Mid Week Getaway

The Priest Lake Thoroughfare .

Our homes for this week.

The key to retirement camping is to leave your home on Monday and return on Thursday. That is the best camping prior to the end of public school. After school lets out for the summer, it is every RVer for themselves!

We packed up and drove north out Hwy 41, through Rathdrum and Priest River to the end of Priest Lake where we met Daren and Marcy at the Beaver Creek Campground. The camp was virtually empty and so we got a good double site with a lot of sunshine hitting it.

Once we were all set up Daren and I took a hike up the trail towards Upper Priest Lake. We hiked about three miles total, just enough to get good and loose.

No bears around here!

Dinners were created and eaten, and we sat out and talked of past adventures while slapping a mosquito once in a while. We turned in early and slept like logs.

On Tuesday we packed a lunch and all four of us hiked up the trail all the way to Plowboy Campground about a three-mile hike from our rigs.  On the way in we met a couple of hikers and they told us that they had come upon a bear earlier in the morning on the trail. The bear had run away and so they were not bothered. We kept an eye out but saw nothing.  Our hike up to Upper Priest was near perfect and we enjoyed our lunch at Plowboy. The return hike was as nice as the walk in, with no interruptions or visitors.

Phoebe Tip across Upper Priest.

We had a good late afternoon drink and appetizer session then ate dinner and then went off to bed.

Wednesday saw Daren, Marcy and I hiking down the Priest Lakeshore Trail and checking out some of the nice boat-in campgrounds. We hiked to Teacher Bay and I went a little further down the trail to try and get a picture of Chimney Rock. After about a quarter mile I came upon Bottle Bay Campground and decided that I would not get the picture I wanted so I returned to Teacher Bay. We hiked back up the trail and met two mountain bikers, other than that we saw nothing unusual

As we entered the campground it started to rain. We sat out around the fire until about 6:00 PM when the intermittent sprinkles turned into a downpour. By the time we fixed dinner, the rain had socked us in, so Linda and I played Cribbage and washed up a bit. We straightened up the inside of the camper, brushed our teeth and went to bed.

The reward for hiking to Plowboy.

Goblin Knob and the Wigwams.