Enjoying Bay Center Day

©2013 Lydia Hinshaw

Downtown Bay Center

The Bay Center Day buffet

 BAY CENTER, WA -- Ordinarily, we avoid commercial campgrounds.
 Too often, we've wound up camped in a slot canyon between giant motor homes.  As we fix our morning coffee on our tiny camp stove, we are overlooked by folks sitting in the breakfast nooks of rolling palaces.
 The KOA here at Bay Center is different.  It's small, has many trees and no pavement.  There's no pool or hot tub, but there are amenities we like -- wi-fi and a reasonably priced laundromat. There's a 200-yard trail to a beach where campers like to go clamming.
 We've stayed here now three times in in the past year.  When we arrived Friday, we learned that we had lucked into a KOA's free-night weekend.  If we stayed Friday night, we could remain Saturday night for free.
 Sold.
 As a bonus, we would be able to attend Bay Center Day at the local park owned by the Chinook Tribe of Native Americans.  The location is less than a mile's walk.  A garage sale and a buffet lunch were on offer.
 And so we have caught up on laundry and Internet chores and enjoyed a day off the road.  The lunch buffet was a hit -- there was spaghetti with an assortment of tempting salads, plus even more tempting desserts, all home-made.  The cost was only $8, for all we could eat, and we ate way too much.
 We also took a walk around the village (pop. 276), home for more than 100 years to oystermen, joined more recently by the more affluent who have built vacation homes along the roads outside town. 
 Downtown consists of the post office and a community building which used to be a small supermarket.  On the ex-market's door is a sign referring customers in need of groceries to the KOA camp store, not a place with a large inventory.  It's 12 miles to a bigger selection in South Bend.
 The gas pump across the street ran dry long ago.  The price for regular is frozen at $1.38 per gallon.