A long day of driving

In the morning, Bill and Deanna made us an excellent blueberrry pancake breakfast before we hit the road. We had planned our first two days of vacation to have a fair amount of driving, so we set out fairly early from Bill and Deanna's place. We crossed the border just before noon and headed across Washington.Prior to this trip, I had only been on the west coast of Washington, near Seattle, and had assumed all of Washington was green, lush and mountainy. However, we learned that most of Washington is a DESERT!! It was pretty boring.Eventually we made it Yakima, where we stopped in at a Super Walmart to pick up food and supplies. Then we continued on towards the Mt. St. Helen's area, passing by Mt. Rainier on the way.Garrett took a picture of me in front of Mt. Rainier, but you ended up being able to see only me.There was also this rock formation at that viewpoint, called "palisades".Here's a typical picture of Garrett from our trip:I would just hang out while he took all the pictures he liked. I didn't mind, since it meant he got some really great shots that I can use on my blog!

After stopping to see Mt. Rainier, we went on a big of a wild goose chase, trying to find a camp site. Eventually we found one around 8pm in a town called Mossyrock. The campsite was mainly RV based, but had tenting sites in a sloped field. We didn't get a great site - pretty tilted, however we had other problems our first night of camping. First, once we stopped and went to get our jackets to stay warm in the cool evening air, we noticed that they were SOAKED! Smart kids that we are, when we put the ice in the cooler earlier that day, we didn't make sure the plug in the cooler was closed. As the ice melted, the water ran out of the plug opening and onto our jackets. Luckily the seats in the car didn't get wet at least...

Secondly, we arrived at the campsite in the near dark and pulled out our lantern, only to find there were no batteries in it. Apparently Garrett used to keep a box of batteries in the campsite bin, however when I was storing the bin and packing it for our trip, I took the batteries out of the bin. I didn't know why they were there! I found them under my sink when I got home from holidays.

Lastly, when Garrett and I unpacked the tent, we remembered that we hadn't dried it out from our trip up to Floe Lake. When we pulled it out, it smelled sort of fishy, like mold or bacterial growth. It remained smelling like that until we dried it in Amanda and Ray's backyard for a few days.

So, our first night car camping was a little rough. We did decide that backpacking is actually easier than car camping, because you need less stuff when backpacking! However, we had picked up a fire log from Walmart, so we weren't without fire completely. After the first night, we definitely fared better while camping.