RV Sabbatical Trip - Day 18 through Day 20

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Day 18 - Explore Astoria, travel to Seattle, WA

 Day 18's Pictures
In the morning we drove the RV down to the coast and walked around the beach for a while getting our shoes trashed. The water was icy cold. Jennifer found some sand dollars but no really "cool" shells. Then from there we drove towards Seattle along the Columbia river. We saw a sign for "Big Creek Fish Hatchery" and decided to stop. Once we found the darned place we took lots of really cool pictures. It turned out to be a Coho and Chinook salmon hatchery and scores of 10-15lb salmon were swimming up this teeny tiny creek and trying to get back into the fish hatchery where they were born!

They really do know where they were born and they really do swim back! If we'd wanted we could have put on our aqua socks and gone out into the stream and picked up a fish since there were so many--no hook needed! After that we cruised into Seattle to Jennifer's sister's house with few problems except traffic jams.

Originally we'd planned on heading over to Mount St. Helen's but given the time constraints we just bagged that part of the plan.

We hung around there for a while until James got home and then we went out to dinner at a reasonably fancy restaurant on the shores of Lake Washington. This time Jennifer ordered the same thing but it was not nearly as good as the previous night at the little hole-in-the-wall place near the coast. John ordered the standard tempura combination. We finally got back to their place and immediately headed out for our RV park. We got lost a few times but ended up rolling in about 10:00pm or so.

Day 19 - Explore Seattle, travel to Moses Lake, WA

 Day 19's Pictures
The next day Charlene and James took us down to the ocean pier in Seattle. But, Charlene had a slight fender-bender on the freeway with the kids and Jennifer on board. Nobody was hurt, but the kids cried. It took us about 1.5 hours to get everything straightened out. We went to this open air market where there were all kinds of things to purchase. Fresh fish, crabs, flowers, fruits, vegetables, jewelry, etc. After we walked around for a few hours we headed down for some lunch. We got this BBQ-baked salmon plate from a local Indian tribe that was doing it as a yearly event on the street. They must have given us a 10 oz filet of salmon along with lots of other goodies for $8.50! We could barely finish our plates. After we got back to their apartment John quickly changed the oil in the RV and we took off.
However, we got stuck in major traffic jams so we didn't actually leave the border of Seattle until almost 4:30.

We decided to see if the place where we were going to stay near the Grand Coulee Dam took late arrivals. The person on the phone said "sure" but then proceeded to tell us that because of the terrorist attack on New York, the Coulee Dam had been shut down to tourists until the end of this week (not opening until Monday at the very earliest). It was a darned good thing we called them because it would have been a 4 hour round trip fiasco to find out it was closed! So, we just found a place near Moses Lake to stay the night (we got in pretty late because of our extremely late departure from Seattle).

Day 20 - Travel to Missoula, MT

 Day 20's Pictures Day 21's Pictures

Today we drove 300 miles down to Missoula, MT. We stayed at another KOA Saturday evening and through Sunday. It was a lot of driving since Seattle trying to work our way down to Yellowstone park so John was very weary. Having the Sunday off to unwind and play with the kids at the park was just what the doctor ordered. We went over to the KOA's excuse for a petting zoo but Samuel wasn't that interested. Then we pushed both of the kids on the swings and that was a big hit.

We tried our best to keep up on the news about the terrorist attacks, but it wasn't always easy on the road. Sometimes parks wouldn't have cable and if they did it wasn't always the clearest reception.

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