Today was a travel day. We gathered up all our stuff, crammed it into the proper hiding places, hooked the Barbarian Invader to Charlotte and took off for the dump station. Soon, we were on our way through the nightmare which is Seattle metropolitan area traffic. I don’t like repeating myself but in the case of Washington traffic, I will make an exception.
Many scary hazards were encountered as we worked our way through the maniac-filled alleged roadway system in our quest to go south. After an hour or so of abject horror, we made it to a point on I-5 south of Olympia where the traffic calmed down to Bedlam-like activity. Driving anywhere in the Seattle metropolitan area, which extends from Olympia to north of Everett, is a crazed journey through abrupt maneuvers, disappearing lanes, poor merging and outright lunacy by local drivers. There are no straight or level roads here. This portion of the world is exquisitely beautiful but traveling through it in a vehicle is an exercise in terror.
An hour after passing south of Olympia, we turned east on US-12 toward Silver Lake, WA. There we pulled into a Thousand Trails facility known as Paradise. We have stayed here before, in 2014. It is a pleasant campground with full hookups and even has some spots where a satellite antenna can be directed to the source of TV signals. Unfortunately, the good reception and the sewer hookups are not in the same place so we settled for a sewer hookup and set up the Invader for a four-day stay.
The RV spots are pretty close together here. Only after getting fully set up did we realize our neighbor was a bit bizarre. He had three very friendly dogs but one of them seems to have something like emphysema. Today the neighbor was alone but he has set up a veritable conference room’s worth of chairs so we expect some family to join him soon.
To avoid too much hobnobbing with the neighbor, we decided to go eat at a restaurant, something we do rarely because we enjoy our own cooking better than most other folk’s efforts. I had seen ads both on the internet and in Paradise RV park’s brochure about a nearby restaurant called Spiffy’s. I believed Spiffy’s to be immune from being lousy since it had a name like Spiffy’s. Peggy, however, had found an equally close diner called Lisa’s that had 5 stars on Yelp. We took off for Lisa’s.
In the middle of the tiny community of Onalaska we found Lisa’s Diner in a very small building on the main drag. We were greeted inside by Lisa herself who holds court in the tiny dining room. As usual, I ordered chicken fried steak and Peggy got the fish and chips special. The chicken fried steak was pretty good (although not as good as Dean’s, in Clackamas, Oregon) and Peggy’s fish and chips were great. Two big pieces of fish are served with a salad and the best hush puppies I have ever had. All other hush puppies I have encountered in the past, even those served down in the South, are crummy compared to the units here. Lisa served them with honey and the combination was delicious. Prices were very reasonable.
After lunch, Peggy drove me on a long, hard to describe trip through many parts of the Washington countryside. I am unable to tell exactly where we went, other than a town called Winlock where they had lots of statues of chickens, since Peggy does a lot of random turns while exploring and I had eaten some special chocolate candy a bit earlier in the day. How astute Washington voters are; recreational marijuana use is perfectly legal here and I would be remiss if I failed to take advantage of their reasonable laws while visiting the state.
We took a few pix while driving wherever we went after lunch and you can see some of them if you click here