winter – Page 4 – The MoHo and Other Traveling Tales

Company in the cabin

One of the delights of my last few years as a soil survey project leader was the chance to make some really great friends. After six years in the Air Force, and lots of other experiences, Chris arrived in Sonora in early 2009, an energetic, incredibly brilliant, funny, sweet young man, ready and willing to learn to be a good soil mapper. It was fun teaching him all the inside stuff about field soil survey that I knew, and by the time I retired last year, I had not only a great employee, but a true friend.

Another delight I enjoy by sharing a home with Mo, is the pleasure of the guest cabin just next door to the big house. The cabin was the first thing on the property when Mo acquired it many years ago and is still a great little cozy spot to hang out. Complete with running water in the summer, a composting toilet, and a great wood stove, it’s a lot more fun for guests than hanging out on the living room sofa or in the guest room with the bath across the hall. Chris loves the snow and loves to come and visit so we welcomed him with his friend Karen for the weekend.

They arrived on Friday night armed with salmon that Chris smoked, along with all the ingredients for a great Smoked Salmon Chowder. Gotta love friends that come with dinner and Chris is a great cook. Many of the co-worker bar-b-que’s at my house in Jamestown were enhanced by some of Chris’s amazing grill roasted rosemary potatoes.

You know how cold it has been here, with all the deep snow, so Chris and Karen came prepared with snowshoes ready to tackle the deep high snows at Crater Lake. Ever heard of a January thaw? We got it big time this weekend with long warm hard rains on the deep snows, making a great big mess of everything. Even at 8,000 plus feet at Crater Lake the snow was mushy and almost impossible to slog through. Instead our friends spent more time in the big house with us, watching football, while Karen and I knitted, and playing killer Racehorse dominos.

On Sunday afternoon, Chris and Karen went ice skating at our local ice arena at the Running Y Resort. It was a first for Chris and the movies were truly funny. Mo made her famous waffles on Saturday, I cooked some sour cream apple pies and a Guiness Irish stew, and Chris and Karen made fat, juicy breakfast burritos for us on Sunday morning.

I noticed that a lot of the RV bloggers down in Desert Hot Springs are having great times catching up with fellow RV’rs and it sounds like a ton of fun. Having company now and then is a lovely reprieve from the cold, dreary days of winter, especially when the company is as wonderful as my friend Chris.

Love that wood heat…most of the time

we go from this: to this:

with this:

That pile on the porch is about what we use in two weeks keeping the house warm. This time we only made it to Monday, though, which means we burned half a cord of wood in about 10 days. Whew! Today it was about 10 when we got up and by the time we started to move wood it was all the way up to 18. I don’t believe it, though, because with that little soft breeze blowing, it felt like it was 10 again.

I love wood heat. It keeps me warmer than any other kind of heat, bar none. I am warmer in my house here than I ever am in California with the gas turned up as high as I can stand it. It cost me 400 bucks a month to heat my house in Jamestown during the winter and 500 a month to cool it in summer. Yeah it was older and not very well insulated, but still. When I am tromping up the stairs here, however, hauling the wood from the trailer up the steps to the back porch, huffing and puffing away, I wonder just how long we will manage to do this. Once back inside the warm house I have no doubts at all. Love it.

It’s been a quiet week since New Years. We have been staying home, feeding the fire, doing small house chores. I have been working on soils “stuff”, knitting, and finally getting around to reading “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”. The Kindle I ordered should be here sometime this week, and my first purchase will be the next book in the series.

I actually managed to get out my cross country skis, (the first time since I left Klamath to work in California in 2006) and shusshed around on the local roads a bit. Cross country skis on my feet aren’t made to go down hills. At least not any more. Guess I am going to have to practice a bit and get my balance back, but it was still fun.

Yesterday my daughter Melody brought her family out to Rocky Point to enjoy the deep snows and get in some great sledding. The skies were sunny, with temperatures that weren’t so cold you couldn’t have fun and we certainly did. Mo has an old sled that is everyone’s favorite, but the big green thingy I bought from Costco wasn’t a bad ride either. Kwankae, Melody’s exchange student from Thailand, had a great time as well, laughing in the snow. This is her first year for snow, since that is something you certainly don’t find in Thailand. I loved the chance to make a couple batches of peanut butter and chocolate chip cookies, knowing that I could send most of them home with the kids. We all drank hot chocolate and ate cookies and laughed about all the “air time” the kids got jumping over the moguls on the old roads around our house. Speaking of wood heat, after we all got back in the house, everyone really loved backing up to the wood stove to warm their buns!

In less than two weeks I’ll be flying to Florida with my eldest daughter to board a cruise ship to the Eastern Caribbean. Yippee! Wood heat is wonderful, but white beach sand heat is a whole lot better!

Do I REALLY want to be here?

I swore I didn’t need to post another photo of snow at Rocky Point, but I was wrong. After returning home from our desert travels on Monday afternoon, it was wonderful to be here. At first. The snow was manageable and home was so welcoming and comfortable once the fire was blazing in the woodstove and we warmed our achy bones with a dip in the hot tub under the night sky.

