Everybody Loves Raymond, Washington

After our four days on Long Beach Peninsula on the coast, we are heading in-land again. We're still on Highway 101, but instead of driving beside the Pacific Ocean, we are alongside the waters of Willapa Bay. Our campground is right on the Willapa River, and we are excited to have a site that is facing the water. We don't have any television signal here, so this view out the front windshield is our wide-screen source of entertainment. We watched an osprey fishing in the water. We watched a flock of geese flying overhead. We watched as the tides went from low tide that drained the water out of the bay . . .

to high tide. Notice the same post approximately in the middle of both pictures. It was definitely a muddier view from the windshield at low tide.

We watched as a flock of birds flew right over the top of our motor home in V-formation as the sun was setting. This is pretty riveting programming from our windshield view.

Besides the views of the water, we also have some pretty interesting parking lot views. We are parked behind the Prestige Boats factory. Here they build one-of-a-kind catamarans for customers that have a crazy budget for luxury.

Mark is standing in front of the two catamarans on the lot, and it's hard to describe how big they are. It takes this small company around two years to finish one of these boats. The owner showed us pictures of past projects and let us look in on the workers in the shop. It's like we are living at a factory tour!

The address of the campground is Raymond, Washington. Just like the television show, "Everybody loves Raymond." We drove into town to see the metal sculptures that are found on most of the street corners.

There are probably 100 different metal sculptures scattered around town and the surrounding grassy areas of Raymond.

Raymond also has a kayak dock, and we had beautiful weather for a trip on Willapa River.

It takes about 15 minutes to inflate our new Sea Eagle kayak. This up-graded boat is sturdier and tracks better than our old beloved Sea Eagle.

We have driven many miles on Highway 101, but today we would float under the Highway 101 bridge.

We are learning about tidal rivers, and since we are so close to Willapa Bay we are definitely seeing the effects of the tide. We studied the tide schedule and found that it was supposed to be high tide at 3:15 p.m. So we were on the water by 1:15, to take advantage of the tide's in-bound flow to push us up-river.

The Willapa River is wide, and surrounded by tall trees and grass. But there are narrower "trails" that allow kayakers to explore the inner inlets of the river.

As we went deeper inside, the trails got narrower.

Many times there were options to go multiple directions, so we had to choose which path we wanted to follow. But there are no maps and no trail signs. We wondered how easy it would be to get lost and continue to wander through this grass maze that went on and on.

We finally got to the end of our trail, and then had to remember where we turned left or right to get ourselves back out to the main body of the river. We had never played kayak maze before!

We made several trips into the grass mazes that lined the river. Denisa gets a font row seat to our kayak trips, but poor Mark gets the back seat view from the rudder position.

We continued up-river until high-tide, then we turned back towards home in hope that the changing tide would pull us back to our launch point. There are three factors at work in our kayak trip--the river current, the pull of the tide, and the wind. For all our planning around the first two, we would find that the wind would have the biggest effect on how hard we had to row today. We were making pretty good progress as long as we had the wind behind us.

Not long after we turned around, we saw two large birds flying low over the water in front of us. We were surprised to see it was a turkey vulture being chased by a bald eagle. We got a shot of the eagle soaring overhead as the vulture left in the opposite direction.

We were wishing for a closer look at the eagle, when we saw her turn and land in the biggest tree right beside the river. We snapped this picture of the eagle, with her mouth wide open communicating to something else in the tree. That's when we noticed the large nest in the bough of that big tree.

We were lucky enough to see that two heads popped up out of the nest. Now we could understand that the vulture must have gotten too close to the eagle babies and the nest.

Once things calmed down, the parent eagle took off again. We've seen many bald eagles lately, but it's still a thrill.

We had a great time on the river, and perfect weather to be outside all afternoon. Now we know why everybody (including us) loves Raymond.