Wifi frustrations and travel through Washington State.

Hi Everyone.

My last entries on this blog were from Kamloops in Canada, and now we are staying at a trailer park near Newport, Oregon, on the Pacific Coast.
An ongoing challenge is to find reliable internet connection, and this is often hard to do when staying in state park camp grounds and other trailer parks with poor or no connectivity to the internet.  I apologise for this and hope you haven't stopped looking for y posts.

We spent a night in Vancouver, Canada - a huge sprawling city which takes hours to get around. We stayed in an inner city trailer park which proved a mistake.  It was really a collection of very poor quality homes (trailer homes) which are not mobile and we were one of only two RVs in for the night.  There was no internet connection.
We drove around the city but found it hard to get back over different bridges to where we entered the city and which are "toll bridges" but with no instructions on how to pay. The bill will no doubt come in the post.

The next day we headed south, back into the United States, and drove almost all the way to the southern part of the State of Washington.  This photo, taken from the RV window while driving on the motorway, is the Seattle Space Needle.  It was the first of this type of building in the world, and I believe the same company built the Auckland Sky Tower many years later.  The Sky Tower is much taller.

We stayed the night camped beside the Colomba River, about 50 miles (80 km) from the river mouth. We are in Washington State, and the other side of the river is Oregon. These huge ships were going up and down the river to the city of Portland, Oregon.  The docks are 68 miles up river from the ocean.  How far is that in kilometres??

The ship above, with Mrs McLeay in the picture, has just delivered hundreds of cars and is heading back to sea, while the ship with me in the photo is hauling some form of wheat or other crop for the markets.

This next photo will really only mean anything to some family members.  We had a surprise meeting with friends of ours whom we had not seen for 25 years!  Jim and Kathy Jo Estes lived with us in Ecuador in the 1980s.  Mrs McLeay and I taught their 4 children (all adults now!) in the little mission school there.  Jim was the hospital administrator and, after he went to a bigger job in the mission, I took over as the hospital administrator.  Mrs McLeay and Kathy Jo keep in touch through Facebook and made arrangements to meet for breakfast in Portland. They were heading north and we were heading south.  What a neat time!