Go Fly A Kite!

Excellent advice when you are on the Washington Coast. We spent several days, including the Fourth, at Ocean Shores. Ocean Shores hosts an annual kite festival but it is held early in June and we missed it. We have attended another such gala in Oregon and they are beautiful sights. All sorts of shapes and colors filling the sky at one time with thousands of people, cars, trucks, vans, mopeds, bikes, etc., dotting the beaches for miles. There are beach umbrellas, portable cabanas and flags flying everywhere. If you have a chance to attend sometime, don't miss it. I managed to get a couple of inexpensive kites in the air so it really isn't that difficult to heed the advice, "Go fly a kite!"

We camped in a dry RV lot at the Quinault Casino located in Ocean City, just north of Ocean Shores. We had a great spot overlooking the ancient dunes and could see the water over the rolling grassy sand hills. We saw deer grazing just about every evening and one lone eagle soared along the beach looking for dinner. The weather was reasonably warm and windy but as the Fourth approached we started to get morning fog and on the Fourth we had evening fog. Visibility went down big time!

Since the Indians sell fireworks that aren't legal anywhere else in the state there were thousands of celebrants of the Fourth that had pitched tents and made camps on the beach, well away from the high tide line. We saw at least one motor home parked on the beach for at least two days. In preparation for the big display there were many significant bonfires laid and many multiple family groups had quite the party. One group had their own version of burning man as they erected a stick figure fabricated from boards off old pallets. As the party got down this figure was ignited with the help of significant amounts of flammable liquid. It made quite a show. As the sun set we could hear all sorts of explosions but we could not see any of the show so we decided to go down on the beach to improve the view. What a show! Fires everywhere cast shadows and eerie glows with huge clouds of mist and smoke wafting across the beach. Rockets and bombs were exploding everywhere with participants pointing them any old way and lighting the fuses only to have flaming material shooting off towards another group just out of sight in the haze. It is the closest we have ever been to a war zone and that is just what it felt like. We enjoyed the show but we were happy to get back to solid ground away from the explosions. The show was still going strong at 2:00 AM!

We left the ocean and went to Woodland, WA where we had some new tile flooring installed. We had the new floor put in last summer but had some problems with a part of it and had it redone. We took advantage of our proximity to Oregon to do some shopping since they have no sales tax and spent a few days at an RV park in Vancouver, WA. We also spent one night at a great RV park located right on the banks of the Columbia River. We had major sea going vessels going past at all hours of the day, going into and out of Portland.

Today we are heading north again, albeit slowly. We stopped for the evening at Little Creek Casino located in Shelton, WA. They have a great buffet on weekends and tonight we had Alaskan king Crab as well as the local Dungeness Crab! It is always a treat. We will spend the next couple of days deciding where we will go next.

Hope you're having a great summer.