Yesterday, however, was a different story. The snow that came down on Tuesday was thick and soupy and it rained hard all night before turning to a deep fluffy powder by morning. We woke to a windy winter wonderland of snow laden firs, and another round of plowing, even though Mo spent a good part of the day before on the tractor.

Mo runs the tractor, I do the shoveling and we often share the snow blower duties. After two hours of shoveling a foot thick load of moderately heavy snow over a six inch dead weight of frozen slush, I was ready to move to Florida. Mo could barely push the stuff around with the tractor, and spent nearly three hours out there trying to get our road cleared down to Rocky Point Road. Once again, I was the grumpy one. Hmm, do I see a pattern here? I was so sick of lifting heavy snow, trying to toss it, only to have the entire load stick to the shovel and jerk me around, that I just said, “I quit. I am done. No more.” As luck would have it, I had managed to get the most of the snow out of the way enough that Mo could get the plow in the rest of the way.

Of course, I had to move my truck out of the way first, (we store Mo’s Lexus and the baby car in the garage) and it was frozen solid. I jerked and swore, and finally went inside to find the hair dryer to try to melt the frozen gunk all around the door seams. Eventually I got the door open, and the frozen stuff removed enough from the windows that I could see to back the truck out into a spot across the road so Mo could continue to plow.

I decided to ease my grumpiness with a soothing daytime dip into the hot tub, of course I had to break some icicles and sweep off a bunch of snow to get into it. Now remind me again, why do I love living in Rocky Point? Oh yeah, it’s really pretty in the summer and the winter snows are gorgeous.

…

By late afternoon, the snow finally stopped, and Mo came back from her foray to the mailbox all excited, (at least as excited as she usually gets which is pretty low key). She wanted to take me out to Rocky Point Road, which hadn’t been plowed at all during the entire day and looked wonderful. The baby car has studded tires and four wheel drive, so it was great fun running around the neighborhood and checking out all the deep drifts, the snow laden forest, and the unplowed roads. I jumped in and out of the car, snapping away, oohing and aahing at how beautiful the lake looked through the trees, how clean and white the snow looked, and decided that moving to Florida really wasn’t an option after all.

View out my window today

I have another follower! It’s so much fun to follow the wonderful conversations out there in blogland, especially those that have some link to the amazing world of RV life. Welcome! to Jeana, from the Seattle area. Right now she is flying off to Tucson to find some sunshine and after spending a very large chunk of my life in the northwest, I know how that feels!

Today I am working at home, a much nicer locale than the office in town with it’s dim, fluorescent lights. The cat is curled up in his favorite place while I am working. Can you tell that is a cat in there? I am in my pajamas, and at the moment it is lunchtime. Looking out my window I see huge pines and firs, and deep snow. Mo is again out trying to plow the deep, slushy stuff that is the result of warming temperatures. I’m having lunch, taking a break, and thinking about my upcoming trip to Florida. I am partly excited, and partly not so much. Flying isn’t what it used to be, and from what I have been reading lately, might be even less fun during this holiday season. Cheap fares seem to require several flight legs, and the old days where I could jump on a plane in Spokane and fly directly to Orlando are long gone. This time I will board in Medford just after 8am, and after three jumps, will land in Orlando at 10 PM. Ocala is still a good 90 minute drive from Orlando, so I will probably be lucky to get in at midnight after picking up the rental car. The trip home a week later will be even worse, with stops in Cincinnati and Salt Lake before finally arriving at Medford, again just before midnight. Big Sigh, the price of a cheap ticket.

Did you know that it’s not really ‘cool’ to love Florida if you are a Westerner? I think many of us out west think of Florida as that strange, flat place epitomized in Miami Vice, full of fast cars, fast boats, pastel high rises, and way too many people. I used to think that way, of course I had no experience with the state at all. In 2000, a very dear friend of mine went back to Florida to care for her elderly parents. During the first few years after she left, I traveled to Ocala several times to help her deal with all the logistics required, and I found out that Florida wasn’t anything like I imagined. I fell in love. I fell in love with skies that swirl in circles with big puffy white clouds, with rain that fell so hard you had to pull over to the roadside and then blink into brilliant hot sunlight minutes later. I fell in love with north central Florida, that world between the Emerald Coast and Gainesville, south to Ocala, on the limestone backbone of the state. I fell in love with the most gorgeous horse country in the US, with miles of black rail fences and grand estates. I fell in love with palms and oaks and pines in the same forest, with palmetto understory filled with snakes and alligators, with giant grasshoppers that looked like some sort of Technicolor cartoon, with springs so crystal clear you can see the gar 200 feet down among the swirling eelgrass. Yes, parts of Florida are horrendous, but the north-central limestone spine and the magical isolated northeast coast from Apalachicola to St Petersburg are an amazing wonderland of complex wilderness and beauty.

