Well, here we are again in the Seattle/Tacoma area. After leaving Westport this morning we visited what is becoming our favorite Camping World, just north of Tacoma, and bought a new automatic hitch tongue jack (the thing that lifts the trailer onto the trailer hitch on Mary, our tow truck). Steve had installed our original automatic jack himself, so we thought it would be simple to just pop it in right there in the Camping World parking lot where the pavement is flat. You just drop it into the holes, bolt it down, install a wire to the power source, put in a couple of fuses, ground it somewhere and you're good to go.
Naturally, it turned out to be completely impossible. There are two, 2 1/4 inch holes on the A-frame of the trailer that the shaft of the device has to fit through and they are just a smidgen off plane - like 1/64 of an inch. So we took the old one off, discovered we can't fit the new one in, put the old one in again, jacked up the trailer a little with the emergency hand-crank, took the old one out, still couldn't fit the new one in, filed down the lip of the new one a little, and found it still wouldn't fit, and once we had tools all over the parking lot and were completely covered with grease, we made an appointment to have the damn thing installed tomorrow at Camping World. We can see that there is enough room for it, but the stupid thing just won't go through. If we had the right tools it would take 15 minutes. But we don't. So now we're in the KOA in Tacoma. Of course Camping World can't fit us in until tomorrow at 2:00 PM so we'll be here 2 nights. It's not all bad. We can do all our rainy-beach-weather laundry (lots of jeans, sweatshirts, dog-towels, etc) purge the trailer and truck of sand and mud and run Mary, who is filthy, through a car-wash.
Then we head for Mt. Rainier. The Tacoma Power Company has three campgrounds around reservoirs off Route 12 that sound terrific. So we're headed for Taidnapam, near Morton, WA. And we'll be close enough to see Mt. Rainier as day trips to avoid the curvy mountain roads with the trailer.
Jeanandsteve2010 itinerary update: we have decided to go to the Kiwanis Convention in Reno August 19-21. Yes. We'll be at a Kiwanis convention on my birthday. But the good news is that we hope to be able to spend a little time with daughter Carol in Incline Village either before or after the convention. We'll head south through the eastern Sierras on I-395 August 22 or 23 and be in Moorpark by the end of the week.
Hopefully some nice pictures next post, which might be after the Mt. Rainier trip. No internet at the power company facilities, I'm sure.
