Our strange neighbor again has demonstrated his ability to remain mostly silent for the daylight hours, choosing to prove he is alive with sustained, obnoxious racket perpetrated in the wee hours of the morning. Plaintive wails of “Daddy! No! I don’t want a spanking” and yelling competitions during disputes with his relatives during the evening hours fill his nights. As I write this today, I can easily hear his screaming children and his dog’s tortured coughing and wheezing. We were hoping they would leave today at the end of the Labor Day weekend but they don’t appear to be going anywhere.
Today was a rest day. We didn’t do anything productive except showers, reading and casual eavesdropping on the neighbors. I did cook a nice breakfast for us but, other than that, nothing much happened.
We went and purchased diesel just before dark. When we returned, we noted our strange neighbor was preparing to take his noisy arguments, screaming kids and asthmatic dog home to wherever he lives. Maybe we will get some uninterrupted sleep tonight.

We started the day with a trip to Spiffy’s, a restaurant I had been interested in ever since reading about them on the net and in the Paradise RV’s blurb. I wanted to go there a couple days ago but we had gone instead to Lisa’s Diner in Onalaska where they have excellent food. Peggy graciously agreed to go to Spiffy’s and we started our exploration for today by driving the 15 miles to their parking lot.
My desire to eat here was diminished somewhat after we had their food. First, we encountered a truly frightening looking waitress who took our order. When she finally returned with the food, my disappointment began. The chicken fried steak looked strange and was nestled in a slurry of bone-colored gravy. It was crummy. Peggy had a scramble with red potatoes and sausage but the sausage turned out to be slices of weiners, maybe left over from last night’s kiddy special. My hash browns were nominal; they looked like they were derived from potatoes but they were strangely tasteless. Prices were pretty reasonable until one remembers that the price should reflect the food quality. In that case, the place was a gyp.
Today we were able to make a second visit in four days to Mount St. Helens, which produced some inconvenient and devastating effects when it erupted in May, 1980. Our trip to St. Helens a few days ago (see September 1 entry) took us along the north and east side of St. Helens and the now-devastated Spirit Lake. Despite the low clouds obscuring the top 3000 feet of the volcano, it was still a magnificent drive through the mountains to the numerous overlooks where you can gaze at this monstrous stratovolcano. It is a bit less strato- since 1980 because the eruption blew 1300 feet off the top.
Today we approached from the west, driving up the Toutle River. From the Johnston Ridge Volcanic Observatory, our furthest destination, amazing views of the collapsed northern face, the crater, Spirit Lake and the remarkable devastation remaining from the eruption can be seen. Massive areas that used to be canyons were filled with millions of tons of exploded rock and ash, completely revising the old terrain. Ash deposits hundreds of feet deep have been cut by glacial melt and rain flows, changing the layouts of entire rivers, including the Toutle. The Observatory, despite being many miles from the volcano, is surrounded with the effects of the scouring action of blasted rock passing over the landscape at 300 miles per hour for more than 3 minutes. The soil is gone from large sections of terrain, exposing the bedrock beneath. All the windfall timber leveled by the blast points in the same direction. Nothing of the old pre-eruption terrain exists anymore. It must have been a big wallop. Very few folks in the area survived the eruption.
After a few hours of enjoying the fantastic views of the volcano and surrounding, mixed-up country, we headed back to Silver Creek and our RV spot at Paradise. Not too much later, we left the trailer and headed north to South Sound Speedway for an evening of mishap-filled stock car racing. The evening was filled with much crazy driving and numerous crashes but, by the time we left at 10:30, nobody had been killed.
We got a few pix around the mountain and you can see some of them if you click here

