The Sunday Blast from the Past

After I finished my stint as campground host at Lewis and Clark State Park in October of 2006, I headed 100 miles northwest to the Washington coast. I spent an enjoyable week at Ocean City State Park.

It was foggy and rainy much of the time I was there, but that's to be expected. One benefit of all the moisture was the abundance of mushrooms that could be seen.

While I enjoyed taking pictures of the shrooms...

another creature found a more practical use for the fungi.

These slugs appeared to be adorned in camoflauge. They were about five or six inches long. I've never seen such huge slugs!

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I took many walks along the beach and collected several nice sand dollars.

I encountered this crab on one of my walks.

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It was a restful week in between assignments, and the last night even produced a beautiful sunset.

Thanks for stopping by....talk to you later, Judy

The Sunday Blast from the Past

While I was camp hosting at Lewis and Clark State Park in Washington during the early fall of 2006, the other hosts and I took a day trip to visit Mt. Rainier National Park. The Putz's are a fulltiming RV couple originally from Washington, so they took it upon themselves to show me a few fabulous places in their home state. I really appreciated that, since my transportation at that time was a moped. A one hundred mile trip was not something I was going to do on the moped. :)

There was still plenty of snow up on the mountain, even in September.

While we were taking in the sights, the Putz's struck up a conversation with another visiting couple. It turns out, they were from Kasson, Minnesota. How's that for a small world? You see, I lived in Kasson for the ten years previous to my taking to the road!

When we headed out from Lewis and Clark SP, I was wearing shorts because of the nice warm weather. I didn't take the altitude at Mt. Rainier into consideration. That was a mistake. I was getting goose bumps, and it wasn't just from the magnificent scenery!

It's hard not to take a million pictures when you are in the grandeur of the mountains.

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Thanks for stopping by....talk to you later, Judy

The Sunday Blast from the Past

On August 31, 2006, I arrived at Lewis and Clark State Park in Washington state to begin a seven week stint as a campground host.

I had been told this would be a more physical than social job, and that description was correct. Besides selling fire wood and answering camper's questions, I had plenty of physical chores to do which include scraping, priming, and painting the Environmental Learning Center building.




I also had to dig up all the boulders surrounding three flower and plant areas. Over the years, the boulders had sunk in the ground and it was my mission to unearth them all, put in new soil, and reposition them. Manual labor, to be sure...





This park is located in the old growth Douglas fir forest with huge fir trees that are around 600 years old. And underneath those fir trees are numerous kinds of mushrooms.


Most of the stuctures in Lewis and Clark State Park were constructed in the 1930's by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). They are beautiful stuctures and must be maintained as they were constructed because they are now on the historic building registry. That includes the cedar shake roofs. Those roofs require a great deal of upkeep. There are two picnic shelters like this one, and while I was there, the larger shelter was rented out twice; once for a wedding, and once for a native American Pow-wow.



I was provided with a full hookup site in amongst the Douglas fir trees. It was a beautiful site. I spent one memorable evening sitting at my campfire while listening to the eerie sounds of the drums floating through the forest from the pow-wow. I'll never forget that. It brought all kinds of images to my mind of what it must have been like a couple of hundred years ago. That was truly a blast from the distant past!
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Thanks for stopping by....talk to you later, Judy