Laundry is overdue, so that was the chore for this morning. It is so nice to have a lovely laundry room at the KOA which is close to our site; it was clean and reasonably priced. After our big waterfall day yesterday, we decided to take it much easier today.

Blackberry Beach

To get open skies for internet time, we drove to a nearby park that included Blackberry Beach and the easyCLIMB Trail. The trail is designed for beginners on mountain bikes, and several families with children came to use it while we were there. We used our internet connection to work on our blog, catch up on managing our finances, and to download a couple of shows to watch later this evening. The KOA has Wi-Fi, but it is slow and not meant for streaming. The entire park is very shady with trees (which is nice temperature wise, but doesn’t play well with our Starlink dish that needs to see satellites) .

Blackberry Beach is a small rocky spot on the shore and has a trail along a peninsula that provides more shoreline along the Columbia River. Why is it called Blackberry Beach? A walk along the trail makes that obvious. The berries are plentiful, but not yet ripe.

We did have to pay for parking here, but it was a dollar an hour, so not breaking the bank.

4th of July in the Park

We ventured back to the town of Cascades Locks to see the historical locks that were used from 1896-1938 to allow ships to avoid rapids on the Columbia River. When the Bonneville Dam was built, the rapids were no longer a problem. There are no gates and the water way is open for small boats to use.

The town’s Marine Park was set up with several food trucks and room for live music on the pavilion for the town’s Independence Day celebration. Tony was able to find a kettle corn stand. These will be the only sanctioned fireworks in this area tonight.