We expected to get a nice 9:00 AM visit from the site honey wagon operator, but found our expectation unrealistic. Mount Vernon RV Resort has a unique but impractical honey wagon schedule. They charge the normal base price to suck out the nastiness as long as it is Tuesday or Thursday. They don’t work on holidays. However, if the RV owner wants to schedule service any other time, it is classified an “emergency” and the park charges twice the base rate.
We arrived on the 29th of June, 2017 which was a Thursday. Our tanks were empty and we did not need service. We have an older 5th wheel and our waste tanks are not large so we need to get at least the grey water discharged about every four days. Since our scheduled departure from Mount Vernon is July 7, we needed the welcome services of the honey wagon sometime during the stay. The next available dump date to get away cheaply was Tuesday, July 4, which coincidentally is a holiday and, as I said above, they don’t work.
We were pro-active. We wandered into the office last Friday and informed them that we were going to have an “emergency” in the near future, specifically the 3rd of July, and needed them to send over the stinky waste sucker next Monday. The girl at the desk was very nice and indicated she would stop by at 0900 on the 3rd. At 2:30 PM she finally arrived and saved us from our emergency. The girl’s name was Macy and she was very nice and apologized for her tardiness.
Waste issues being resolved, we had an opportunity to go exploring. This time we tried the country northeast of Bow, driving east out of the Bow area on Prairie Road, a stretch with virtually no prairie anywhere in sight. Instead there is emerald green pastures with waist-deep grass, large copses of hardwood trees offering shade adequate to fool the truck’s automatic headlights into illuminating, small lakes, big marshes, skinny roads with blasted vertical cuts through the stone alongside meandering waterways with names like Nooksack, Chuckanut and Samish. We think “chuckanut” might be Indian for “a device to hurl, toss or throw the mentally unstable or homeless person through air.”
We followed Prairie Road all the way to the town of Prairie which isn’t really there. From Prairie we turned north on WA-9 up to the Nooksack River where we turned east onto Mosquito Lake Road for a bit of really slow progress. We were mesmerized by the gorgeous countryside along this back road. There didn’t really seem to be a lake, though. There was a massive array of marshes possibly lending credence to the name since they looked like superb mosquito reproduction sites.
We emerged on WA-542 in the town of Welcome which was really a town. We continued west to I-5 for a short spin south to Lake Samish (not to be confused with Samish Island or Lake Sammamish) for a drive along the shoreline. Many clever Washingtonians have acquired irregularly-shaped parcels of land along the shores of the lake and have built numerous houses and cottages of unusual shapes and configurations due to the size constraints of their steep, bizarrely-shaped, postage stamp-sized land holdings. Second floor garages abound. A panorama of architectural styles can be seen along the shores of the deep-blue lake. There is no parking.
After Lake Samish, we wandered east across I-5 to US-99 where we turned south toward home. Our Garmin GPS had a fit of temporary insanity and turned us off 99, which runs very close to our current RV park, and took us down a squiggly road called Friday Creek. We may have just skirted our campground but the only road we saw possibly going to our site was old, unused, untried and gated. It could have gone to the property the RV park is on but we doubt it. I suspect our GPS is started to suffer from the effects of Alzheimer’s.
There’s a few pictures of today’s stuff if you click here