Prior to this trip, my memories from Crater Lake were from my honeymoon…exciting, magical, good strenuous hikes, amazing views, so much knowledge to soak in. I wondered what our experience would be like with two sweet little ones.
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After returning from our 2 week Olympic Peninsula trip we spent two weeks at home before we got the itch to get out camping again. We headed out to Mt Hood National Forest for what was supposed to be an off-grid-campsite scouting trip… but things didn’t go exactly as planned…
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I’m going to try to get in the habit of tallying our miles and expenses for after-trip summaries. This is a summary of our 2-week trip up and around the Olympic Peninsula in Washington last month.
Our two-week Olympic Peninsula trip was our longest trip yet in our Airstream travel trailer with the girls. The trip was long enough that we could start to get a bit more of a feel about what long term life on the road might be like with our young kids. Here’s a few things that we noticed.
A campground right on the beach! We arrived a little after noon on a Friday and weren’t sure what we would find left as far as scenic sites. As you may have guessed, all the beach view sites were taken. Something we noticed though was that the beach sites were pretty tiny. Of course there were a couple that had a little more space but as a whole you paid a price for your view. Not far away from the beach we found a lovely site with a hidden gem!
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We stayed in a rainforest for 3 nights though our girls didn’t believe it was a rainforest (it didn’t rain once while we were there). The campground was beautiful, and I think we got the best spot right next to the river. We enjoyed some short hikes in the mossy forest, playing by the river, and riding bikes around the campground.
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Sol Duc Campground was our first campsite in this trip where we didn’t have luxuries such as electricity and free dump and fill-up options for Wobbles (our camper). The draw to this particular campground was the Sol Duc Hot Springs close by. The campground was in a wonderful tall growth forest which was beautiful! This is what we had lacked thus far on this trip, the woods!
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Our GTRV camper van came fresh from Craigslist with two open cell lead acid deep cycle house batteries installed in a sealed battery box in the rear of the van (and vented to the outside). These two batteries provided roughly 100 amp-hours of capacity. In this phase of the electrical system upgrades, we’re going to replace these two batteries with lithium batteries, which will double the capacity to 200 amp-hours and reduce the weight from about 100 pounds to 60 pounds (that might not sound like much, but since we’re just about at the van’s weight capacity when we are towing Wobbles (the Airstream), every pound is important to us. We’ll also be adding a battery monitor (the same one we installed in the Airstream).
I know! We stayed at a KOA. I can only half believe I am admitting this to the public. Don’t get me wrong, KOA’s are not bad places to stay, however, I don’t really consider them “camping” spots either. They are full of luxuries that do not go under my definition of camping. At a KOA that Justin and I once stayed at we were forced to listen to a horrific Elvis impersonator painfully sing who-knows-what being blasted from loud speakers throughout the park. It was enough to make someone’s ears bleed. As you can guess, I was a bit skeptical having this on our list of stops but we were due for a clean load of laundry. Truth be told, it was a great stay!
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For the second stop on our 2 week Olympic Peninsula trip we drove 1 hour from Dosewallips State Park up to Fort Worden State Park in Port Townsend. Since it was a Monday, we didn’t make reservations and assumed we’d have no problem finding a site. As it turned out when we arrived there were only 2 sites available for the 4-day stretch that we wanted to stay (at-least at the more popular beach campground), so we considered ourselves lucky to have snagged one! We loved Fort Worden and the surrounding Port Townsend– there was so much to explore that we couldn’t see it all in our 4 day visit.
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