Yesterday I noted that our neighbor could be a bit strange. Last night our suspicions were validated. We spent a good part of the morning carefully avoiding contact with this fellow camper who I wrote might be a bit weird in yesterday’s entry. The neighbor is almost silent during the daylight hours, skulking around his trailer and campsite appearing to be looking for something to do. He really comes into his own at night, electing to make lots of racket during the dark hours instead. Much door slamming, cooler rearrangement, outside furniture reorganization, heated discussions with family and periodic releases of his asthmatic, wheezing dog for coughing fits fill his nights. By 1:00 AM, I was considering drastic action to silence the cacophony but cooler heads prevailed and I was left with merely being amused at the amount of noise one camper could make during the park’s posted “quiet hours.”
Today we were obliged to go the laundromat here at Paradise RV, one of the onerous tasks we face while traveling. We took all our dirty clothes down to the facility and spent a couple hours renewing our wardrobe. It was the usual boring stuff but I am fortunate to have a better half who is very good at processing our duds quickly considering the bulk of the task. My handicap with proper clothes folding techniques is a source of disgusted amusement for my spouse.
We returned for dinner to Lisa’s, where we had lunch yesterday. Tonight the big draw was prime rib. We ordered two of the special and soon Lisa returned with two excellent pieces of beef which were served alongside almost football-sized baked potatoes (with butter, bacon, cheese, onions AND sour cream), a bowl of salad and garlic bread, all for $16.50 a head. It was excellent food. Lisa’s Diner in Onanlaska is definitely worth the trip.

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

At the south end of Washington State’s Cascades Range lies Mt. St. Helens, a recently taller stratovolcano, and the adjacent Spirit Lake. In 1980, St. Helens erupted, sending the entire northern face of this enormous mountain either up to around 60,000 feet or sideways and downhill into Spirit Lake. The shock wave from the blast thundered across the landscape on the mountain’s northeast side, blowing down a couple hundred square miles of timber. All the terrain facing the blast was scoured of life and pummeled with hot rock, sand and dust. Six to fourteen feet of ash fell from the enormous column of smoke and rock that spewed from the mountain for the next few days. 1300 feet of the top of the volcano was vaporized.
Millions of tons of rock and mud from the mountain and its almost instantly melted glaciers slid down the lower portion of the mountain with a large salient of goo sliding into the formerly scenic Spirit Lake. The mini-tsunamis created by the abrupt change in scenery sent lake waters up to scour the adjacent hillsides of timber and return the destroyed material into the lake. Bacteria worked its magic and the lake became a fetid swamp emitting carbon dioxide and other nasty gases into the environment, killing all life. A few years later, dilution from rains and glacial runoff allowed the lake to start recovering and by the time ten years had passed, the lake’s waters were again pristine. There is an enormous raft of decaying logs covering substantial amounts of the lake surface, bleached by more than 35 years of exposure.

We decided to go give this amazing place a sniff. We started east on Centralia Alpha Road until we hit WA-507 which continued mostly east. Eventually we encountered WA-12 at Morton. Again turning east we went to the village of Randal where we turned into the Gifford Pinchot National Forest on WA-131 to FR-25 to FR-99 into Mt. St. Helens National Monument. 10 or so miles down FR-99 brought us to the Windy Ridge Overlook. The volcano, or at least the bottom of it because today was cloudy, fills the horizon on one side and Spirit Lake fills the other. On the enormous slide between them, elk graze in the new growth that is just getting started on the surface of the slide. It is a colossal landscape.
The quality of the first 25 miles of road from our RV park to Randal is ordinary Washington highway; nominal. Once past Randal on 131, all bets are off. The road surface is terrible, even for Washington. Large sections of sunken grade try to pitch the unsuspecting into deep chasms along the road. Despite the dreadful road surfaces and widths, the scenery alongside WA-131, FR-25 and FR-99 is magnificent. Large expanses of timber blown down in 3 minutes of absolute shitstorm can be seen on some hillsides. All these partially rotted trees point the same direction. Flowers have regained their foothold here and are abundant and colorful. The extent of devastation caused by the eruption is truly impressive and plainly evident even though 36 years have elapsed since the blast.
FR-99 does not go through to anywhere so we were obliged to backtrack down the minefield-like road through the amazing scenery to get back to our park. The round trip is a bit over 100 miles from Chehalis and it is worth every minute required to get there and back.
We took a few photos during our drive through this gorgeous area. You can see some if you click here

Today we did absolutely nothing other than watch the news to see what was happening out in the real world and catch up on our reading. Nobody would be interested so I’ll cut it off here.

