Rocky Point – Page 8 – The MoHo and Other Traveling Tales

It is time

Time for what you say? Time to write something again that isn’t related to the Alaska Trip. I know, I know, we got home on the 15th, and I think it now is the 27th of the month. The first week home, of course, was spent cleaning up and settling in. The second week home I had to go back to work and put in a good 40 hours or more trying to get everything to work properly again after a government software upgrade. Can you say “nightmare”? Finally, today, I managed to finish writing about the last few days of the trip. Somehow I just couldn’t make myself write about it, and each morning my ‘todo’ list had on it, “FINISH BLOG”. I am also not sure when I will be ready to change my header photo from that picture of Joe Lake on the Denali Highway. I am just not quite ready to let go yet.

At least I am finally caught up. At least I will be until tomorrow! The MoHo is lined up in front of the Tracker in the driveway tonight as we prepare for launching once more tomorrow morning. This launch is a short one, though, just a 2 night trip to Silver Falls State Park a few hours north of here. We will hike waterfalls, check out all the amazing dahlias in full bloom at the Swan Dahlia Farm festival, and sit by the campfire in the forest, this time under starry skies. We will cap off the trip on the way home with a much anticipated visit with Donna K and Russ from TRAVELS IN THERAPY. I’m tickled about getting a chance to meet our fellow Oregonian blog friends.

As I write, Irene is bearing down on the east coast, and Al has posted photos of the sad damage in the Ontario town of Goderich. So far, everyone I know who is east is doing OK. My daughter the trucker was in Connecticut, but traveled south and is now in Orlando. She managed to get out of the way of the storm. So far, all the RV’rs back in that part of the country seem to be hunkering down and doing OK, at least the ones who can blog about it. Out west all is calm, a few forest fires ignited last week in a thunderstorm are burning in Central Oregon, but everything around here is peaceful. Nights are in the 50’s, days are in the mid 80’s, humidity is low and skies are brilliantly blue. Oregon in the summer, when summer finally comes, is perfect.

Within a few days of getting settled back in, we had the kayaks out for a paddle. It was a gorgeous morning, just cool enough to need a long sleeved shirt out on the water for about half an hour before we started peeling off our shirts. The lake was so calm and there was a bit of smoke hanging over the mountains to the east, but I didn’t care. Snow was still on McLoughlin, and just a bit on the rim at Crater Lake and Mountain Lakes Wilderness. It felt good to be out in the boats in familiar water. The funny part about familiar water is that on Klamath Lake it is never the same twice.

The lake levels vary and sometimes the refuge can get pretty low, but on the morning we went out, the water was deep enough that we had no trouble paddling across what is called “The Wocus Cut”, a route that nearly did us in for a late fall paddle last year. At that time we were paddling in late evening and our paddles were scraping bottom. That was a rough ride that I don’t want to repeat! We traveled the beautiful canoe trail through the refuge and so enjoyed all the birds. I packed the camera along in the waterproof pelican case and took bird photos. Since I just bought a serious wide angle lens, battered though it may be, I won’t be getting a fancy bird lens any time soon, so I have to settle for the best I can do for now. I’ll let Judy take the fancy bird photos while mine will at least remind me of what was out there and how lovely they are.

The greenhouse has created a jungle of tomato plants and at last a few are getting ripe. You have no idea what an amazing feat that is at Rocky Point! I planted some more spinach and lettuce for the fall, and am enjoying having a little bit of veggie garden to putter in.The daylilies are blooming beautifully, and so far the deer have left us alone. I sprayed the Liquid Fence almost immediately, and I don’t know if it makes the difference or if there just aren’t any deer around this year.

The birds are back after a few days of filling the feeders, of course there aren’t nearly as many as there were in the spring before we left. It seems the finches and wrens are the most prolific right now, and I have seen several flickers and this morning a tanager graced my office window. For some reason the flicker was harassing the tanager as they both fluttered around in the sprinklers. Strange.

