First Day: Walmart of Course!

To go to the first post for this trip, click here.

 

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The first leg of the journey is on BC Ferries. Doreen has been wondering for the last day or two when we are going to get going? A few days ago she was wondering whether she wanted to go! Well, she seems pretty happy in this picture in the bowels of a BC ferry, on our way off Vancouver Island. We arrived at the ferry terminal 10 minutes before 1pm, and wow, we made it on. We were expecting to have to wait until 3pm!

 

The sign said 5 minute wait at the Peace Arch USA crossing, and it looked in this picture like that would be the case. But the short line went so slow! It ended up more like 25 minutes. The guy at the booth was so very meticulous; he even wanted to come inside and case things out in Miss Travelaire's insides. Looked in the Fridge, and when he saw it was almost empty, that settled the situation, and he waved us through.

 

Of course we would normally go across on the Coho ferry to Port Angeles. But, the Coho is always out of service for a couple of weeks in January for it's yearly refit. And of course, as usual, we are traveling right in the middle of those two weeks! This means traveling down through the Seattle/Tacoma mess. We expected the traffic wouldn't be too bad on a Saturday, but we were mistaken. Going past Everett, all six lanes were pretty full. We had stopped for a half hour north of there for a small power nap to ward off the sleepys, which used up our daylight. Then just going past Everett it stared to rain pretty hard, and with the night time, rain, and high speed heavy six lane traffic, Miss Travelaire started complaining about why we put her through this mess!

 

Anyway, the rain stopped once we were past Everett, and here we are at a favorite destination: Walmart, parked in amongst a bunch of big trucks, plus two or three other motorhomes. That's in Puyallup, WA: N47 09 36.7, W122 17 26.9. Actually, we are parked more in the Home Depot parking lot next door, and using their excellent WiFi. Puyallup is just sort of half way between Seattle and Tacoma, a little to the east of Interstate 5. We did a bit of grocery shopping in Walmart to stock that empty fridge. The GPS lady is pretty funny. She's Australian (of all the choices in our GPS, we've become attached to her because she speaks so clearly), and every time she refers to a Washington State road she says something like "turn off at Western Australia 345."