The blog never caught up on our homeward trek, so here’s a few lines to cover that.
Thursday, March 21, found us just enjoying the day by running a couple of errands and soaking up some beach time. 
We have seen all kinds of weather on this trip, and today we got the hail and soft snow splats.
Friday morning we cleaned up the campers, stowed things away, and headed out, headed for Fort Vancouver to pick up a few stamps that were missing from our books.
As we headed out of the campground and across the Astoria bridge, we were picking up a few snow flakes. 
As we headed into the hills of Washington, it became flurries, and accumulating on the ground. The trees had a fresh coating, and it was very pretty. When we got back down to the Columbia River, we stopped at a little county park to check it out for future trips. It is very small, but right on the banks of the river. We talked with the host and she mentioned the pictures posted on a large board. She said all of the fish pictured had been caught last fall right from the banks there on the river. Barney and Fred were drooling – there were some pretty good size fish! We will make plans!
Continuing on, we turned off of I5 right before crossing into Oregon, and found the Visitor Center at Fort Vancouver.
The host there was very helpful in finding the stamps we needed, and pointed out the officer homes we wanted to visit for more stamps. 
The first one was the General Marshall House, and definitely showed that rank has privilege. Beautiful. 
There are quite a number of huge homes along the row, and we found it interesting that much of the space has been rented out to political official offices. 
We picked up the stamps for both the Marshall and the Grant house at the Marshall House. 
The General Grant house is now a restaurant, so we didn’t go in, and continued on to find the last one that had a stamp, the General Howard House. It too was pretty much all political offices. At least by renting out the office space the houses can be kept up and preserved.
It was getting hungry out, so we headed east on Mill Plain to find the Old Spaghetti Factory. As we suspected, the restaurant was closed between lunch and dinner hours, so we fixed sandwiches before heading on out.
We stopped to check out the camping area at Beacon Rock State Park, and the two standard spots were empty, but we didn’t feel like we wanted to pay $22 for a parking spot. No other amenities except a restroom building. We had kind of planned on going on to John Day Dam, and that we did, finding free parking spots there for overnight. The fish must have been running there because there were a lot of fisher people around.
Almost glassy smooth water in the river, and hundreds of completely still windmills were quite an unusual sight for us as we left the Columbia Gorge behind and made the trek over the Blues headed for home the next morning.
We will be back on the road before too long, but don’t know yet where we will be headed. Until then the rock pad will be put away!
