Movin' to Mount Vernon

On Wednesday, we moved a little south to Mount Vernon (Washington, that is) to the Thousand Trails Mount Vernon. 

The trees are starting to turn here in the Pacific Northwest.

We got to the campground and found a site -- in this Thousand Trails, the sites are "FCFS" (First Come, First Served) or, you pick your own site. They give you a map and out you go. I asked if they had any suggestions on where available sites might be, and they did not. The lady helping me did share where the sites were that had more of an open sky view versus where the more wooded sites were. She also pointed out where the 50A sites were versus 30A. She didn't bother pointing out where the FHU (Full Hook-Up - including water, electric, and sewer) because there are so few and, as far as I have read online, they are given out based on people getting on a waitlist after they arrive at the park. We can survive without sewer hookup for at least two weeks (as we regularly do at the Kane County campgrounds near Chicago), and we can live on 30A, just needing to consider what appliances are already in use before we start heating anything in the kitchen. More on our site later in this post...

In the early evening, we took a walk around the campground -- it is a long narrow campground, running right alongside I-5. Dwayne and I had stayed here a couple of times before (2017 - https://trekincartwrights.blogspot.com/2017/09/heading-south.html and 2018 - https://trekincartwrights.blogspot.com/2018/08/a-few-more-pictures-from-victoria-and.html) -- I remembered it as being very wooded and with road noise from I-5 being prevalent when outside.

We had seen this rig at our previous campground - Thousand Trails Birch Bay. We think it may be a home-grown tiny house built on a goose-neck utility trailer. It looks well made.

Side note: it is pretty common to see the same rigs over and over again within the Thousand Trails (TT) system in a geographical area. There are stay limits (usually 3 weeks) so people may move from one TT campground to another and back, using their membership to stay for "free" for a long period of time.

Additional side note: many campgrounds have limitations on what kinds of rigs are allowed to park there, indicating that the RV must have a RVIA (RV Industry Association) sticker, meaning that it was built to RV industry standards. Schoolie conversions (school buses made into RVs) as well as other home-done bus conversions, and other home-built campers do not have RVIA stickers and are excluded from many public and private campgrounds.

While on our walk around the campground, we saw what looked like a silo sticking up from the trees, and thought that maybe this had been a farm at one time...

... as we came by it, we found that it is a water tank, we think for campground water usage.

We walked by (and into) a site that we had considered as we were selecting our site. It was 50A, and we thought it might have clear enough sky access for Starlink, but we decided against it because the entry getting into the site seemed very tight...

... I wanted to take a picture of the cover of the electrical box -- which isn't covering the box but rather is on the ground next to it. I can't decide if I think that they painted the leaf design on the cover, or if, when they were painting the darker green color, they just didn't move leaves out the way. Given that this is Thousand Trails, I would guess the latter... but maybe I am being uncharitable.

The site we ultimately chose was B48, 30A Electric/Water -- relatively clear sky view for Starlink, and, we thought it would be reasonably level (but it turns out that the front end had to be jacked up quite a bit).

I am going to try to start putting information into our blog posts about which sites we're gotten at different campgrounds -- particularly if we've chosen them for ourselves -- so I can look back if we go back to the same campground and know if there was a site that we liked, or one to avoid. B48 at TT Mount Vernon is an "okay" site, but if we didn't want Starlink, getting a 50A in the woods might have been preferable. If it was predicted to be sunny and hot during our stay, then getting 50A in the woods would definitely be preferred.