I am not a daily blogger, unless we are traveling of course. I often wonder about whether I need to even write anything at all when we aren’t moving. Then I realize that I want to share the birds, and the lake, and the daylilies, and what better place to do it than here? While on our Alaska trip we gained quite a few new followers, and I thank each of you for checking in and paying attention.

The rest of the photos for our kayak outing are linked here.

Day 41 August 15 Home to Rocky Point and the trip stats

I took not one single photo today. Not one. The 278 mile trip from our COE campground at LePage on the John Day River to our home in Rocky Point is a well traveled, well known route for us. Familiar. I suppose if I were in a different mood I could find something wonderful to photograph, there is beauty everywhere if you take the time to look and to see it. But on this day, Mo and I were what my daughter calls “barn sour”, we were heading home, fast, and not taking any time for anything except filling the MoHo in Madras. The sky was a bit cloudy in the morning and the heat of yesterday had cooled. The temperature was a balmy 60 degrees with a stiff breeze, and we were still in shorts.

We did take a bit of time at our favorite little funky café at the Crater Lake Junction of 138 and 97 for lunch. We started this trip with breakfast there and decided it would be fitting to try lunch on this final day of travel. The place is not only famous for breakfast, but has sandwiches, burgers, and real chocolate milk shakes that are renown. It’s not Western Oregon Cool Food, it’s Eastern Oregon Comfort Food. Great lunch!

Instead of driving the shortest route home across the beautiful Wood River Valley, we continued south toward Klamath Falls, with plans to stock up on home groceries at Fred Meyer, fill up the MoHo with gas, and dump at the free/donations accepted RV dump in Moore Park. It added a few miles to our trip, but we wanted to get home fully stocked and ready for the next go round.

I was feeling a bit low as we traveled, remembering all the magnificent beauty we had seen over the past weeks, and the dry dusty eastern side of Oregon between Biggs and Bend wasn’t doing much to cheer me up. However, once we began slipping into the Klamath Basin, and Klamath Lake opened out in front of me, the magic returned. I do love this place. The skies blessed me with clarity as well, no fires adding muddiness to the horizon, and the big white puffies accentuated the gorgeous blue. There were white pelicans cruising above the lake, and the east slope of the Cascades were reflected in the water. There is still snow on Mt McLoughlin, a very unusual sight for mid August. It has been a cool summer in the Cascades for sure.

As we got close to town I got all teary, and told Mo, “I have to see Melody”. She patiently negotiated the town traffic and parking lots with the MoHo and Tracker so I could run into Melody’s workplace for a serious daughter hug. It was great for me to see her, and I think that the hardest part of the trip was the inaccessibly by telephone while we were in Canada and in many parts of Alaska. Like so many busy families, we often keep in touch by telephone when we can’t get together, and I really missed that.

Once filled and loaded with groceries and dumped, we traveled around Klamath Lake to our home. It’s always just a little bit scary coming in after being gone for so long, especially since our home caretakers had to leave a bit before we arrived. The long driveway opened up to the cabin, the greenhouse, the gardens, the big house, all sitting there in the brilliant afternoon light, welcoming us back.

The deer still haven’t eaten the roses or the azaleas, even though I last sprayed Liquid Fence more than six weeks ago. The lawns were still green, the greenhouse intact with tomato plants to the ceiling. The cool summer has blessed me with a ton of green tomatoes, still, but hopefully they will ripen eventually. We spent the first afternoon just walking around a lot, unloading the necessities, and enjoying that great feeling of coming home.

It has taken us three days to finish the cleaning up process, but that is less time than I imagined when I looked at all the dirt on all the rigs. Everything has been washed, cleaned, rubbed, and scrubbed. The laundry is finished, the ironing is done, the only big job left for me is the final writing of the story. I somehow stopped when we got to Hinton and never got back to the blog. Soon.

I did figure out the stats of our trip:

We traveled 7,243 total miles in 41 days, 1,265 miles in the US getting to and from Canada, 3,991 miles in Canada, and only 1,987 miles actually in Alaska.

The total cost of the trip was $6,168, with $4,659 spent on fuel, with an average of 5.14 per gallon since so much of our mileage was in high priced Canada.

