Washington - Day 6 - Long Beach and up the coast

Grayland Beach State Park, Grayland

Monday, 6 June 2022

It's nice to start the day with a walk on the beach.

On our early morning walks, I heard the distinctive sound of Bald Eagles.  Nice.

today's route

Long Beach Peninsula includes 28 miles of beach along the Pacific Ocean and is locally claimed to be the longest beach in the US.  I've driven it before, many years ago, and decided not to do it today - it mostly being beach (duh) with little towns and parks along the way.  But I did stop at the town of Long Beach for its kite museum.  

When I looked it up online, the website for the World Kite Museum said it would be closed on Mondays and Tuesdays until mid-June, but I thought I'd go there anyway to maybe look through the windows.  

What I found was a small building with 2 women inside and a sign saying it would open at 11:00 (it was 9:45 by then).  Surprised, I mentioned to the women that they might want to take a look at their web page and they started to argue with me.  It turns out that their Facebook page is accurate (they said) but, as I pointed out to them, lots of people don't have access to Facebook so they might want to check their other page.  But then they seemed to want to take out their frustrations with the internet oddities on me, and I finally just turned away saying it was just a suggestion.  After that, I decided not to bother paying an entrance fee to them.  

Instead I walked Dext around a bit.  We were a little limited in places to walk because right next door was a stable for horses that people could rent to ride on the beach - and at least a dozen were all saddled up and being parceled out among a busload of kids.  I still didn't trust Dexter's reaction to being close to horses, so we went the other way.  Just a short walk around town.

I saw the shop of the Long Beach Pie Lady, so when we started back up, I swung by to see if she was open.  Sadly, nobody was around.  I stopped for gas and off we went.

Today we ran around the north side of that chunk of WA that anchors the Long Beach Peninsula.  I tried hard to see if that land has a name but couldn't find one.  It looks like a peninsula to me, but I guess the connection with the mainland is too broad to qualify.  Anyway, for miles we skirted Willapa Bay.  In fact, almost all of today's drive was along the bay.

The road ran through lands that looked as if they get flooded from time to time: lots of large dead trees and acres of mounds of long leaves of grass and mud flats.  It was bounded by hills thickly covered with evergreens.  (Washington's nickname is The Evergreen State.)

We crossed the Naselle River, the Nemah River, and the Niawiakum River (you can see the Native influence in place names here).

I passed "managed forests" (per the signs) in varying stages of being logged and regrowing.  And I saw several logging trucks in use.

I passed the Goose Point Shellfish and Oystery - open - and remembered how much I loved living in Washington for its oysters.  The only oyster species native to the US West Coast was the Olympia oyster.  And thanks to the population boom brought on by the Gold Rush, the oyster population all along the coast was wiped out.  (Yes, the Gold Rush was in California, but they went farther afield to find oysters.)  Since then, various species have been imported from Japan to be grown in farms, and they're also growing Olympia oysters again, in hopes they can eventually be reestablished.

At Raymond, I passed a vet's office with the sign: "Give Us A Collie!"  (Heh, heh, a little pun.)  I also saw a sign saying "Raymond Wildlife Heritage Sculpture Corridor Next 3 Miles."  And almost immediately I discovered this referred to large metal cutouts of various animals that were standing near the road.  Some of them were very real-looking, and I noticed that Dext was paying close attention.  I managed to find a webpage with photos of quite a few of them in a slideshow.  You might want to take a quick look.   https://www.tripadvisor.com/Wildlife-Heritage-Sculpture-Corridor-Raymond-WA

I saw a banner stretched all across someone's front porch that read: "F*CK B*DEN.  Maybe because it was so large and so in-your-face, but it seemed pretty violent to me.

We passed a number of captive ponds across the road from the bay, and at one of them I saw a Belted Kingfisher, one of my favorite birds.

I think I saw a male, because the rusty
belt on the female is easy to spot.

female Belted Kingfisher

I passed the Shoalwater Bay Indian Reservation.

I got to tonight's state park 20 minutes early and they wouldn't let me in.  They said I needed to turn around and leave - and I could go down the street to a public beach access area if I wanted to.  Instead, I used the campground's tank dump station to turn around, and while I was there I stopped and dumped my tanks.  By the time I did that and got back in line at the entrance, they were already checking in campers (10 minutes early) and I was 5th in line.  Was I just the test case or something?  Did so many people come in after me that they realized their idiotic insistence on an exact deadline was creating an impossible situation?  (There was no easy way for anyone to turn around - especially since I was taking up the lane at the dump station.)  Just weird.

At our campsite, I consulted the park map and saw that the beach seemed pretty close behind our campsite.  Thinking it'd be like last night's, I gathered up Dext and tried to get there.  We never did.  

First I had to figure out how to get around a very large pond/small lake that had formed behind our campsites after all the rain we'd been having.  Then I had to find the trail, which was signed only at the beginning.  Over a steep hill, I did find beach, and I could hear ocean, but I never even saw it.  The beach area was at least a quarter-mile across and there was more of that saturated land stuff here and there.  So I tried hard to navigate a way to the ocean, and we walked for a long way.  I had my boots on, but of course these were the boots that had a gash part way up and were useless in more than a slight puddle.

I finally gave up and tried to find the next path over to the campground, figuring it couldn't possibly be worse than the one we'd been on.  It was.  It was a lot worse.  That one was more like a large lake (these ponds are in low land under a dense canopy of trees and look like they won't dry up for a long time).  But I'd gone to a lot of trouble to get there and decided to find a way to skirt the lake.  Which meant I had to bend under low tree branches and fight through grasses and things.  It didn't seem much easier for Dext than it was for me.  And we ended up suddenly at someone's campsite - and the someone was sitting out in the sun with her dog, which started barking at us of course.  So I called out to the woman to explain we were harmless and what had happened, and she put her dog in the camper and let us come through.  She said her boyfriend had discovered the same lake problem we had but had learned that the path down even further along the campground was in fine shape.  Anyway, it was a mess, and a disappointment since I'd been hoping for something pleasant like we'd had yesterday.

The compensation was that I had a signal on my hotspot, which I needed to make an appointment in Olympia to get my 2nd Covid booster.  I'd heard on the radio that doctors were thinking some of the reason for the resurgence in cases on the East Coast was that people's boosters were running out of effectiveness, which is why people should be getting 2nd boosters.  I checked my shot card and saw I'd had my 1st booster last November, so it was indeed time for a 2nd one.