Camping where?!?! Yep, Royal City, WA. When my mother-in-law suggested it I honestly had no clue where Royal City was! Quick search and I realized it’s just about 20 minutes east from where you cross the Columbia River on I-90. Luckily the girls are pretty good in the car now, so we didn’t mind the drive. What a fun weekend it turned out to be!
Backstory: My in-laws have an R-Pod and every time we go visit them the girls love to play in their camper. We’d been talking about taking a camping trip together so when they suggested a weekend in May we said great! We didn’t have a specific location in mind, but since they live in North Idaho and we live in Seattle area we figured somewhere in-between would be ideal for both. We are both members of Harvest Host so decided to see if we could find a good Harvest Host location.
We stayed just one night at Seed Cupboard Nursery in Royal City. It was a great location away from any main roads with nice and level camping on wood chips with some larger trees between our campers and the main drive into the nursery. My in-laws got there a bit before us and grabbed us a late lunch from the grill. The food was great! That afternoon we roamed the nursery and bought a few flowers. The girls loved seeing some of the fun flowers and all the garden/decor items in the shop. However, the real highlight was spending time with Grandma & Grandpa! Honestly, it didn’t matter where we stayed the girls just wanted to play in the R-Pod and enjoy all the extra attention! There were many games of make believe (princess and family are the two current faves), story time and having very important jobs helping set up and take down camp! Jordan and I enjoyed putting the kiddos to bed in our van and then sitting in the R-Pod and catching up with his parents.
The following day we went to Potholes State Park (about 25 minute drive). The girls had a blast on the playground and we enjoyed relaxing under the shade of some big trees. We had a picnic lunch and then took our paddle boards for their maiden voyage. We LOVE the new paddle boards (ironically a Christmas gift from Jordan’s parents so fun they got to see the first voyage). The big girls even went swimming while we were out on the paddle boards while Grandma & Grandpa hung out with Ry! It would definitely be a place where we could have spent more time. We lucked out with amazing warm weather! It was 85 degrees on Saturday and 90 on Sunday so perfect to spend some time out on the water. I’m not sure how great swimming from the shore would be (people were swimming from shore), but the water is somewhat weedy and is definitely much clearer when you get a bit farther out from shore. There were several boats out fishing and more people seemed to be heading out on the water when we were packing up. Overall a fun couple days with Grandma and Grandpa!