Bay View State Park 11/8-13/2020

We arrived at this cute little Washington state park about 3:30pm on Sunday afternoon after a short. 80 mile drive north from our home. This park is situated on Padilla Bay about 8 miles west of Burlington, WA with campsites on the east side of the Bay View - Edison Road, and the beach on the west side of the roadway. The beach is easily reached via an underpass. There is a small community called Bay View and interestingly one of the houses has the address 12745 which was the address of the house in Seattle that my parents built and that we later owned.

Our cost is only $10/night for utilities as we have an offseason senior pass. Our camp setup process is pretty routine now and within an hour we were set up in campsite #30, The RV sites here are mostly a bit small except for those closest to the beach and near the camp host. We are parked next to the bathroom which is sparkling clean and heated and has showers. We also have a view of Padilla Bay out of our dining room window. Our truck is parked perpendicular to the trailer and we have a nice fire pit and a concrete picnic table which we pretty much ended up not using as the weather is so chilly.

Speaking of being chilly, the little electric heater I bought a month ago worked out very nicely. It saved us from having to run the propane furnace and we are nice and toasty. We did have an experience with our furnace not coming on. Using my Google Fu, I determined that the Sail Switch (this operates using air movement from the fan), needed to be tweaked a hair, Since then, it's operated just fine. We use it just to get the interior heat up quickly. Then we use the little electric heater to maintain the heat.

Apart from the beach access, there's not much to do here. This makes it a great place to just chill out and relax, read, etc. The park wasn't filled. On our first full day here, we ended up driving into Burlington and Mt. Vernon to get some propane and do some shopping at Costco. We tried to visit my youngest sister, but she was sleeping and didn't answer her doorbell. We did, however, drive back into Burlington on Tuesday and spent the afternoon with her. On Wednesday, we took a 60 mile drive north via Samish Island and Chuckanut Drive to to Bellingham and returned via back roads east of Lake Samish and Bow. This was the first time either of us had been to Samish Island; we have been on Chuckanut Drive multiple previous times. On our last full day at camp, we did a 3.1 mile round trip walk north to the Padilla Bay Interpretive Center (closed because of Covid-19). At the interpretive center there is access to the beach via a cool spiral staircase and also an upland nature trail. We did both of those. It was a bit blustery as a weather change is in progress but fortunately there was no rain.


Generally our evenings (after a dinner which we eat shortly after dark which is now 5pm) are spent streaming our favorite television shows from the previous day. Given how much camping we are doing I found out for the past month that I've used 48 of my 50 gigabyte data allowance (an "unlimited" T-Mobile seniors data plan). Streaming uses up to about 2 gigabytes of data per hour. We have discovered that the Murphy bed mattress is totally inadequate with a giant sag having developed in the middle. Fortunately we ordered a replacement memory foam mattress and it should be delivered next week. I'll do a post about how I install the new mattress into our existing Murphy bed. We'll also change out the dinette cushions as they are also totally inadequate with no support. Those are really the only two major things we've found wrong with the trailer after a year's ownership. 

We were also informed that the water is going to be shut off after we leave on Friday which is part of their normal winterization process. We experienced the same thing last year at Fort Worden State Park. This park, unfortunately, does not have a frost free water hydrant like most parks. 

In summary, this is a neat little state park with good beach access. It's clean and quiet (except for the occasional Growler jets from NAS Whidbey and the infrequent light airplanes in the pattern for landing at the nearby little Skagit County airport. It's a perfect place for a quiet, relaxing stay.

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