Mt. St. Helens KOA

First I want wish my daughter Stephanie a big HAPPY BIRTHDAY.  Miss you honey...see you in a few months.  Hugs and Kisses and more HUGS!

Marcia and I were anxious to get out of the overcast skies, and the weather cooperated just like it should, because there much more "blue" to the sky as we pasted through Astoria than we had seen in 4 or more days.

In the bottom picture you can just make out the Astoria-Megler Bridge.  It is a steel girder continuous truss bridge that spans the Columbia River between Astoria, Oregon and Point Ellice near Megler, Washington.  It is the longest continuous truss bridge in North America at 21,474 feet in length, and opened to traffic in 1966 after taking four years to build, at cost of $24 million.

As you can see, they are currently doing some work on the bridge, but we did not pass over this bridge so I could not tell what they were doing.

The bridge we did go over was about 45 miles down the road.  It was the Lewis and Clark Bridge.  It is a cantilever bridge which goes over the Columbia River between Rainier, Oregon and Longview, Washington.  It was built in 1930 at a cost of $5.8 million.  It is 8,288 ft long.  There is one way traffic each way, and they were doing work on this bridge too, and the traffic was very congested going both ways.

By the time we got across the bridge, we were only about 15 miles from the KOA we were going to stay at.

This KOA, the Mt. St. Helens RV Park/KOA  is much, much smaller, and very quiet.  We have neighbors one each side of us, but there are few kids, and not a whole lot of people walking around, except for the occasional dog for Skruffy to bark at.  (She tries so hard to just growl....but she just has to let them know that she is "here too".

This is the look to our left (above).  There is a nice grassy area between our row and the row in front of us.  It is just the side-by-side where the sites are close together.  Below is the view to the right, before more RV's pulled in.  It is now 2/3 full.

Like most of the KOAs we have been in, there is an area for the dogs to run.  Here, it is just that, a dog run....no toys to play with, not that they played with them anyway.  But they do like the ability to run on the grass without being tied up to "me".

 They sure enjoy going around smelling....and doing what dogs love to do...do...(lol)

We are right along the highway which leads up to Spirit Lake, and we will get a great view of Mt. St. Helens.  We were encouraged by the workers when we checked in to see the two movies they offer at the visitor's center up by the lake.  So we will have 50 mile drive up, and a 50 mile drive back, which will take up our day on Tuesday.