RV Travels With Huggy

There is a great miniature golf course at Ponderosa Falls RV Resort and my brother and I played all 18 holes there on Wednesday of last week. That was the day the temperature reached 84 degrees in Spokane in the afternoon and of course that was when we were out there playing golf. This RV park used to be in the Yogi Bear Campground chain and there are still some left overs from that era, including the golf course. The course has a man-made river that flows through it, starting with a water fall that is about 25 feet high. There are foot bridges that cross the river in a few places through the golf course, and at one point there is a rapids that drops probably about 6 feet.


Here my brother, L, has just taken a shot and you can see the ball moving toward the camera on the carpet. As you can see there are lights and the course is playable until about 22:30 hours at night. The RV you see in the background is ours- we were right beside the 15th hole. This is about the only place that I can say that I "live" on a golf course!


One thing about just playing alone this way is that you can kind of make up your own rules. We would sometimes have the ball end up against one of the bricks at the side of the course and we determined that it was proper to move the ball up to 6 inches out into the course so that you could hit it with the putter. Here L is doing just that.


This view is looking down over the rapids toward the 15th hole, with our RV in the background. I hadn't taken my camera along but, thanks to cell phones, I called Pat who carried it out to me, handing it across the fence. Otherwise I'd have had to walk all the way back to the start and to the RV, then back to where we were playing. Alright, it wasn't all that far, but it was pretty hot!

This RV park is beautiful, with many Ponderosa pine trees all through it. Central Washington State is more of a desert with very few plants other than sage brush but about 20 miles west of Spokane you start back into the trees. Here they are the long needle Ponderosa pine rather than the predominant fir, spruce and cedar trees found on the west (wetter) side of the Cascade Mountains.


Here is the rapids as seen from below, with the fairway of the 15th hole at the left side of the photo. Those lights turn off at 22:30 so we could go to sleep at night but the water runs all night. At first we wondered if being so close to the rapids would be a problem but it turned out to just be a pleasant background sound, kind of like being near the ocean where the surf is breaking on the beach.


As I said, this place used to be a Yogi Bear Campground and here is Yogi's little friend, BooBoo, atop about the 5th hole on a large piece of driftwood. The driftwood really isn't green but with strong sunlight reflecting up on the bottom of the driftwood arch, it does give it a very green color. You can also see the waterfall that marks the start of the river. Of course the hole you had to sink the ball into is under that arch BooBoo is on.


I didn't have my macro lens along on this trip but my standard 18 - 200mm zoom lens will focus fairly close, so I was able to get a pretty good photo of this dragon fly who had lighted on a fir tree branch. This is a bit of an enlargement from the original image as it tended to fly off if I tried to get any closer.

The park has a lot of other activities available including an indoor swimming pool, weights room, pickleball court, volleyball, plus some neat things for kids.

Here my Grand Daughter, K, is enjoying one of the paddle boats in the kids lagoon at the park. K wasn't there with us this year- this photo was taken in July, 2006.

I really enjoy visiting Ponderosa Falls RV Resort. As I said earlier, it is one of the parks owned by the group I belong to, K/M Resorts, and it is one of those that I have spent the most time in. This one and Ocean Mist on the Washington coast where Pat & I visited back in August.

I have a few other miscellaneous photos from the trip that I'll post at another time. Now that we are home I have the faster Internet connection and posting of photos seems to work much better. But I did get these six edited in Photoshop Elements and uploaded to my Flickr site from my laptop computer with the WiFi connection in the park. So it wasn't all a failure.

Labels: Family, Grandkids, Photos, RVing, Trips to see things