Moses Lake, WA

Having a Type A personality moment here. It’s driving me bananas that the title of these blog posts don’t necessarily reflect the contents of its body. Hear me out — When I started writing about our trip in September, I began titling each post with the name of the town we stayed in that evening. That works, except that we seem to be in a pattern of travel where we see sights in the morning, drive to a new town before dinner, and then sleep there that night … which means the title of the post (the place we slept that night) isn’t the place we adventured that day.

All this to say that today’s post isn’t about Moses Lake, Washington (although that’s the town where we ended up staying by the close of the day). Today’s post is about our visit to Mount Rainier National Park.

Friday, October 11

We woke up in Ashford, Washington, just a few miles west of the main entrance to Mt. Rainier. The town of Ashford is small — very small — and mostly serves as base camp for many of the 2 million people that visit Mt. Rainier every year. We stayed at Mounthaven Campground Resort last night which was nice. Honestly, we didn't see much of the campground itself since we arrived after dark and left early Friday morning to start our day, but the place was quiet overnight and had full hook-ups that allowed us to charge our batteries, dump sewer and fill up on water, and most importantly — plug-in to power so we could keep warm with an electric space heater throughout the night instead of running our propane heater.

When visiting busy national parks, Andi and I always find it wise to enter the park early to beat the crowds. The beauty of traveling in a Class C RV is that it doesn’t take much work to pack up and leave a campsite in the morning, drive to our desired destination, and then settle in for breakfast once we arrive. That’s exactly what we did this morning — we were parked in front of the Mt. Rainier Paradise Jackson Visitor Center by 9:00am.

Because we’re traveling through the national park in a larger vehicle, arriving early also ensures we can easily find a parking spot. Our RV fits into a regular parking spot, but we like having the freedom to choose which parking stall that is vs. fitting ourselves into the last one available.

It was a beautiful drive into Mt. Rainier National Park that morning. The sky was bright blue and we could easily see the full mountain peak. We felt lucky to be there on such a clear day.

After breakfast in our RV, we looked at displays in the visitor center and watched a 20-minute video about the park. Tory and Aden were having “one of those days” and seemed to fight over every little thing. I’m not even sure what happened, but for some reason Andi put Aden on time-out in the middle of the floor of the busy visitor center. That’s always (ahem) a fun way to solicit questionable looks about our parenting from strangers.

Andi and I decided that maybe now wasn’t the best time for indoor exhibit exploration, so we grabbed the kids each a Junior Ranger packet from the visitor center’s front desk and took them back to the RV to complete. I created some separation between siblings — Aden up in the cab area; Tory in the back — and helped them complete the assignment.

Part of the packet usually has an outdoor hiking component, so we took the kids booklets along and hit the hiking trail. Several hikes take off from the Paradise Jackson Visitor Center, including the easy Skyline Trail to Myrtle Falls which is the one we selected.

Now at 10:00am, the parking lot was full of cars and the sidewalk to the trail area was packed with people. I suppose everyone else was taking advantage of this blue sky 40-degree fall day.

Despite the sunny day, the sidewalk was slippery in shaded spots which made me really nervous for all the people (young and especially old) navigating the trail. As we walked, I imagined how beautiful the meadows before us must be in the summertime. The ground was covered with (now brown and crusty) wildflowers.

As we walked, Tory worked to complete the scavenger hunt activity in her Junior Ranger packet. Aden did a fair amount of whining about “how much farther” we had to walk on our one-mile excursion. Apparently, he was very hot and tired.

We heard someone mention they saw a black bear in the meadow not far from where we were, so the four of us walked up the path to get a closer look. A big crowd of people were gathered on the muddy trail all staring at a spec of black hundreds of yards away in the field. Tory and Aden were not impressed.

Andi and I had enough hiking with the kids for one morning, so we returned to the visitor center to collect their Junior Ranger badges. The visitor center was packed with people and we had to wait in a line about 15 people deep to speak with a ranger. Once we got up to the counter, the park ranger gave Tory and Aden of the more lackluster ‘swearing in’ ceremonies we’d experienced in a national park. He barely looked through the kids’ Junior Ranger packets at all which was a little frustrating for Andi and I considering the great lengths we’d taken that morning (lots of whining endured) to get those booklets completed. It also makes the kids less interested in completing them when nobody is going to read their answers anyway.

The four of us hopped back in our RV and drove through the southeast part of the park. There’s obviously so many hikes to do and breathtaking sights to visit in Mt. Rainier National Park that Andi and I contemplated camping at one of the park’s campground for the night. To be honest though, we didn’t really feel like dragging our unwilling kids down miles of trails after an already exhausting morning of parenting. Andi and I were also feeling the pull to begin our trek back to Wisconsin as we were due home in six short days. In the end, we decided to say good-bye to Mt. Rainier National Park and continue our drive toward home.

We did stop at one last overlook to get another picture with that gorgeous mountain.

When we came to Washington State a few weeks ago, we drove the more scenic Highway 20 route across the state from Spokane to Burlington. Now, our goal was to take the quickest route home which meant a very boring drive along Interstate 90. It was already 1:00pm, so Andi and I decided we’d drive about 3 hours east and find a place to stop there. If we’d had more time, I would have loved to visit one of the many Harvest Host winery locations in the south-central part of the state but it wasn’t in the cards this visit.

Around 5:00pm, we pulled into the Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park in Vantage, Washington to camp for the evening. Unfortunately, all the spots were full for the night. Shoot! It was a weekend night. Go figure.

Onto Plan B. Andi asked the campground host if he knew of any other campgrounds close-by and the host recommended Sand Hill Campground on the other side of the Columbia River. We decided to drive over there to check for availability.

Opposite of Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park, Sand Hill Campground was completely empty. How could this be? This campground was GORGEOUS with perfectly manicured lawns, brand new picnic tables and paved campsites. The only problem — it was a tent-only campground. No RVs allowed.

Andi and I contemplated staying here anyway. By now, it was 6:00pm and the sun was setting. There wasn’t another person at the campsite, so it’s not like we’d be taking up a spot for a potential tent camper. In the end, we decided we’d better not break the rules. Andi pulled over in a parking lot and we contemplated our options. A) We could drive an hour to the nearest Harvest Host location, or B) we could drive 45 minutes to the nearest Wal-Mart parking lot and sleep there. Ultimately, we picked the Wal-Mart in Moses Lake, WA since it was right off the interstate.

Back on the road again, we drove another hour to Moses Lake. We’d driven a total of 5 hours today and neither Andi or I felt like cooking once we got settled in the parking lot of Wal-Mart. We decided to order take-out (Pho Saigon for Andi and I; McDonalds for the kids) and finally made it to our destination for the evening at 8:30pm.

Tory likes to say Wal-Mart is her favorite camping spot (we have no idea why), so she was excited to hear we’d be sleeping next to the semi trucks tonight. One perk to sleeping in a grocery store parking lot is having any food imaginable right outside the door, so after dinner Andi and Tory went inside Wal-Mart to buy ice cream for dessert. Along with ice cream, they also came back with a 3-lb bag of Riesen Chocolates if that’s any indication where our commitment to health was by this point in the trip! Good thing they didn’t buy the giant animal head Halloween masks they tried on because we definitely don’t have room for those in the RV!

Our stay in the Moses Lake Wal-Mart was complete when the lawn sprinklers activated at 3:00am. Pfffft, pfffft, pfffft, pfffft the sprinklers sounded as water squirted the sides of our RV for an hour. Sigh.

On the road again tomorrow. We’re hoping to make it as far as Montana.