We stayed in campgrounds, either dry camping or with hookups 30 nights, with an average cost per night of $23. Our 11 nights boondocking brought that average down to $17 per night.

We spent very little on excursions, with the Discovery River Trip and the Columbia Glacier Trip costing just $360.

We didn’t eat out very often, and actually managed to cook from our grocery stash for a very large part of the trip.

Total cost per day including food, fuel, camping and all incidentals came to $150.44. 75 bucks per day per person is a darn good price for a fabulous, incredible, life time vacation like this one.

I took almost 6,000 photos and managed to delete some with about 3,200 left in my Picasa albums. Maybe I’ll delete some more, who knows, but not for some time yet. I’m having fun picking my ten favorites of each subject, just for fun.

Alaska Bound 4 Days and Counting

Four days. 4 DAYS. How many lists do I have? Certainly a lot more than 4! I am blogging about this why? I have no clue, other than the fact that it helps me to write things down. It helps me to remember. I love to journal about times past, to write the stories as they happen, to sometimes summarize the stories years later, or summarize the year past. I also like to write about what I am planning, because it’s so much fun to go back after the planned event and read what I thought it might be like.

Alaska. We are embarking on the “epic journey”. Although as I follow along as other RV’rs travel this road I am thinking maybe it is no longer quite so epic. The highway has been tamed a bit, it seems, so I am not really expecting epic. I expect long, I expect a bit of monotony, I expect frost heaves and gravel.

I remember once about 40 years ago I saw the Canadian Rockies west of Calgary for the first time. Of course I had seen photos, but nothing really prepares you for the magnificent mass of those mountains. The closer we got to them, the less I could breathe, with their weight lying heavy in my chest. Truly breathtaking. I expect moments like that one to come in completely unexpected places.

Recently there was a blog discussion about places folks wanted to go in their RV, and Alaska was the subject of many comments, both pro and con. I don’t know why I want to go to Alaska, but I realize that it isn’t so much that I want to go to Alaska, as it is that I want to do the road. I want to know that I “did” the road. I know many people who did it in the days when it was a wild place, when gas was hard to come by, and the animals were everywhere. Now, as I read the blogs, I see the standard tourist destinations come up, the photos and stories, each with a different perspective, but still very similar. Has the road been completely tamed? Will we be one in a long line of RV’s plying the highway?

We haven’t made any reservations, wanting instead to stay flexible in our route and our timing. We have “plans”, though, thoughts about where we want to stay, and places we want to see. For me, big on the list are the lakes along the Cassiar Highway and a soak at Llaird Hot Springs, and I want to put my kayak in as many BC lakes as possible. Sure, I want to see “the mountain”, but I am not attached to it, and reading about the crowds in Denali makes it a bit less exciting.

For me, it is about the journey, about the feeling of the road opening up ahead to vistas I have never seen. Flat and boring spruce, or magnificent take-your-breath-away mountains and turquoise lakes. Either way, it’s new, and it’s far. I like the idea of “far”. I like actually being on the road, the driving part, the riding part, the moving part where your body is vibrating with the engine, where the unknown road opens up ahead of you, with the extra benefit of a bathroom ten feet away, and the dog and cat with us.

Mo has been the one checking and rechecking the MoHo, making sure all is well. All wasn’t well with the house batteries, they were five years old and heating up. Scary. Especially with all the photos of RV fires that have been in the blogs lately. Last minute trip to Klamath to buy new batteries. So many folks have talked about batteries, but I couldn’t remember where to find the discussions, so Mo just did her own research and came up with two 12 volt Trojans, for some reason not sealed, but supposedly the best. Once a year maintenance. Then, while installing the batteries, she blew the big 110 amp fuse on the inverter. No clue what was wrong, but after fiddling for a long time, she made an appointment at Central Point RV.

