Camper Adventure: Sunday, 24NOV13 – Monday, 25NOV13 Camping at Fort Stevens State Park- Oregon

We took our time relaxing around the house and getting things packed in the camper for our latest expedition. Work has kept me really busy.. so I was exhausted after last week. Traci thought it would be a good thing to get things around and relax some before getting out on the road. I’m so thankful for her!!

We had some fun getting ready for our trip. Here we are trying on winter hats at Cabelas before we got on the road! So Warm!!

We headed out on Sunday afternoon and made it to our first stop at Fort Stevens State Park. Little did we know, but it is the largest state park west of the Mississippi River. This place is great! There are close to 600 camping spots here.. and about half of them have full hook up with sewer at the spots. The rest of them all have water and 20,30 and 50Amp power. It is a great place to camp! The spots are all tucked into the woods. There are several different loops cut back into the thick evergreen woods that provide a lot of privacy for it being such a potentially busy campground. Lucky for us… it wasn’t so busy. We don’t really shy away from winter camping these days. We have heat… electric heat pump and propane backups… so we basically have a home on wheels. We pulled in, leveled up the camper, hooked up electric, hooked up the water… and we are set! Home sweet home.

We did something different this trip.. we brought bikes for everyone. It has been a great move! It’s a little challenging to figure out where / how to fit them into the truck, but it’s ok. We contemplated the rack for on the back of the camper, but that’s pricey and limits access to the rear tool compartment= no go. I have a thule rack on the top of my truck, but you would need a tall ladder to get the bikes down off the top of the truck.. plus with a family of 5… it would be another $700 in bike holders to put them up there… no thanks. We carefully fit them into the back of the truck on this trip.. for now that works. On a cross country move- we might want to try something different.. we will see.

We had a blast on our bikes today. We had to go buy the kids some new helmets. Turns out all kids under 16 have to wear helmets by law in Oregon… we haven’t ever been too strict about that, so we didn’t have the kids helmets with us. It’s ok though. As it turns out- all camping for Active Duty military on leave- is free in Oregon State Parks… so we’ll be getting all of our camping money back for this trip. How great is that??

So, back to biking… we did a nice loop together as a family… and wore out our Dog pretty good too. We rode through a lot of really nice paved trails that they have here in the park. We even rode down a nice access trail onto the beach. It was beautiful! The beach here is really flat. As a result, the difference between high tide and low tide is roughly 300’ of beach sand. With that difference, there was a really nice wide flat area on the beach that was really firm and smooth for us to ride our bikes on. It was awesome. We had a really great day together! There was even an old shipwreck on the beach for us to check out.. It was from 1909.. The Peter Iredale shipwreck. It was a great day.

We headed back to the camper and collected up some wood and built a campfire. It took a bit to get started but was a great fire. We played a game with the kids telling stories for them. They always ask Traci and I to tell them stories from when we were younger. So, we made a game of it. They had to come up with a topic that they wanted to hear a story about; then, Traci or I had to tell a story about the topic. It made for some good laughs around the fire.

We camped right next to a nice big playground (no accident there). I’m telling you, this place is ideal.

Tomorrow is Jacob’s birthday- so we are in for another exciting day!!..