Heading for Spokane, WA

I don't know what's going on with Blogger, but the ability to make comments has disappeared from my blog. Looks like you can only email them? What's even weirder is that both Eldy and I have Macs...and his screen at the bottom of the post doesn't even show all the same options/choices that my screen does! I'll check settings again, but if you'd like to make a comment, for now, I guess you have to click on the little email envelope button. And I thought I was lucky, not having any Blogger problems till now! This probably has something to do with "cookies" being enabled ("COOKIES? Did I hear you say cookies? Are you gonna make us some?" E. wants to know.) He likes my ginger spice molasses cookies, and unfortunately, I LOVE them. They don't last long with both of us attacking them! If the weather cools down a bit, I'll make us some....At any rate, I do not know how to fix this comment issue on a mac...I haven't changed a darn thing and all of a sudden things are not working right. The Blogger bug has gotten my computer! I'll do my best to try and figure it out.....

Gee, the hoopla is all over with...we've seen my family twice, traveled to Washington and back and now it's time to hit the road...we headed for a Thousand Trails park called Little Diamond, located in Newport, WA. Newport is practically on the border of Washington and Idaho. We still have four days coming to us for free on our zone membership, and then 3.00 a day after that should we stay longer. This is our last Thousand Trails park in our zone. Once we leave Washington, we're done using our northwest zone membership for now. So we're going to sit for about four days and try to not spend money! (HA! says E. THAT will be the day!...) Well, we're gonna try, that's all I can say...our budget took a hit with the travel back and forth from Arizona to Washington, but it was well WORTH IT!

Little Diamond clubhouse

45 acre fishing lake

We headed out this morning and covered a little over 240 miles today, landing in Newport, WA at The Thousand Trails Park called Little Diamond. Little Diamond is a jointly owned park with KOA campgrounds. Interesting! The clubhouse is really nice, there's a small pool here mainly for kids, there's a little frisbee 9 hole golf course with no "tee" cement pads to mark where to start, just baskets to throw at. There's a little lake where you can rent shortie kayaks, canoes or pedal boats, and fish, but the times and days are VERY restrictive for the boat rentals-- like 4:00-8:00 PM on Wednesdays. There are some activities planned for families like ice cream socials, candy hunts and kids' crafts.  There's a driving range, horseshoes, a ballfield, a playground, basketball court, wi-fi in the adult center, a laundromat and they have firepits at each site. Yay! Sparky LOVES campfires! However, there are NO sewer facilities in the park. There is a dump station and a "honey wagon" if you need them. In case there are any people new to RVing or thinking about it, or curious readers a honey wagon is the truck that comes and pumps out your self-contained septic tank on your rig. How they ever gave it the name "honey wagon" is beyond me! But I'll take a stab at it and say, "It's SWEET when you have a fresh tank to start filling again!" Boy, that's lame!
The park itself is beautiful...LOTS of woods, there are shade trees around the sites...there is a lot of acreage here. There are over 300 RV sites with KOA and Thousand Trails combined.

We have a corner site just inside the park...site 64. It was tough pulling in the 40 foot Tiffin to this corner spot. Eldy had to trust me as I guided him in past the water spigot and the electric box at the very front of the site, making it difficult to maneuver him in, but we did it.  Some of the Thousand Trails spots available to members at Little Diamond are very restrictive in length and width and the park is showing its age by not having easily accessible sites for larger rigs. The power and water hookups are in odd locations for sites. The park's sites are NOT spacious as a rule, but you can find them. Fifty amp hookups are rare, there are a few in the park but we didn't find one. We're settled in for the next few days. This park is back off the highway in the boonies! No really close town or store, we'll have to plan a little carefully on our errands. That's a good thing for us..No easy temptations for dining out. (Darn, says Sparky!) Sparky will be brushing up on her culinary skills. (Yay? says E.)...Spokane is about 45 miles away...so we're not sure if we'll be doing a day trip there but we might!

It's time to catch up on laundry and figure out where we are going to winter this year....and where we will plan our next few destinations after we leave here---Glacier National Park, the Grand Tetons, and Yellowstone.....that's probably what we will be doing tomorrow and the next few days unless the activity director (that's Sparky) comes up with something! See you later......