A day on the road

Trip Start May 06, 2010

137

Trip End Oct 14, 2010

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Where I stayed

Packwood Inn

Flag of United States Packwood, Washington
Sunday, June 20, 2010

I continued heading west toward Mt. Rainier National Park. Expedia and Priceline don't show many hotels in the area but I suspected that my GPS would know about more of them. I set my GPS for Yakima and after arriving there set it for Packwood so I was sure I would be routed on US Highway 12, which passes by the southern entrance to the park.

There were a couple hotels on Hwy 12 near Yakima. Then there's 30 miles or so of National Forest with very few services. Eventually, I reached Packwood. I checked my phone and found that I had no service in Packwood. I normally would get the phone numbers of hotels on my GPS and give them a call to check rates but that wasn't possible here. I had to resort to the old method of stopping and asking. There are only about four hotels in town, so I could have checked all of them, but I stopped after two.

My Toyota 4Runner came with a 90-day trial subscription to XM Radio, which I've been listening to on this trip. About a week ago, my friend, Bill, informed me that I received a subscription renewal form from them. I asked him to sign me up for another three months. Since then I've gone further north and I've found that I frequently can't receive the satellite signal. While I'm not surprised I lose the signal when I have a steep mountain to my south, it also seems that just large trees to my south block the signal. I'm getting concerned that in Alaska, the place I thought I'd really want it, may have even worse coverage. I'll find out in a couple weeks.

Tomorrow I'm going to visit Mt. Rainier National Park.