Idaho - Days 29 - 31 - in Kamiah campground

Kamiah/Clearwater River KOA, Kamiah

Friday, 29 through Sunday, 31 July 2022

I'd intended to spend the last few days of the month in one place - this one - figuring I'd need the time to catch up and hoping they'd have a good wifi system.  It turned out I did indeed need some catch-up time but, sadly, they didn't have a system that worked with any consistency.  On the other hand, my hot spot could pick up a signal, which was slow often but at least I could get some work done.  And I finished 10 blog posts while I was here, which shows how far behind I was.  Still, that puts me in a far better position than I've had in months for winding up the month fairly close to the time the month winds itself up.

Once again, I had some trouble when I checked in here.  They told me they'd moved me to a site "that's better for me" because someone else had reserved the site I'd been promised (which I pointed out meant I had it first and they'd bumped me out of it, because if the other guy had been first, they wouldn't have given it to me in the first place).  And the new site wasn't better in any way - it was in the middle of a large party of campers who were meeting here for a weekend of fun, and it was a lot farther from the dog park and the bathrooms and the laundry room - not what they'd promised at all.  And I said so.  I had to be a little forceful about it, but they ended up putting me right where they'd said they would.

And I was glad I did when I realized almost nobody else was staying near us most of the time we were there (quieter), and when I saw how large that party of party-ers was.  They were in 5 or 6 campsites next to each other, each with a camper or RV, and each also with multiple tents (for the kids - lots of kids).  They had a ring of folding chairs gathered together that must have had at least 20 chairs there - you know, for visiting in the evenings and gathering for coffee in the mornings.  They also each had a lot of large flotation devices - inner tubes and things for floating on the river (there was river access near the campground).  I'm sure they all had a great time, but since I go to bed so early, it would have been an impossible situation for me.  So it was lucky the campground gave in and let me move.

And it turned out the dog park wasn't very nice.  They had a large trash can inside for people to deposit their poop bags.  But they seemed to be waiting until the trash bag inside it was full before changing it, and the smell was pretty bad.  I don't even want to think about how long it would take to fill a large trash can with little bags of dog poop.  Maybe it wouldn't matter in the winter, but this was the end of July and the smell wasn't contained by the lid on the trash can.  I couldn't take it for very long.  And I guess other dogs didn't like coming here because Dext never seemed to find much to sniff, and nobody else ever joined us.

And the campground had the laundry room closed for some reason I didn't quite understand.  So it turned out not to be so important to have a campsite near the dog park and the laundry room.  I think the campground folks here are basically well-intentioned but underfunded, and they just don't have the money or the staff to do the level of maintenance work that places like this require.  On the other hand, this is a nice setting with a serious abundance of trees, which helps overcome many drawbacks.

Speaking of heat, which I was a minute ago, I don't know what the actual temps got to, but the forecasts for while we were here were 105°, 106°, and 107°, in that order.  Fortunately all those trees helped keep it not as bad as it would have been, but it was still very hot each day.

I don't think the heat was why the smoke alarm went off one morning when I was toasting bread.  I don't cart around a regular toaster, of course, but I've learned it works just fine to use a Teflon skillet and turn the bread over frequently.  So on Saturday, the alarm went off when the door and 2 windows were wide open and the bread hadn't even started to brown.  I have no idea what makes it do that.  A smoke alarm is designed to alert a household of ordinary size, so in a 24' x 8' space it does a whole lot more than alert.  It scares me to pieces and I drop whatever I'm holding.  Someday I'll end up creating a major mess because of that, and I'll be pretty peeved.  But so far, lucky.

Speaking of appliances.  My frig is just plain not working right.  It goes from freezing the frig contents (frozen yogurt is only good when you plan for it to be) to melting the ice in the freezer.  And a couple of times it's turned itself off.  Just off.  For no reason that I can see.  I only find out it's off when I open the door and the light doesn't come on.  That's the biggest mistake I've made on this whole trip - to get rid of my original frig because I thought it might malfunction in the future, because I'd heard that they often did.  Big mistake.  Huge.

I finally got around to watching the copy of Minority Report that I'd bought in Olympia, and it had some kind of malfunction.  It looks perfect - no scratches or anything.  But when I was watching it it would freeze itself, as if I had paused it.  And when I tried to fast-forward through that section, it did it again a little farther on.  It's such a complex movie that I couldn't really miss very much of it, because then I couldn't follow the plot, so I finally just gave up and put in The Milagro Beanfield War.  That's a wonderful movie but it could hardly be more different from Minority Report, which I'd already gotten invested in, trying to figure out this different world.  Well, the world in Milagro is different from my regular world too, but the 2 movie worlds being so different was almost disorienting.  But I finally got settled back and relaxed (which you can't do with Minority Report), so that was good.  Too bad about not being able to see the movie, though.

This campground has a large pond that they say is for fishing.  I didn't see anybody fishing but the ducks.  There were a lot of ducks living there.  A party of 4 Mallards and a separate group of maybe 7 or 8 white and tan ducks, that I have no idea what kind they were.  They had a lot to say, though - I could hear them often from my campsite.

One time I was walking Dexter, and a guy stopped his pickup and rolled down his window and pointed at Dext and said, "That is a beautiful dog."  I never think of him as attractive, but I do think he's one of the sweetest-natured dogs I've ever had.

I was rereading my posts for the month to try to get ready to do my monthly summary, and I realized I mention going to the grocery store about every 2nd or 3rd day.  It's partly because I'm eating so much fresh fruit and salads and don't have much room to store stuff in, and don't want it to go bad before I can eat it.  And it's partly because Idaho doesn't have many large population centers - actually, it's mainly got the Boise area - so grocery stores don't always carry things I want - like oranges, for instance.  So I get what I can at one store, and then stop at another store a day or two later to try again, or to fill in the gaps of what I just ate.  And with the frig acting up, the salad greens don't last very long if I don't eat them right away.  Anyway, that's why I'm shopping so often.

Despite my nit-picking criticisms, Dext and I enjoyed walking around the campground because of the trees, and I was happy to have gotten almost caught up on my posts.