With the holiday weekend coming up, we were a bit concerned, but she drove down early yesterday morning and was back in less than 6 hours with a new fuse, the generator problem solved, and the MoHo is mechanically ready to go. The technician said that the linkage to the carburetor in the generator was stuck, and that it needs to be run every few weeks to keep it clear. Mo thought the problem might have been related to the battery/inverter issue, so was glad that she had checked the generator before she went to Medford. They charged Mo 80 bucks for labor and 45 bucks (ouch) for the fuse. Hope we don’t blow that one very often. It was great to call the night before, get an appointment for the next morning, and have all the problems solved so quickly.

The other funny story is about the Protect-a Tow. We wanted to do business locally, and RV Trailer Warehouse in Medford finally agreed to order some in and promised to save one for us. The folks there weren’t too good about returning calls, or giving us any idea of when they might actually get one in, so Mo finally ordered one on the internet directly from the Canadian manufacturer. It was actually cheaper even with shipping that the local guy quoted. It was supposed to arrive within 8 to 12 business days via expedited mail. According to the tracking number, it was only processed through Toronto, Canada, on June 29th. When Mo went to Medford, she picked up a Protect-a-Tow from the folks who had ordered one and saved it for us. He said the return policy was good if we didn’t use the one we bought. We will hopefully return the one that shows up in the mail after we are long gone. Apologies to the local store, but if he had been more on top of keeping us informed, he would have had the sale, even if it WAS more expensive.

Our trip looks to be somewhere in the vicinity of 7,300 miles, just a little bit more than our cross country trip to Niagara last summer. Streets and Trips has been tweaked and shoved and waits patiently on the laptop. Lists like this: laptop, plug, external drive, baby laptop for Mo, plug, phone, plug, charger, camera, plug, charger, baby camera, plug, charger. GPS, GPS cord, tripods, Mo’s phone, plug, charger….GEEZ when will someone come up with a wireless charger and wireless power for all these toys. Oh yes, Kindle, and plug.

Another list: passports, animal certificates, copies of important documents saved to an external,cancel the TV, cancel the paper, cancel the mail. Mow the lawn and spray the Liquid Fence once last time. Make sure the house sitters have all the relevant phone numbers. Dog food. Cat food. Dog leash. Cat leash. Clothes for rain, clothes for being cold, clothes for being hot while still traveling through Oregon and Washington and maybe the first part of BC. How many shoes and what kind of shoes for each situation. Walking sticks. Dry bags for the kayaks. Find a dry bag for the camera in the kayak!

I finally resorted to paper lists, on those 5 inch hot pink lined Post It notes. One for each of the next four days, lined up in a row along the counter with the piles of stuff to go to the motorhome. More lists. Mo install the Protect-a Tow, blow the pine needles off all the roofs today. Make cookies. Make spaghetti sauce for freezer. And yes, “go to July Fourth Celebration in Klamath”. That one is on Monday, and thank goodness the parade and festivities don’t actually start until 5pm, so we have all day Monday to do “stuff”. Then Tuesday more stuff, and then finally Wednesday morning we are off.

Summer Solstice

The longest day of the year, the shortest night, the beginning of summer, time to celebrate. I love to celebrate the turning of the seasons, the changing of the light. I ring bells at Winter Solstice, with that wonderful feeling that winter light will be lengthening and summer returning. In the midst of the summer solstice is the thought that already the sun is turning away. Strange thought when summer has only just begun to warm the forest here and the trees are only now fully leafing out. The weather on this first day of summer did not disappoint us, with the hottest temperatures of the year so far. It was a gorgeous, crystal clear, beautiful, 80 plus degrees today, and I think I could see the tomatoes growing taller as I watched them.

We didn’t do a Solstice party, but we did have a bonfire last Sunday night. With the formal notification of the beginning of fire season, the last day for outdoor burning was June 20, so we invited the neighbors and built the last big outdoor fire of the season. Wes and Gayle live most of the time in Arizona, relocated there after many years in Oregon. Their place here is a lovely mountain home, just across the road from our house, and it’s nice when they return for the summer. They waited a bit this year because of our cool temperatures, so we were glad to see them come back in time for some neighborly visits before we leave for Alaska. Of course, it’s also nice that they are here since Wes is our resident summer lawn mowing person and house care-giver while we are gone. Wes has no grass to mow next door and seems to get a kick out of riding around on Mo’s mower. At least that is what he says. Personally, I just think he is a truly kind and generous neighbor! Gayle has treated us to many lovely meals, both here in Oregon and when we have visited them in Arizona in the winter.