Today we did not have a stifling schedule so we started the day slowly with much lounging around and some breakfast. Eventually, however, we decided to do something and started by driving to get diesel for Charlotte. We checked Gas Buddy for the lowest prices and were informed that the lowest price in the area was in a small village nearby called Onalaska. As it turned out, Onalaska was not really nearby and they did not have the lowest prices. Somebody lied to Gas Buddy about the price of diesel. By the time we got there, our dashboard info panel indicated we had 35 miles worth of fuel in the tank and it was just too far to go to a real town to get cheaper fuel, if any.
From Onalaska, we went west to I-5 and turned north to the city of Centralia where Peggy desired some time in the Centralia Antiques Mall In Historic Downtown Centralia. After leaving the freeway at Exit 79, we zigzagged through ordinary residential areas and finally arrived in Historic Downtown Centralia. Centralia is sort of run down and the only historic aspect we noted was that the buildings were old. Very little urban renewal here.
We did note that the building which used to house downtown’s old Fox theater had a faded painted sign on one wall that said the place was where you needed to go to see the latest in talking pictures entertainment. We stopped not far away and wandered into the Centralia Antiques Mall which appeared to be an old downtown hotel repurposed into the basement antiques store and an upstairs breakfast and lunch restaurant called Berry Fields Cafe. The antiques mall was not a mall in the usual sense. It was a large subterranean basement with steep stairs descending from the street. Upon entering, we encountered a Hobbit-sized owner/operator that looked a lot like Renfield in the movie, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. He urged us to look around.
I’m not a big fan of antiques stores but Peggy is delighted to browse in such places. I always envisioned antiques stores as being mostly filled with antique furniture and appliances but this one was a bit different. It had all the stuff that folks have collected over their lives that they hope will gain value instead of being discarded. The store had lots of glass items, a few old crummy lamps, a small collection of functioning and broken illuminated tavern signs, a bit of china, many old grease and oil containers, broken watches and pocketknives and many old campaign buttons from mostly Republican candidates.
Peggy checked out quite a bit of the stuff but I was done pretty quickly because I was unable to find anything that interested me other than a pencil drawing and some stick art from Malaya. The treasures (according to Peggy) or junk (according to me) was pretty pricey so I lost interest quickly. The owner was selling old Zippo lighters for $65.
After a while, Peggy took pity on me and allowed us to depart. We did a bit of food shopping on the way home. We also stopped at a restaurant called Kit Carson. I ordered the chicken fried steak in accordance with my nationwide quest to locate the country’s best. It is not available here.
In Centralia, we shot a picture of a thing. We do not know what it is. You can see the thing if you click here

Today was a travel day. We gathered up our folding chairs, cleaned up the interior of the Barbarian Invader, disconnected from the shore utilities and departed Tall Chief RV in Fall City, WA. Our destination for today was Chehalis Thousand Trails near the town with the same name.
We had originally gone to Tall Chief in order to skirt the Seattle metropolitan area and its horrible traffic. Today we left Fall City, got on I-90 for a bit before turning south on I-5. Our efforts to avoid the hellish traffic were not entirely successful.
Seattle metro is unique in the number of absolute nightmares encountered by motorists passing over their highways. Many of the drivers have considerable difficulty keeping their cars in their twisting, narrow lanes. Lanes on the freeway just disappear with little or no notification to unsuspecting idiots, like us, and the resulting scramble created by the sudden loss of a third of the lanes is nearly catastrophic. Entry and exit ramps are installed on both the right and left side of the freeways although many of them are blocked or were never completed. Speed limits change more often than a fashion model changes snazzy clothes. The road surfaces were created by apparently dropping hot asphalt from passing aircraft followed by another aircraft dropping high explosive bombs. Signage is either confusing, incorrect or non-existent. Road construction barricades and delineators are everywhere but no construction appears to be in progress. WADOT vehicles with flashing amber lights clog the few, screwy lanes in their aimless search for imaginary work in progress. It is a mystifying and treacherous funhouse of potential death.
After much terror and confusion, we finally passed through Olympia on our way south and right away the number of lanes were reduced, making the already chaotic traffic squeeze down into two lanes and the speed of many motorists to be reduced to a mere crawl, perhaps due to perceived ring tones from their cell phone or hallucinations. Some folks just drive along on the freeway, 40 miles per hour slower than all the adjacent traffic while making obscene gestures at their fellow risk-takers who have sounded their horns in an attempt to encourage them to accelerate. Sometimes, a motorist in one of the two lanes would abruptly slow or stop creating a flurry of swerving, bright brake lights and much lane changing without the benefit of turn signals. On this stretch of highway, the speed limit for cars is 70 and for trucks it is 60 but the trucks around us were all going about 70 as they dodged from lane to lane in their attempts to avoid slow or stopped passenger vehicles. The cars we doing around 62, 25 or 6.
We finally made it to Chehalis and turned off the freeway for a nice 15 minute drive east on abandoned roads to the Chehalis RV entrance. It was wonderful to be off the metro highways. We found a nice spot in the campground, set up our stuff and climbed into the Barbarian Invader for some liquor.

