Scenic Beach State Park, day 1

Sunday, July 19, 2020

Off I go again! The State of Washington is continuing to allow campgrounds to remain open as long as we are responsible and careful. I promise to be responsible and careful, I promise! 🙂

This time I’m headed fairly close to home again (Friends Landing was close … this next campground is close too). Scenic Beach State Park is less than a 2-hour drive away from home. Here’s where I went …

The red dot is my home, at the very south end of Puget Sound. The yellow dot is Scenic Beach campground on the Kitsap Peninsula. For an RV/trailer, there are few options for access to this large peninsula … you can drive across either of the two bridges, or use the Washington State ferry boat system, or you can drive on a road across a small strip of land at the south end of the peninsula. Because of the limited accessibility, Kitsap Peninsula is quiet and lovely.

I could write an entire blog post or two or three or four about the Kitsap Peninsula, the Naval Shipyard in Bremerton, fishing in the area, boating in the area, native Nations in the area, golfing (some of the finest in Washington), some spectacular gardens and breweries and wineries and museums (even a live bug museum, how cool is that?), and other major shenanigans, but let me stick with just this camping trip for now.

After leaving home with Towhee the Trailer in tow (and Little Towhee sitting on the truck’s dashboard, monitoring my driving and the route), I arrived in short order at Scenic Beach campground. Oh, it was luscious.

 

It was a wonderful bright sunshine summer day, so the tops of the trees in these photographs look too bright, over-exposed in the photos. And yet the lower portions of the trees were in dark shade and so may appear a bit under-exposed in the photos. But, all in all, isn’t this campsite really gorgeous? I think so.

I backed the trailer in, leveled the trailer from side-to-side. All that took was just one thin board under one tire on one side of the trailer.

Then I unhitched the truck from the trailer. Then I leveled the trailer fore-and-aft using the tongue hitch to raise and lower the front of the trailer until the trailer was level front-to-back.

And then I opened the door of the trailer … and I was home!

As always, I then walked around the trailer and made sure everything was A-Ok.

Oops, it wasn’t A-OK. When I touched the bathroom window on the outside of the trailer, it moved … it shouldn’t move. From inside the trailer, I opened the window, then went back outside to investigate. You’ll see below that I can stick my finger in between the two panels of thermal glass. The seal between them had failed, had stopped sticking to both panes of glass, so the outer pane of glass was loose! It flapped in the wind, had there been any wind. It was still attached by the rubber (not metal) hinge at the top, but it was no longer being held against the other pane of glass, when the inner pane of glass was closed. And it was the inner pane of glass that was held closed by the mechanism, not the outer pane … bad design! With the trailer moving down the road, the outer pane of glass could flap outward on the hinge and hit something (or some one) or come entirely loose and fly off (there are reports of these windows doing that). Aack!

I needed a temporary fix until I could replace the entire window and I had the perfect thing with which to do that … duct tape. 🙂 Ok, more precisely it was Gorilla tape.

I wrapped both pieces of glass together, completely around both pieces of glass. That will hold them together (holding the outer panel of glass securely) until I can get back home and figure out a permanent repair/replacement. Don’t worry about the green “smudges” on the glass in the photo above … those are reflections of all of the lovely green trees and other foliage that surround my campsite.

These types of windows have a history of this problem, so I wasn’t surprised, though I was hoping that my trailer would bypass that bullet. Ah well, it’s all fixable.

So … next … because this campground does not supply electricty to campsites, I set up my remote “suitcase” solar panels in a spot of sunshine behind the trailer.

 

The panels sit on a large piece of cardboard. Maybe someday I’ll figure out a more elegant way to protect the bottom of the panels. But the cardboard slides on the ground very easily so it’s easy to move the remote panels around the campsite in order to follow the sun. It’s a good solution for now.

The cables from the panels are then plugged into the trailer.

Above … the cover system on the right for the remote solar cables was designed and purchased and re-configured and installed by me. The cover on the left is the vent cover that allows external/exterior off-gassing of the 12-volt battery bank. The vent cover on the left was installed by Escape Trailer employees. You might notice how tidy the sealant is around the cover on the right … vs. the sealant around cover on the left. I kinda like my job better, yes?

Ahhhh, the window is fixed for now … the roof solar on top of the trailer and the remote “suitcase” solar are set up and running nicely … the trailer is leveled … everything is now A-OK!

 

What a gorgeous place to call home.

This evening I’ll have a nice dinner, and then a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow … adventures. 🙂

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ADDENDUM: Can’t leave this blog post without just a wee bit more information about the Kitsap Peninsula.

Here’s a closeup map of “Kitsap”, as we here in Washington State call it. I have outlined the Kitsap Peninsula with a thin yellow line. Seattle and Tacoma and all that nonsense are off to the right, on the east side of Puget Sound. The impressive Olympic Mountains are off to the left, on the west side of Hood Canal (which is not a man-made canal, by the way, but a huge natural saltwater waterway).

Gosh, Kitsap Peninsula looks like a giant arrow head, indeed it does. My home is near the red dot at the bottom of the photo above. The yellow arrow points towards the narrow road access to “Kitsap” that I took with the trailer. The yellow dot is Scenic Beach State Park. That narrow width of land that the yellow arrow points to is just two miles wide, with only three roads entering the peninsula there. The peninsula is about 55 miles long, north to south, and about 27 miles wide at the widest point. Most of the 300,000 residents live in those four white areas … Bremerton, Silverdale, Port Orchard, and Gig Harbor. The rest of the peninsula is sparsely settled by humans so it is thickly covered by rich forests.

Notice how many islands there are around the peninsula … lots of them! In fact, while I was using my mouse cursor to draw that yellow line around the peninsula, I inadvertently included several islands … Fox, Bainbridge, Blake, Cutts, Raft, Pitt, Herron, Tanglewood, and likely a few more than that. There are dozens of other islands in Puget Sound. It’s a boater’s paradise.

There’s an interesting story about that narrow bit of land, that 2-mile wide section that connects the peninsula to the mainland. The story goes that for many years there was lots of talk about digging a canal … so the saltwater on the west side would connect with the saltwater on the east side, so boat traffic could travel through that 2-mile man-made canal. No problem eh? Oh yes, there was a problem. Tide (the vertical movement of water) … atmospheric pressure … current (the horizontal movement of water) … all of that and more meant that the water level on the west side of the narrow strip of land was many feet different in height than the water level on the east side of that narrow strip of land. If a canal were dug, then a set of locks, to lift and lower boats, would have to be built and staffed and maintained at great cost … AND it meant that the water in one section of Puget Sound would mix with the water in another section of Puget Sound and would subsequently forever affect fishing, particularly the exceptional, world-renowned shrimp fishing that currently exists on the west side of Kitsap (in Hood Canal) … it would be gone forever because the water temperature and salinity would be changed forever. Rebelion! Everyone said “no we won’t accept that! and we won’t pay for that!” And so, the story goes, the 2-mile canal was never dug. For those of us who wish to drive to “Kitsap”, that’s cool, no problem. But for those folks who wish to run their boat from one side of the peninsula to the other, oh my it’s a long trip up and around the north end of the peninsula and then back down the other side. As a former boater, however, I can tell you it’s a mighty beautiful trip. 🙂 There are all kinds of trade-offs in life, eh?

Ok, now for a little supper this evening and then a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow … day 2 of my adventures here on Kitsap Peninsula.