After two amazing months traveling the entire Oregon Coast camping and volunteering, we headed back to the Land of Creature Comforts, a military base FamCamp…namely JBLM Holiday Park. Great name for a place to stay over the holidays! Plus, we stayed at an awesome Airbnb…what a treat!

Holiday Park

Avoiding the big ol’ Megler Bridge out of Astoria, we headed through Longview and on up to JBLM Holiday Park FamCamp, just south of Tacoma. This positioned us just 45 minutes away from our daughter, her fiance and their two awesome cats for the holidays!

The first part of our stay was a couple of weeks at Holiday Park where we lived the luxurious, glamping life that feels like a vacation: gated entry, tax-free shopping, easy access to food, cheap gas, fitness center, hiking trails, beauty salon…and more! Add to that a beautiful, forested campground and it’s the best of both worlds.

Touristy Stuff

Mushroom Tour

My daughter, Leslie, and I are fascinated by mushrooms visually and love, love, love eating them. We wanted to learn about foraging in a way that doesn’t result in death or gastrointestinal issues.

Recently, we spent one very rainy afternoon attending a hands-on, in-the-woods mushroom foraging class. It was amazing! And we were soaked to the bone. Leslie has lived in the PNW as an avid hiker and nature explorer for several years, and she said this may have been the wettest hike she’s ever been on. Yup, it was wet.

The class leader was very informative and funny. He taught us how to safely forage as novices: avoid little brown mushrooms (LBM’s), when in doubt, throw it out, and recognize the deadly duo…those were the most important points. More advanced foragers can get into the brown mushrooms more, but that requires more training! There was a lot more that we learned and it has motivated us to want to learn even more.

We successfully foraged our own oyster mushrooms, turkey tail and coral mushrooms. Then our leader gifted us a bag of winter chanterelles that he foraged the day before. Next we learned how to properly dry saute wild mushrooms.. I made THE BEST miso mushroom and tofu soup for lunch the next day!

McChord Air Museum

We have had the coolest experiences while visiting museums on military bases. This museum is tiny as military museums go, but the personal stories shared by the museum volunteer were priceless!

This volunteer has been working at this museum for many years. He was a crew chief in the Vietnam War and worked on some “secret squirrel” CIA stuff, as well. He even had a code name. But if I tell you the name, I’ll have to kill you.

He even had me, a horrible history student back in the day, hanging on his every word. And then he showed us how to actually use a slide rule on the actual slide rule he used during his service as a crew chief! Wow! He used words like logarithms, sine, cosine, factors and then I blacked out. Not really, but math is a mystery to me, and I was amazed at how much he had to know in his role. And he often had to use more than one slide rule at a time. OMG, that kind of brain power is beyond me.

We had a similar experience at another military museum a few years ago when we realized that the volunteer showing us a C-141 was showing us the actual plane on which he was the navigator. Literally THAT same, exact plane. He knew which screws were always loose and this crack and that noise.

We used to try to avoid museum volunteers, because we like to read the display cards and don’t want to be on their agenda. But no longer! These people are amazing resources and won’t be around forever!

Pizza and Bluegrass

It is always fun to enjoy live music with dinner. A pizza place (Stone Creek) in Olympia, WA has a bluegrass band called Briarfinch that performs monthly. The pizza is wood fired, and I truly appreciated the dairy-free cheese. The music was good (even without a banjo), and it made for a nice evening!

Too Hot! in the Hot Tub…

Greg found an awesome Airbnb with a hot tub on a lake about an hour from here for Christmas Eve and Christmas. It was a real treat! For most people this is probably not the best hot tub weather…rainy and 45 degrees….but we loved it! And we were given the gift of clear weather for a few hours right after we got there. Hooray!

There was room to park our camper safely along the road near the house. We decided to leave the slide in for the two days even though the cats would have less room inside. I think it was weird for them at first, but they adjusted, even though the trailer was leaning five inches! We usually level side-to-side since we have a slide. But this time, there was no need to bother with it. And we have a 12-volt fridge, so it doesn’t have to be level to operate properly like a propane fridge requires.

We were joined by Leslie and Anthony and had a great time cooking Christmas dinner, watching Christmas movies and hot tubbing. The simple pleasure of spending most of the day cooking with Leslie was the best gift for me. She is funny, smart and a really good cook! (Time with Greg and Anthony was nice, too, but…) We toiled in the kitchen for three or four hours and then soaked our sore feet and backs in the hot tub in the rain. Perfect!

Time in a big house with all the conveniences and space didn’t make us miss living in a “sticks and bricks” at all! In fact, we hated the bed and felt like we would feel wasteful if we owned all that space. A nice place to visit, but we wouldn’t want to live there.

Catio Corner

So OUR holiday time was weird. We were in the camper with sporadic visits from our humans while we were left lap-less and lit by a street light. We were practically feral! How do you catch mice, again? And cars were driving by right alongside us! And our house shrunk and the floor was slanted! For the first time ever Nemo threw up in his carrier when we left, right next to Leslie who was riding with us. Retribution. Ha!