Hello from Western Washington

Janp · 09-02-2010, 12:49 AM

I have been visiting the forums here for quite awhile and decided it was time to say hello. I love this site.

I'm a happily married woman in my 40s. The kids are grown with the youngest being 18 years old. We live in Kitsap County, Washington, between Tacoma and Bremerton.

My husband and I camp often. Sometimes our trips are just the two of us, other times we camp with large groups of family. The one thing that never changes is we always camp with our dogs. We have three dogs that live to camp. Britt is a lab/pitbull mix. Pandora & Rebel are ancient longhaired miniature dachshunds. This summer we are also camping with two kittens, Muggle and Abigail. I would love to raise them to be campers, but this will only last as long as I feel it's safe to take them. As soon as I get nervous about their safety, they will be home with our other two older cats.

We owned a wonderful little Coleman popup camper for several years. We camped often in our popup and I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for that little camper. As time went on, we decided we really needed a sturdy hard sided travel trailer that requires a little less setup time. In June of 2009, we purchased our 2004 Salem by Forest River. We love our Salem and have had several wonderful trips.

Besides camping, our other hobby is geocaching. The two go perfectly together. We call it geocamping. Our dogs love it and it's great exercise for dog and human. Most of all, it's fun.

I also scrapbook and make greeting cards.

I don't know alot of the technical stuff about vehicles and hitches, but I love to exchange ideas for great camping meals and camping stories about our pets.

I love forward to visiting often and getting aquainted with other Forest River owners.

pondlady · 09-02-2010, 06:04 AM

Hi Jan, from another Jan. We love your part of the world and have traveled there dozens of times. Welcome to FRF. You will learn much here and have a good time doing it.

NWJeeper · 09-02-2010, 10:22 AM

Wow, yet another Washingtonian, we are gonna have to organize a FRF campout sometime, there is getting to be a lot more of us here.

So I take it you live near Gig Harbor then?

We too love to Geocache. It's an awesome way to see places and things in a new area you would not have known were there if not for the locals putting caches in these great spots. We found an awesome hike in Utah because of caching. My Username on GC is NWJeeper also and the wife is Wendoger. She has a "travel" series of caches along HWY 410 heading east out of Enumclaw where we live.

We have 2 mini Dachshunds and one old Bichon that go camping with us. Where do you like to go best?

Welcome to the forums.

Janp · 09-03-2010, 05:38 PM

Thank you so much for the warm welcome.

Jan-- I stopped by your pond site the other day. A fun and informative place.

NWJeeper--I live in Port Orchard, not far from Gig Harbor.

I agree with every word you said about geocaching. We often marvel about places we have visited only because we were led the by the GPS on a cache mission. I also like the hikes. One of my favorite places to cache is the Mt. St. Helens area. There is so much to see there. Many are earthcaches. The whole area is gorgeous. We recently camped at Seaquest State Park for ten days. We spend two days exploring St. Helens and made cache/sightseeing trips almost daily and I still feel like we missed alot. We want to go back again as soon as we can.

Our cache name is The Porters in Wa. We've been caching since Oct. 2006. We are a family of cachers. Other family includes: Swan inwa, Kiyojohn & Ryan98366.

Thank you again for the welcome.

I hope everyone has a great Labor Day weekend with fun plans. Be safe.

pondlady · 09-03-2010, 06:22 PM

Jan, glad you liked pondlady.com. I once built a pond on Bainbridge Island. It was a trade for staying at a fantastic house for a couple of weeks. We only spent one day at Mt St Helens when we were there last. I was there many times before it blew its top.
We are still working on geocaching. It's tough to do with limited mobility.

NWJeeper · 09-03-2010, 07:26 PM

JanP,

We stayed at Sequest earlier this year. Not a great park for a big motorhome like ours, the trees are just a bit too close and the interior roads a little tight for us. Ended up in the upper area where the CG host was as it had the most room. We haven't spent much time in the MSH area but would love to some time. I'll keep an eye out for your names on GC.com