We arrived Friday at Larrabee State Park, on Chuckanut drive just south of Bellingham. We pulled in to T7, and levelled the trailer, put down the jacks and hooked it all up. Temperature was in the high 60s, and dry.

Saturday was work day... work to install the ham radio antenna and antenna wires. I had already installed the radio itself, just had the remaining work on the antenna connections. There's no better time to work on the trailer than when we're out someplace actually using it. Had to fix the awning support struts, as they are just a pressure type clamp and needed some extra support. Note the dual-band J-Pole antenna up at 12 feet... a beautiful sight for any Ham radio operator of course...


I managed to get the dual-band J-Pole antenna mounted on a $0.99 8' piece of wood that I was able to clamp on to the side of the trailer. At a buck a piece for the clamps, the entire mounting cost three bux. Cost effective for sure. The hardest part was mounting the SO-239 connector on the outside front of the trailer. Turns out that there is about 2" of insulation between the outer shell and the inner shell. Figuring out how to drill through it, and mount screws all the way from the outside to the inside, and then get the ground wire lug on a screw was a 2-hour entertainment in and of itself. But it did work, and the connector is now mounted and waterproofed.

There is a huge rock just across the street from the trailer, which makes it interesting to pull out of this spot...


but, it is a lot of fun for little boys to climb on of course.

We played in the playground...


Then we went down to the beach and had a good time in the sun (yes there was sun...)



There were beautiful views...







And a good time was had by all. By the way, all boys throw rocks into the water, now don't they?



It was a perfect 74 degrees Saturday, nice and warm. Sunday it cooled off a bit to 68, and Monday morning we got a fair amount of rain. We slept in Monday and by the time we got out to pack up the trailer, the rain had tapered off. We had only scattered drizzle for the way home fortunately.

We get 8 miles to the gallon on the beast, towing the enormous trailer. That's about 50c a mile for those of you doing the math... That's an effective range of exactly 200 miles on a $100 tank of gas... DANG.

Well, its expensive but a lot of fun to go camping... Next time it's off to Canada in June.