More storms are predicted here for the next few days, although it seems that it will bring lots of wind and rain to much of the area, and maybe not so much snow as we have had recently. The skies are becoming more gray by the minute, and the thought of velvet, warm Florida air is so seductive. Who knows, some of the bloggers that I follow down in the south say things aren’t really that warm and velvety right now, and my friend Bel sent a little text note saying, “Bring mittens”. Hmmm. I’m trying the carry-on only way of traveling this time as well, so we will see how that works out! If it’s really that cold, I think I will have to wear lots of layers on the plane. That could get interesting at the security checks. How many jackets and shirts, and scarves can I take off quickly while I am trying to get my shoes off and my computer out of my backpack? I’ll let you know.

Someone recently asked what what I was knitting, so here’s a shot of it. I bought this hand-dyed wool, thick and thin yarn in Silverton, Oregon when we camped near there last spring. There are so many sweet little yarn shops desperately trying to stay in business in these small towns, some of them truly wonderful. It requires that we take the time to purchase our goods directly from these little shops if we want to enjoy all they offer. I know how easy it is to buy online, but when traveling I always try to buy something special at the local yarn shop. I am a fairly new knitter, maybe the last 5 years or so, and sometimes I miss things I shouldn’t. In this case, the two skeins of very special hand dyed yarn looked identical until yesterday, when the bright light of day revealed that they weren’t exactly alike after all. So my project is now a bit weird, with one end of the scarf just enough different than the other end to look off. Sigh. I think my sister won’t mind too much, since she took one look at the hat at Thanksgiving and said, “I want that!” Hmmm. I hadn’t planned on giving it away, but how many wonderful yarn things do I really need anyway. Awful person that I am, the imperfection makes it a bit easier to give up.

Heck of an early winter here

Nice to have a new follower, I am always amazed when that happens. Thank you. Barry and Linda are talking about boondocking sites, always an interesting subject.

The guest cabin is getting buried!

Although for the last few days I haven’t been spending much time reading. Every morning I have shoveled 2 to 4 inches of snow from the driveway, enjoying it actually, until today when we had more than a foot dumped on us overnight. It seemed like a little bit too much, I had nowhere to throw it and it’s only November. Mo tried to start up the snow blower to finish the job, but it wouldn’t go, so I shoveled and she plowed and after about 3 hours we had the driveway and road passable. This big storm has rampaged across the northwest, leaving snow in Victoria, ice in Bellingham, and wreaking general havoc on roads and highways all over the place. We knew it was coming, but the predicted temperatures tomorrow are below zero, and that’s Fahrenheit, not Celsius! The wind blew hard all night and covered the wide front and back porches with hard, icy snow that I couldn’t scrape off no matter how hard I tried. I think I am ready for a break already. Yeah, I know it’s only November.

I’ll be off to visit a friend in Florida for a week in early December while Mo keeps the home fires burning and the road plowed. The day I return, we are jumping in the Tracker and going to pick up the MoHo in Redding and find some sunshine in Desert Hot Springs for Christmas week. Whew! I am having Thanksgiving this year, so there will be some good family time there, and told my Klamath daughter and grandkids that I would celebrate a late Christmas with them when we return.

The road to Medford on the way to Costco

The road home from Medford. Class A with no chains??

Yesterday Mo and I decided to make a Costco run. For us, that is a 45 mile drive to Medford, over the pass on Highway 140, past Lake of the Woods and down the Crater Lake Highway. It’s usually a beautiful drive and we can be at the Costco parking lot in less than an hour. Not so yesterday. After our morning snow exercises, we left around ten and the storm was already coming on fairly strong. By the time we left Medford and headed back east, it was in full force, with many sliders and slow vehicles trying to get over the pass. I was especially surprised by the big Class A motorhome stranded on the pass trying to get out the the Basin. I have no clue why someone would attempt to drive a big rig like that over a stormy, snowy pass, with chains required signs everywhere, but with no chains.

Today we had to go the opposite direction, again after morning snow exercises and on another snowy, icy road. I ordered a free range organic fresh turkey from Howard’s Meats in Klamath Falls and of course needed to do the rest of the Thanksgiving shopping there as well. On the way home, we saw that Klamath Lake is beginning to freeze already, and there are still hundreds of ducks in the bay, and even some Canada geese. Tonight that little bit of open water is going to close in even more. I worry about the birds. Our lake and basin is on the major Pacific flyway and these little ones are on a clock that didn’t include subzero temperatures in November. Heck, we rarely get sub zero temperatures in the deepest of winter!

The MoHo is in Redding, where tomorrow morning the temperatures are predicted in the low 20’s. Pooh. We drained the tanks, but didn’t put antifreeze in the drains. The whole reason for that expensive storage place is that Redding rarely drops below 30 degrees and we wouldn’t have to winterize. Sigh again. Mo thought about driving down there today while I did the Klamath shopping, but 3 hours each way in a winter storm isn’t particularly fun. After talking to some folks we decided that the rig would probably be fine. The temperatures will go low, but it is inside, and the sun will be out and the temps in the 40’s by 10 am. Tomorrow is the coldest day, so we are watching the weather map on weatherunderground and hoping it won’t be as bad as predicted.

Tomorrow is the big cooking day, so as long as the power grid holds up I should be busy. Mo also got the snow blower running this evening so my shoveling time might be a bit less. Who knows. I love winter, and I love being able to leave it as well! It’s the best of all worlds.