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Gig Harbor is located on a small inlet near the southwestern portion of the Puget Sound. We have previously visited the Seattle area on the eastern side of the sound but this was our first time on the west side in what’s known as the Olympic peninsula. This is a huge tract of land bounded by the Pacific Ocean on the west, the Strait of Juan de Fuca on the north and the Puget Sound on the east.
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We last visited Portland in June of 2014 as part of our road trip heading to Seattle to house sit. If you are interested, you can see the details of that visit here, here and here. This time we of course are in our motorhome, parked at the Columbia River RV Park. We repeated some experiences from our last time here and tried to see something new.
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We left our RV parked near Crowley Lake and made the drive to Lake Tahoe to visit with our friends Steve, Wende and Brady. It’s always fun to spend time with them but summer in Tahoe at their nice home is special.
Lake Tahoe is a truly beautiful place at any time but summer is especially nice with a pleasant climate, clean mountain air, the blue lake and the variety of colors in the snow topped mountains. We enjoyed lots of hiking, biking and took a ride up the Heavenly gondola and did a little hiking around the ski runs.
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I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that I’ve never visited this area during the summer. I used to come here frequently to ski since it is the nearest major ski area to Southern California, about a 5 hour drive. So this portion of our summer itinerary was built around a stop in Mammoth Lakes. We parked at the Mammoth Mountain RV Park.
Sadly, one of the major areas I wanted to visit here, Devil’s Postpile National Monument was closed to allow for repairs to the road that leads to it necessitated by winter storms. But there’s still plenty to see and do here.
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Continuing my journey west, I stopped in Willcox, AZ. While here I parked at the Magic Circle RV Park. Earlier in 2016, we stopped over in Benson, AZ, which is about 30 miles west of Willcox. From Benson we visited, Tombstone, Bisbee and Kartchner Caverns.
