August, 2021
I like to stay put in one place for several days and nights when I’m camping. But after just one night in that perfectly quiet campsite, I had to hitch up and move. That campsite was available only one night because someone had reserved it for the next few nights, so I had to move. Luckily, there were three other campsites that had just become available that morning for the entire rest of the time that I would be here at Dungeness.
So I had to move, and so did two other trailers of friends of mine. And you know what happened? Our three trailers ended up together! Look at the photo below. I’m on the left … a new friend of mine with her Scamp trailer (also molded fiberglass, like Escape trailers are) is in the middle, and two other friends of mine are in their Escape trailer with their dark green truck on the right. We were a community, a neighborhood. 🙂 It was perfect.
What was also surprising and rather fun for me was that the campsite I was given for the rest of my stay here was #61, the exact same campsite that I had during my first camping trip here at Dungeness in 2020. I felt right at home. 🙂 I simply backed in and set up camp.
Out of respect for people’s privacy, I’m not going to show you photos of the group camp. It would be too difficult to obtain everyone’s permission for photos that could end up being posted online on my blog. I’ll just say there were a lot of women there, almost all of them in tents, all ages, all backgrounds. I enjoyed getting to know a few of the women and visiting with them during the day, but I also enjoyed quiet evenings and nights in my trailer in my campsite with my quiet friends. We always gathered in one of our three campsites for an evening visit and often shared our evening meal together.
We friends also walked around the greater Dungeness area and saw lots of other interesting things. I’ve been toying with buying a hard shell kayak, but I don’t want to rely on my strength to lift it onto the roof of the truck. I came across this setup below in another campsite here …
The owner appeared as I was taking these photos, said the kayak was one of the best on the market, and said the Thule Hullavator was extraordinarily easy to use taking almost no effort to lift or lower the kayak. Sounds like these items are moving up towards the top of my list.
And then we friends walked through some woods and then we walked through some fields all in the Dungeness Wildlife Refuge (always on designated paths). On our way back to the campground, we spotted a small plane flying around … and around … and around. I finally got a half-way decent photo of it.
It’s a single propeller bi-plane with a wing-walker on top. Later this same day, I asked a park employee about it. He told me the wingwalker and the pilot often practice here … after they get in the air, the wingwalker crawls out of the cockpit and up onto that upper wing. Of course, she’s tethered to the plane, but holy smokes. Just watching her scared me to pieces.
Here’s a link to a video of this very same plane taking a fellow up on his first wing walking experience right here at Dungeness. Truth-be-told, I had to stop watching the video and go do something else for a while, it just scared me too much. But I did come back to it and then I made it to time mark 8:00 where you can see Dungeness Spit below the plane.
And here’s a link to a great video of a professional wingwalker talking about the details of the hobby/sport. You’ll see how different it feels to watch an experienced, professional wingwalker. Still, I’m happy to be right down here on the ground.
And then we wandered back to the campground and our three neighborly campsites. The path took us through the woods right behind Towhee the Trailer, who also likes being right down here on the ground. I’m with her!
