A note to our subscribers: We have upgraded to our own blog domain and can now be found at https://muddscape.com. No more ads! You were automatically re-registered as a follower, so keep on keepin’ on!

You will notice the nice jazzy new banner picture. This was taken Easter Day at Deception Pass State Park in Washington. We are here for a 3 day stay, and hoping that the weather, if not warm, will at least stay dry. Like they say, it’s Spring in Washington. If you don’t like the weather, wait 15 minutes.

We camped this time in the Forest Loop, above Cranberry Lake, which sits on the southern border of the park. Like almost all State Parks, Deception Pass is a wonderful woodland setting, with some large old growth trees and lots and lots of foliage. The sites are cut into the forest to give a good amount of privacy, and in the Forest Loop each has 30 and 50 Amp electric and water hookups, although our 50 amp power source had one pole dead. (For those not familiar with a 50 amp service, it is “two-sided” with parallel 120 volt poles, as opposed to a single 120 volt pole for 30 amp service). With one pole dead, we only got shore power on about ½ of our interior devices; unfortunately the fireplace/heater was one of them! We switched our plugin over to the 30 amp source, and all was fine.

The weather, while dry, was very windy, blowing 20-30 knots and gusting higher. It made for some pretty spectacular shoreline viewing, if you could stand the sand-blasting.

Our tryouts of all the goodies continued, and we quickly came to the conclusion that the TV that came with the rig, a 39” Furrion, was inadequate for the mission. It will be replaced by a Vizio 39” smart TV we found on eBay for $199. When we finally get the Camp Pro Wi-Fi Booster installed (stay tuned), they will be an excellent combo for us to stay in touch with all our evening favorites. The existing Furrion DVD/Stereo has Bluetooth, so we can stream all our music off our phones.

One drawback to Deception Pass is the close proximity of NAS Whidbey, the Navy air station where the Pacific Fleet of F-18 “Growlers” is based. These are the electronic warfare birds, and a lot of flight training and testing goes on. Sunday’s are usually OK, and Monday only had a pilot doing touch-and-go landings in a C17, the largest jet in the sky. Tuesday morning was a different story, and brought a 2 hour long blast of supersonic birds blasting over the campground about 1000 feet up, full afterburner. It’s thrilling, but one soon tires of it.

There are several trails within the campground and surrounding park, all connecting the south bridge to both campgrounds and North and West beaches. We easily got a 3 mile walk in every day and saw something new each time.

We even took a ride into Oak Harbor, 8 miles south, to scope out the local hardware store, a favorite of ours. This time was Country Hardware, right on State Route 20. We hit the small window of time where they had ducklings and chicks of many varieties for sale. Being city folk, we get a kick out of all the gear and goodies for sale for the farm. And they even had both pink and black BB guns for sale, for boys AND girls. Very progressive!

There aren’t too many bad spots in the park, and we really liked #34. We are coming back for Mother’s Day with kids and grandkids, and will stay in site 71, which is even more private and very deep. We’ll let you know how that goes!