When I invited them over, I said to come for hot dogs and a meal composed entirely of non-home-cooked food. Most of the time I love to cook, but lately with the extra work weeks taking most of my time, not so much. Our get-together was more about a chance to have a fire and enjoy the outdoors than it was about eating. We did have a good time, in spite of the store bought picnic, and the hot dogs roasted over the fire on a pitchfork hit the spot. I even found humongous marshmallows, big as a fist, labeled appropriately “campfire marshmallows”. I laughed so hard when we tried to eat them, they were HUGE and sticky and Gayle needed a fork and a plate to deal with just one.

In the past couple of weeks we had 7 cords of juniper delivered, huge rounds that Mo splits with the hydraulic splitter. It’s a hard, hot, and nasty job, and this time she has avoided huge divots in her legs created by flying chunks of wood with the soccer shin guards I got her for Christmas. Mo does all the splitting and we share the stacking chores. The loads come 3.5 cords at a time, and it took us three days to do the first load. Today we started on the second. The juniper is reasonably priced firewood, but it is full of huge knots, one of the reasons it looks so beautiful in woodcrafts. Juniper is encroaching on the native grasslands in Oregon, and the juniper eradication program is making an attempt to take it back a notch. The result is lots of big, dry juniper, needing a home for the winter. We are happy to oblige. I love it. It crackles and snaps, not a problem in our enclosed stove, and it burns hot and long. Mo loves it less, see previous entry regarding shin divots. Today she said something to the effect that we had enough juniper for a couple of years and next time we were going to order it split. She thinks the cost of split wood might not be as much as a busted splitter.

Mo fed our campfire with some of the huge rounds that were impossible to split to a reasonable size. I brought out the fancy Thermocell mosquito repellent device, along with the Off Clip-On device and tried to keep the biting monsters at bay. Wes was about ready to head back for Arizona, since even with the fire smoke and all the devices, the mosquitoes still were trying to have us for dinner. Must have something to do with the nice days warming up and everything is hatching beautifully.

The weekend of the 12th was the big graduation weekend in Klamath, and town was filled to the brim with celebrants, including my niece Savannah. My granddaughter Hillary will also be graduating in a few weeks from Klamath Union High School. Hard to believe that little baby girl is through with high school.

On Friday, the 10th, my friend Maryruth ( we are getting close to 50 years of friendship) and her husband, son, and daughter-in-law returned from an Albany graduation via Rocky Point. Mo and I turned over the big house bedrooms to them and spent the night in the guest cabin with Abby and Jeremy. It was a great way to be sure that the cat didn’t do his friendly cat thing and scratch at the guest room door till they opened it and purr all night on Maryruth’s chest. The cabin is a real treat, with morning sunlight and a warm little wood stove for the night chill.

I cooked a real supper for them, no store bought stuff this time, plank grilled salmon with lemon hollandaise, fresh asparagus, and salad from our greenhouse garden. I even made an old fashioned apple dump cake for dessert. Yum.

One of the great old traditions of Rocky Point are the amazing little steamboats that come here every year. Not your average big boat, but beautifully built little water crafts that are operated by true wood-fired steam engines. We heard the toots from the house and decided we definitely needed to run down to the lake to check them out. We also wanted to check out the newly remodeled resort. Rumor had it that there was a new bar adjacent to the existing restaurant, so we were happy to find out the rumor was correct. After walking along the dock to admire the steamboats, we enjoyed the beautiful view of Pelican Bay from the restaurant for just the price of a round of drinks. It’s wonderful to have friends stop in and visit. It’s also nice to have a special little place close by to have a nice dinner with a gorgeous view. Note to self: dinner at Rocky Point Resort soon!

