Our Fourth Year with our “Beach Music” Scamp Trailer

It’s hard to believe that 2017 is our fourth camping season with our Scamp travel trailer!  It’s been so wonderful to step into Nature protected by our little fiberglass trailer.  Our camping trips consist of the fun of setting up camp, making our meals, and hiking and exploring the small towns we camp near.  Our favorite destination for the last four years has been Tolt-Macdonald Park in Carnation.  It’s a beautiful camping area of 575 acres right on the Tolt River.  There are hiking trails, a suspension bridge, views of the river and the mountains.  At night, it is dark and so quiet we have to take time to adjust to the lack of noise we have grown so accustomed to.

This year, the weather has been unusually hot all summer, and we have enjoyed the air-conditioning unit in the trailer.  Many hot afternoons were spent napping in our comfy bed, looking up through the skylight in our own back yard.  Polly the Dog has her little dog bed, and enjoys napping on the plank flooring that we installed two years ago.

Looking back, we remember seeing this little trailer along the side of the road, and our journey to bring her home.  We spent four years making her our own, and we enjoyed every minute of our adventure.  Now we are passing her on to her new owner, who has wonderful plans to hit the road and continue the adventure of exploring the world with this Scamp trailer.  Happy Trails!

 

A Night View of the Scamp

I love this photo taken at night with the turbulent sky and the half-light.

A Lazy Afternoon at Tolt-Macdonald

Flags and Chrome

high overhead cottonwood leaves rattle like rainfall
between pauses briefly noted

on a short trail down to the river
a single tall tree straight but for a single swerve mid-height
a pause a finger traces in a stream

in the sky a stack of thin white clouds like porcelain tea kettles
or a stack of turtles once thought to support the cosmos
a single pause joins thousands

in a bouquet of dahlias each an offering
of loops and swirls, tongues and fingers
beckoning not quite pulsing

between onrush and delay a stillness multiplies
watching while declining many offers
for this one everywhere the others are flags and chrome

A Little Scamp Humor

I saw this on Facebook, and knew it had to have its own blog post!  Enjoy!

August 9, 2016

We spend Day Two of our trip napping, hiking, driving to Carnation to see Remlinger’s Farm, and then to Fall City to check out the town and the antique stores.  We had another lovely dinner outdoors, and enjoyed the fire and watched the sun go down.  I hiked over the suspension bridge at the park, and saw artists sitting along the river, painting.  It’s a beautiful and quietly serene place.

Tolt River Looking North

Suspension Bridge

Painting along the Tolt River

 

Evening of August 8, 2016

The fire finally burned down, and we were happily tired after our exciting first day of camping.  I have new fairy lights this year, and they are strings of little starfish (in keeping with my ‘beach’ theme for “Beach Music”, our 16-foot Scamp trailer).

Polly had to peek out the screen door one more time before we shut and locked the door for the night.  It’s so quiet at night, camped just 30 feet from the Tolt River in Carnation, Washington.

Scamp has a great outdoor light by the door

Fairy lights and vintage Thermos

Guard Dog Polly

Evening of August 8, 2016

We love to open our favorite wines and kick back in our red canvas chairs and watch the fire.  Don is a master fire-builder!  Even Polly relaxes and enjoys the smoke and heat.  She keeps a close eye on other dogs in the campground!

Opening the wine for our quesadilla dinner

Polly checking everything out

Happy campers!

Setting Up Camp–August 8, 2016

We pulled into Campsite #7 around 2 p.m. in the afternoon.  It was a warm and overcast day, perfect for travel and setting up our campsite.  We are getting good at hooking and unhooking the trailer to the Chevy Colorado, and we had the Scamp “free” in just a few minutes.  The site was perfectly level (a first!), and we quickly pulled out the trailer awning, and set up the red canopy over the picnic table in case we had rain showers (we didn’t).

Don took a nap in our comfy double-bed at the rear of the Scamp (we leave the bed made up permanently, with its 4-inch memory foam and luxurious bedding), and use the side-dinette for eating and food prep.  I stayed outside and set up the rest of the campsite with all of my antique “bling”, a la “Glampers on the Loose”.  Everything looked so cozy!

Polly the Dog and I took a long walk down to the river, and made several loops around the park.  We both were tired when we got back, so we all got into the Scamp and took a nap.

We had a lovely dinner with our favorite wines, and made a campfire and relaxed the rest of the day.

Campsite #7 at Tolt-MacDonald Park

Cool Awning!

Our cool tablecloth and awning over the table

Scamping Trip #2 for 2016

We finally got through June and July, the end of my piano teaching year.  Now we can concentrate on spending the rest of the summer taking trips in the Scamp!

Since we hadn’t been out with the trailer since the week before Memorial Day, we had a little cleaning up to do, and I packed the Scamp with our food and toiletries,  clothing, and supplies such as wood, fire-starters, and new ‘fairy lights’.  You’ve got to bring the essentials!

We took off early the morning  of August 8, and enjoyed the lovely drive on Paradise Lake Road to Duvall, and finally, Carnation, our destination.

Packing up the Scamp

Read to go!

Concealed Carry–A Poem by Don Brandis

High overhead a twin-engine prop plane crawls

slow in this century but not in its era

riding a straight  line of its own making

pushing off steadily against the atmosphere

hardening it against a plane’s weight enough to carry it

to some place that isn’t there now

Our trailers gather in a theme park of portable persona

squarish or rounded, hulking with extensions and animal faces

or small as a covered pickup bed

a slight wind in the trees is only a bit louder than the river

we’ve come to reset our pace to

As we are what we eat so are we what we watch

pushing away other sights from our usual epidemic of distractions

to keep a single object as our attention

The river, still Eliot’s strong brown god

slides over itself swift and deep in its center channel

dawdling near the banks at half-speed

several versions of itself teasing each other like siblings

pushing off against each other to be relatively greater

a push-off as concealed clinging, a needed relation

Watching becomes what it watches

we wait not moving for our river elders to move for us

waiting like understudies until our rhythms slow to theirs

heart and breath and busyness of mind

two geese fly overhead honking directions we need not follow

unless listening with full attention is following

at first we see the river carrying us

the wind in the trees, the slow plane ranging

the imperceptible turning of the earth and its seasons

carry us and although we came to be carried

watching soon becomes mutual carry you say

no wonder I need a vacation

been carrying the whole damn world.

–Don Brandis, May 2016