We had grand plans this weekend of heading to San Juan island to take the Jolly Trolley tour and do some hiking, but after a 3am wake-up to catch an early ferry, I checked my email to find that they had cancelled all but two of the ferry sailings that day. For a minute, we though about just leaving and seeing if we could get standby for one of them - but decided that would be a miserable day (up at 3am to catch the 2pm ferry…). So instead, we decided to go to someplace new.
Enter Westport. We got a campsite at two harbors state park, about 4 miles south of Westport - which claims to be “Washington’s origional beach town”. Apparently it’s one of the few places in the only place in Washington with decent surfing, so the town is mostly built around that at this point. Angela came with us and she had been here when she was a child - and it sounds like very little has changed. It was a fun town with lots of shops. There were lots of beaches to go explore and collect treasures on - which is basically what we did on this trip (plus a little antiquing and some fancy camp cooking).
Sara really enjoyed “swimming” on the beach, which you could almost do given how fine the sand was. Needless to say, she was sand monster by the time we made it back to camp.
And no beach should go un-laid upon, especially by Angela. I don’t think it was particularly restful however, given dog and child throwing sand on you (unintentionally) every 5 min or so.
Saw a deer just after lunch.
Took a spin through town and got some ice cream for Sara from a “Whale of a cone”. There was a strip that ran along the beach and there were 3 shops (out of about 20) with taffee. I suspect it must be a thing in Westport, although we didn’t get any. At the end of the strip, there was this big tower so you could look out at the bay.
Perhaps the most humorous name for a kite & tackle shop…
There were these new berries at our camp. I tried a couple and they are basically tasteless. They are called Salal Berries and apparently they are only really used for baked goods (Pies/Jams) which makes sense given how much sugar they would have needed to be enjoyable. I do wonder what a Salal berry Pie would taste like - seems like it would be somewhat bland…
Angela cooked dinner for us - some pasta with garlic bread and shrimp for an appetizer. Very tasty and I was quite full by the end of dinner. Angela climbed into the van for some reading while Sara and I went on a walk down to the beach. There was a interpretive trail that took use there and they had a fun story for us to read about a field mouse who wanted to be an explorer and was trying to find traveling dune to teach him how. Spoiler alert, traveling dune had some grass/trees grown on him and he wasn’t traveling anymore. Sara was so excited to hear the story and she basically ran the 2 mile loop down to the beach and back.
This was the first night with the new setup - I put a Raspberry Pi computer in the battery box running Kodi and had it hooked up to the monitor. I was a bit worried about the image quality, but I couldn’t tell any real difference between HTMI and the composite cable I was using. There was a bit of feedback from the long line from the computer to the monitor, but I think I can solve that with some feedback clipons. I also need a new power cable to tidy things up a bit, but the whole setup worked really well.
We left and came home relatively early the next day. We stopped in Olympia for a quick breakfast that ended up taking 2 hours, so we didn’t feel like we had enough time to do much else.