…

Squirrels, deer, rabbits, and mosquitos

“Squirrels are nothing more than rats with fuzzy tails that can climb trees”. This comment was posted on Judy’s blog today and I laughed out loud. Of course, I also feel that way about deer. Cute in the forest, far, far away from where I live, but nothing more than big rats with voracious appetites in my yard.

Between the squirrels, the rabbits, the deer, the voles, and the mosquitoes, I often wonder about the joys of living in the forest surrounded by the lovely wildlife. Thanks to the mosquitoes we also have a healthy population of bats, good wildlife of course, but a bit less so when they buzz our heads in the evenings while lounging in the hot tub.

Oh yes, chipmunks as well, lots and lots of them. Just caught myself in a great big “sigh”. We have a very large hole in the ground along the back property line between the lawn and the forest that also has some kind of critter playing around that is much bigger than a squirrel and I think bigger than a rabbit. Abby’s favorite thing is racing out the door to the back yard in pursuit of whatever furry thing is out there. I have been hearing a lot of owls around lately, many voices of many different types, and am gleefully hoping that they are here because of all the other fuzzy critters that are around. Help!

Yesterday I sprayed the entire property boundaries with Liquid Fence, sworn to work by my friends in a California forest. Gerald said he used it all summer last year and the deer ate everything in sight in the neighbors yards and left his alone till he got lazy and quit spraying. It’s not a cheap endeavor, at 40 bucks for 2 applications, and directions that say “Apply weekly initially, then every three weeks after that”. I am applying weekly, with special attention to my roses, delphiniums, azaleas, and the baby flowering pear tree that the deer decimated last fall. Of course we have the greenhouse for the hidden veggies, “nahh na na NA na”! Other folks who have lived at Rocky Point for 30 plus years have learned to quit trying to grow things that the deer love to eat. I’m still not that smart. I WANT my roses and delphiniums, so I will continue to try to outsmart those pesky critters.

When it comes to the squirrels, I think I have won, at least so far. Of course I don’t have those flying stinkers that seem to be the problem at Al’s place in Ontario.

( If you want to read a great story about Al thinking about simulating one of those flying squirrels, be sure to check out his recent blog.)

I hung a thin wire cable between the trees in the forest, just beyond the grass, and so far the poor squirrels are completely stumped and reduced to foraging on the ground for what is scattered there by the yellow headed blackbirds, voracious eaters who like to shake all the seed out on the ground for entertainment. Lucky for me, the blackbirds all manage to head for the marsh by mid-summer and no longer eat me out of house and home.

This time of year I am filling all 8 feeders with four different kinds of food every single morning! So far the black headed grosbeaks outnumber most other birds, but we have a lot of purple finches, evening grosbeaks, stellar jays, juncos, and a very friendly white headed woodpecker. Geez! I am feeling not a little bit guilty about how devastating it might be to our little bird friends when we leave for 7 weeks in Alaska. Hopefully in July and August food will be so plentiful they will somehow manage. I don’t set up hummingbird feeders for just that reason. I have heard how dependent they get on the feeders and how important it is to be consistent if you start putting up food for them.

I have to thank everyone for the lovely comments on my last post photographs. I didn’t mention it because I was feeling a bit insecure, but that was the first day I was out with my new Nikon DSLR D5100. All those photos were my learning experience. I have discovered that my “learning experience” may go on for several years at least. I have stepped up from shooting everything with the “auto” setting, a perfectly acceptable way to take photos.

The water photo that folks seemed to like was an attempt at aperture priority slowing down the shutter so I could get that silky movement. This photo of the east side of the yard early in the morning is my first attempt at HDR. So much to learn, and so little time. Sigh. My knitting has been languishing on the shelf while I play with the camera and fight the critters and garden! I think I started the perfect easy little scarf back in Eureka with gorgeous hand dyed yarn, and am still barely half way through the skein. Maybe I’ll have a chance to knit when we are back on the road, although I would imagine it won’t be on those bumpy frost heaves on the Alaska Highway.