We were slugs today. We did not go anywhere but that doesn’t mean we had a bad time. We were visited by relatives.
John, my oldest brother’s oldest child, and his delightful long-time companion, Maria, came to visit us from their residence in nearby Auburn, WA. They also brought along their enormous Tibetan Mastiff, Bruno. Bruno has a very nice disposition which is fortunate because he is as big as a Yeti and has teeth about the size you would find in a leopard.
John and Maria left their other Tibetan Mastiff, Bodie, at home because he has a surly disposition and cutting him loose near other mammals would mean certain death for any creatures unfortunate enough to be noticed by him. We saw Bodie in April and he tried to eat us. He seems to love his folks but hates everybody else.
Other than taking Bruno for a stroll around the campground at Tall Chief RV Resort, we did not go anywhere today. We can easily be boring and we got in some practice today.

We only had one tiny agenda item today so we looked forward to a good day of exploring. Our task for today was to acquire some more device charging cords because the phones and Kindles do not like some of our existing gear and were about to stage a walkout.
We drove what couldn’t have been more than 15 miles into what we think was Redmond to find a Radio Shack. The first 10 miles weren’t too bad but once we reached the outskirts of town, the conditions darkened considerably. Many traffic lights and local drivers performing bizarre maneuvers to access businesses slowed the abundance of cars to a near standstill. The road intersections are so skewed and frequent that you can see your destination but are seemingly prevented from driving there. We stopped at the Shack, got our stuff and then re-entered the fray for the trip back toward our RV park. After quite a bit longer than we anticipated, we were clearing the lights outside town and were on our way to Mount Ranier National Park.
We drove over many lumpy back roads through Cascade Range foothills before entering the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest on the north side of the park before entering Mount Rainier National Park’s northeast corner. Once in the park, the roadside timber changes to old growth forest and the terrain gets very dramatic with massive rock-faced hillsides surrounded by huge stands of Douglas Fir and cedar. Flowers are abundant. Soon, through the trees there are glimpses of Mount Rainier, a 14,400 foot high giant volcano covered with massive glaciers. It is surrounded by scores of adjacent jagged peaks. The terrain is mostly vertical. Waterfalls cascade down ravines that intersect the road and they are beautiful.
We continued our clockwise path around the east and south sides of the volcano and eventually pulled into the Paradise Valley, a heavily touristed and congested area with a ranger station, a visitor center and what should have been dramatic views of the mountain. While Peggy was circling the parking lot and I was busy getting the postcards we wanted from the visitor center, the mountain was obscured by clouds forming around the top. As we descended from Paradise and its huge transient population, we pulled over for an extended period of time when the clouds were periodically dissipated and the crest was plainly visible. Mount Rainier is a monster. The view from the south allows dazzled viewers to see the mountain without distracting ridges in the foreground. About the upper 6,000 feet of mountain are visible from this angle and it fills up the horizon.
We ultimately emerged from the park in the southwest corner. We did not realize we had traveled so far while gawking at this magnificent volcano and its surroundings. The Garmin indicated we only had 100 miles to travel before getting back to Tall Chief RV Park near Fall City. The scenery along the road around the south and east sides of this gorgeous peak is absolutely stunning and should qualify for anyone’s Bucket List.
Tips for any future travelers on this route:
1. Many Washington drivers have poor lane discipline and frequently approach on your side of the double yellow line. Make sure your horn works before departure.
2. The roads are not really suitable for larger RVs because they are narrow, pass through a few low tunnels, have many tight turns and are quite lumpy. Your silverware could end up on the floor.
We shot a few pictures along the way and you can see them if you click here