The Road to Seaside, Oregon Dispatch #1

Day 18 Wednesday June 15 2011 Dispatch #1

TECH STATS FOR THOSE WHO CARE
1823 miles as of Tuesday 6/14/11
Track us on the map...
1st load of fuel	67 gallons at $3.84	$256.00
2nd load of fuel	227 gallons at $4.27	$967.00
Totals:	294 gallons	$1,223.00

...On the road again...doot doot doot doot doot... the road again.... Fred and I are back on the road, this time looking forward to adventures in the Northwestern United States. We feel like seasoned travelers and are already half way through our third week of our third adventure.

Our days have been full and satisfying leaving no time to blog. On Sunday Fred worked from 9:00 am until 2:00 in the morning rising early on Monday to continue toiling on the QRZ website. Turns out a simple upgrade takes 29 hours to sort out. I stayed out of Fred's way by meeting all the dogs in the RV park, (I want a bus puppy) reading a book, feeding Fred occasionally and reviewing my initial blog entries from our first two trips. It seems I always start out with a mirror story. Well, here it is....

As we loaded the bus for the trip, The mirror fronts on the remaining two medicine cabinet doors came off in Fred's hands. They didn't break like the first one did for me so he removed the doors and glued and clamped the mirrors back on them. The mirrors on the wall behind our bed began falling off around El Paso on our last trip. While it was parked at our house, more fell off and broke; all except the one we had re-glued by the repair shop. That one won't budge. So, we have three strips of mirror and the rest is bare plywood except for the swirls of old glue that remain to flake off daily into the sheets. During our open house, most visitors just stared and said nothing. When we explained that the mirrors had fallen off, more than one person said they thought it was “unique artwork.” Unique in this case meant, “tasteless.”

We started our trip on Sunday, one day late, because I was sick and kept laying down every hour or so to whine. Our first night was spent in a parking lot behind a Dairy Queen with a few other trucks in Needles, CA. Fred worried about battery voltage which was down to 11.9V by morning, whatever that means. I was worried about skanks and hobos wanting to move in with us. Fred assured me that low voltage was a much bigger and more likely problem.

Our "home" in Needles, California

We headed toward Barstow on I-40, then across a state highway to Bakersfield, on to I-5. Ladies, I only mention the route because Fred insists that the men reading this will want to know. So there it is. We had a great meal at the famous Harris Ranch Steak House and Resort. The house generator failed on the bus while we were eating dinner. No restart. This is definitely a problem that even I understand. When you are not plugged in to a campground's power, the house generator runs to charge the house batteries which run the A/C, stove, etc. Remember....the battery voltage was already low. I've forgotten all about hobos and am concerned about not having coffee in the morning, a much bigger problem. We meet up with a bad accident on I-5 and are the lead vehicle waiting to advance. Imagine, if you can, Fred hanging outside the bus window taking pictures of crushed cars and trailers and paramedics working on bloodied bodies. I am mortified but Fred could not resist the urge to photograph the rescue helicopter close up. We stopped in Gustine, CA for the night in a small RV park. We barely fit in the spot and when the owner came by he said we could stay for free in honor of Memorial Day. Nice!

We spent the last day of May driving through rain in beautiful countryside with snow on the mountain peaks about 1000 feet above us. Fred already sent you the link to the youtube video of the drive. We stayed in a KOA in Mt. Shasta which I thought was gorgeous. When the sewer shot its contents at Fred and the WIFI didn't work, he was not as enthralled as I was. We continued our journey north on I-5 to Salem, OR and then took smaller roads to the coast. The narrow, winding road (OR-22) through dense rain forest lasted about 90 minutes, but seemed forever since it was late in our day and was harrowing at times. The shoulders were steep and Fred kept pulling over to let faster cars pass us. I assumed, each time, that he was driving us off the road to our death as he has been known to do. Ok, it was only once, we were in the jeep, and we didn't die. I must congratulate him on a fine piece of driving that day. We stayed in Tillamook that night, ate cheese, and waited for the sun to go down. We gave up at 9:00 pm, closed the shades and pretended it was dark. We needed a good night's sleep because Thursday, we would arrive at our first scheduled destination of Seaside, Oregon to experience SEA-PAC for the first time.

From the road

-robin