Heading south

We've started on our way south! Well... as far as Mount Vernon / Bow, Washington, anyway...

It was a relatively short drive today campground-to-campground (about 40 miles). We had checked diesel prices, and had verified the accessibility of the Costco lot and pumps for a big rig... so we decided to make a stop to fill up with diesel.

My sweetie pumping fuel. 130+ gallons later... The good news was that the pump let us put $150 on each card before it shut off, so we only had to pump 3 transactions.

We had sent a few packages to the post office in La Conner, WA General Delivery, so went on there after getting to the campground and getting parked. One of the packages had arrived, and it was the one I wanted to check on... I had placed an order and gotten shipment information, and then got an email that one of the items I had ordered was not available and I authorized a substitute item. But... it wasn't clear to me whether the substitute item would come in the same shipment or a different one, and the shipping tracking number I had been given was showing as not yet shipped, which was worrisome! When I emailed them to ask a question, they gave me another shipping number, but I still wasn't sure whether that was for the whole order, or the order without the substitute, or the substitute item only! Anyway... the package was there, and it had the whole order with the substitute item, so all is good. The other packages are due to arrive on Wednesday, so we will probably go back to pick them up then.

We had been planning to stay at the Thousand Trails in La Conner next, but... we had also read that the Verizon service is really bad there, so we decided to drive over to the Thousand Trails campground and drive around the park to see if we had any good signal at all. We have a cellular signal booster on the bus, and it definitely helps if there is a signal (it will generally boost about 2 bars - so 1 bar becomes 3, and 3 bars can get boosted to 5), but if there is no signal, it doesn't help. The fellow at the entrance station told me that the Verizon signal was bad, and there were only a couple of places where we might be able to get it... but, as we drove around the campground, we really didn't get anything that we thought would be usable.

We did, however, see two kitties on a picnic table at one of the sites... with a pretty view across Skagit Bay.

They looked like they might be welcoming... but there wasn't any Verizon signal near them either...

So... our plan at this point is to skip staying at La Conner and make our next hop further down the road, past Seattle... but I haven't started trying to make changes to reservations yet, so we'll see!

Our site at Mount Vernon Thousand Trails - it looks really spacious and private, doesn't it? However, there's a site to the right of the bus that is currently not occupied (the rig you can see off the driver's side is two sites over), and the trees are kind of hiding the rig on the passenger side of Miss Doozie.

You can kind of see the other rig beyond the Jeep. I think the fellow there has been letting his dog out unattended... there was a pretty large doggy land mine in the site, and I noticed a few minutes ago he had the dog out and it was on its way onto our site when he called it back. Oh well, inconsiderate people exist in all kinds of places!