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Emigrant Lake from the campground - Ashland, OR

Emigrant Lake from the campground
This is where I�m camped a few miles outside of Ashland, OR. This is quite a lovely town, though perhaps a little too self-consciously so for my taste - and besides, they don�t allow dogs in their city park. Jacob says, �Hiss, boo!� So do I.

Nevertheless, I had a good time yesterday exploring galleries and clothing boutiques, too many of which were too much to my taste – and too expensive for my pocketbook. It was fun, though, and I did buy myself a patchwork vest that I’m quite pleased with.

There are four new entries below, catching up.

I'm back!

I’m currently in Ashland, OR, parked outside the Suds ‘N Duds laundromat. Laundromats seem to be catching on to Wifi as a selling point – at least here in the States.

I’m sorry to have been so remiss in posting here. Connections were hard to find in Canada, and a good part of my time there I was moving around a lot so I didn’t take the time to locate possible Wifi Hotspots. My Verizon phone connections there were almost always Roaming, so even if my data cable hadn’t broken, I wouldn’t have wanted to use it to connect to the internet.

Anyway, I’m back, and will try to keep in touch fairly frequently. I’ve edited the entries below so that they show dates that approximate when I was actually there, even though I really sent them to the blog today. As you remember, you read the dates “uphill.” The last entry that most of you have read was Revelstoke on August 21; there’s a second Revelstoke entry that I’ve added today. It turns out that you'll have to go into the August and September archives for some of these posts.

I’m now caught up to about mid-October; I’ll try to do the rest in the next few days.

Wishbone Campground -- Columbia River Gorge

This is a delightfully funky campground on the WA side of the Columbia River, a few miles east of Hood River. Before I got this far east, I camped at Beacon Rock State Park (also on the WA side), not in the main campground, which is heavily forested and across the road from the river, but down on the river at the boat moorage where there are two campsites next to the river, and which is also much more open. Wishbone campground is set in scattered small oak trees, with lots of birds, especially Western Bluebirds.

Here's how I got to Deception Pass

From Quadra Island, I took the ferry back to Campbell River and drove south to the Living Forest campground outside of Nanaimo. I stayed there for a couple of nights, but it was pretty cold, so I decided to head south. I discovered that I could take an early morning BC ferry from Crofton, about 25 miles south, to Vesuvius on Saltspring Island. I explored the island for most of the day and then took another BC ferry in the late afternoon from Fulford Harbour to Swartz Bay at the northern tip of the peninsula that extends north from Victoria. I didn’t like Saltspring nearly as well as Quadra Island.

At Swartz Bay, I spent the night at McDonald Park, then drove a few miles south to Sidney, BC, where I caught the Washington State ferry to Friday Harbor on San Juan Island and connected to another WA State ferry to Orcas Island, where I camped at Moran State Park. I chose Orcas Island over San Juan because there’s no public campground on San Juan, but I think I would have liked San Juan better; what I saw of Friday Harbor during the hour wait for the ferry connection was nice (including a small group of peace demonstrators), and more desirable still, while in line for the ferry out of Orca, I met a couple who told me that there’s a place on San Juan Island that overlooks a strait where they saw lots of orcas.

From Orca Island, I took another WA ferry to Anacortes, and then drove to Deception Pass State Park.

Most of the campgrounds I stayed in on Vancouver and the other islands were set in deep forest. (The exeptions were Cluxewe [which, by the way, is pronouned like “cluck seaweed” without the “d”] and Heriot Bay. As the weather moved into fall, it was getting colder and darker, so I decided to go south to the Columbia River gorge.

Through the morning fog you can just barely make out the bridge over Deception Pass, between Fidalgo and Whidby Islands, at the eastern end of the Strait of San Juan de Fuca. I stayed at the state park here. Hint: click on the picture to make it bigger.

From Cluxewe, I went to Quadra Island via a 20 minute ferry ride from Campbell River. Quadra Island is lovely. I would have stayed there longer than 2 � days if the major campground, We Kai Tai, had been open. Both We Kai Tai and the Heriot Bay Inn campground, where I did stay, are on Heriot Bay, on the east side of the island. The views in the bay are wonderful, and the ones on the outer, eastern side of Rebecca Spit, which forms the southern part of Heriot Bay, are even better. The island is partly forested and partly small farms. There are a lot of artists living there. One of the things I especially liked about travelling in Canada was the support they give their artists. Signs directing you to artist studios are posted on the highway. I definitely preferred Quadra to Salt Spring Island, where I went next for a couple of days.

I took a kayak lesson while I was there and learned how to get in and out of the kayak, as well as how to paddle it. We then took a two hour trip around the bay.