome and could run across road, into our site and just about anyplace else it wanted to. The owners?  Well, they were huddled up inside.  Needless to say, if we were outside, their dog was in wanted to be on our patio.   Then, there was the neighbor on our left.  Oh, sure they’d be outside with them but the dogs were free roaming … everywhere ...  peeing on tires, barking on our patio and just about anyplace they wanted to roam.  Needless to say, our patio was not our own when we were outside.

Out comes "Mom" with the free roaming "kids".

Where's "kid 2"?  Peeing on a parked car's tire.

Well, we paid for a week but that didn't really matter.  We had another doctor’s appointment in less than a week.  What were we going to do?  We had no idea.  We have discovered we’ve not been able to do a lot of kayaking and also a lot of sightseeing.  We’ve spent way too much time driving someplace.  In a week’s time if you take a couple days to travel to Portland and back for doctors, a day to move the motorhome and another day to rendezvous, there isn’t much left in the week to discover anything local.  Then, of course, you’ve got to add in laundry time.  That in itself can be a pain.  We’ve either got to wash the dirty ones or buy new ones. Maybe we can just turn the dirty clothes wrong side out and no one will notice ??  Hmm … not good choices for sure.

In the meantime we decided to do nothing and stress about that later.  Again, we’re saying we’ll be better at planning next year but will we?  There were a couple little day trips we wanted to take before we thought about the 160 mile trip to the doctor’s office. We had gained a few miles by moving the motorhome south again so it was no longer over 200 miles but still a long ways. What to do? What to do?

We had been in this area before and knew that Eagles frequent here.  We also knew that this wasn’t really the best time of year to see them at their feeding grounds.  However, there are always eagles around this state.  You just have to find them.   We were off to Seabeck which was only about 10 miles away and a feeding ground for birds. Did we see any?  Well, no but we did have a nice drive and it was blamed it on our poor timing.

We also took a  ride through Scenic Beach State Park.  There used to be a time we liked all the trees when we’d put our little tent or tent trailer in.  However, those days are long gone.  You definitely have trouble seeing the trees through the forests here.

‘Tis life on the road.