The MoHo and Other Traveling Tales

On the Road Again

Seems as though I just got home from Texas, but when I looked at the calendar it has been over two weeks since I returned. Geez. Don’t blink, or life will speed right over you, minus the speed bumps to slow you down!

The MoHo is in Brookings, where the snow never flies and chains are never required, and we try to get over there for a road trip at least once every month. A week or two on the road is always a great reprieve from everyday life, even if that everyday life is really quite wonderful.

For our last few trips we have traveled a good distance, often heading south into California to find warm sunshine and blue skies in the winter. This time we decided that it would be great to just hang out in our own beautiful state of Oregon and explore the hidden nooks and crannies in the Willamette Valley and surroundings that we have missed while running off to the coast and then heading south.

Mo found an Oregon website of all the covered bridges in the state, something Oregon is famous for, so we have the google map with 71 bridges pinpointed to guide us. Will we see them all? Of course not. Who knows how many we will actually see, but it gives us a little bit of something to make us move from one place to another at least. We have no plans, no reservations, no particular destination. We are going to wander for two weeks and see what appears. Oregon is just so beautiful this time of year, especially on the west side. The flowers are blooming, the orchards are blossoming, the grass is green and often the skies are blue.

Here at home, on the east side of the Cascades just south of Crater Lake, spring is just barely coming out. All it takes are a few more warm days and I should have at least the beginnings of flowers and blossoms on our own trees. With a little luck, we won’t miss the tulips coming into bloom that I planted last fall.

I returned from Texas barely in time to take a breath and prepare for Easter. With my oldest daughter in Texas, my middle daughter plying the country with her truck, and my son way back in Missouri, once again I was blessed by the fact that my youngest lives in Klamath, close enough to bring the family for a wonderful day of spring time celebrations. This year they came the night before so they could be here for the early morning festivities. With the kids now 19 and 13 the Easter Bunny doesn’t have to stay up late to hide eggs any more, but we still love that big Sunday morning breakfast and waking up together for coffee and family time.

Kevin, my SIL, brought his Big Green Egg BBQ and smoker out for the day and made some of his famous baby back ribs while Melody followed some great instructions for coloring eggs with silk ties. They were gorgeous! We are all planning to collect more ties for next Easter.

The rest of the day we made an Easter cake for entertainment. With some internet searches, the kids decided on the “bunny butt in the stump” chocolate cake. I had to buy fondant for the bunny and the decorations. That was a shocker! Fondant comes in a tub for about 20 bucks, and then I had to buy the different fancy colorings to go with it. It feels a bit like play-doh and tastes a bit like old gum. Ah well, the cake and frosting were fabulous and the decorating was so much fun. Who cares if you don’t eat the fancy green leaves and cute flowers. My 13 year old grandson was pretty good at flower making, and while I expected my artistic granddaughter to do well with this, the grandsons enthusiasm was a surprise. We had a great day together.

Monday morning I was back to work, again racking up two weeks straight of soil survey work to give me the freedom of another two weeks off so we can amble off in the MoHo. I spent the rainy weekend in between finally finishing the quilt table runner for my friend Maryruth and finishing up the baby blanket I started over a month ago when Mo’s new grand niece was born. Sure glad I got it done before she was too big to care!. An easy pattern with inexpensive yarn that is washable made it a simple gift. It was cuddly!

Blogging of course slipped way back to the bottom of the list. Reading blogs slipped as well. In fact, I realized that I was letting the blog world take up much more of my time than I wanted. I made the difficult decision to stop following many blogs so that I wouldn’t feel as though I was always behind. I have heard other bloggers mention this problem lately. Some have discussed it much more eloquently than I can. The whole thing has just expanded exponentially. I went back to my original reason for blogging, keeping track of my life for myself, my own personal diary, and letting those who care about me know what I have been up to.

Of course, I have made some real friends through this blogging thing, and of course there are some old friends I continue to follow, but I am giving myself permission to opt out, to quit worrying if I am blogging enough, or am interesting enough, or paying enough attention. I refuse to compete for comments or readership. It is just too yukky. If you are still here reading, thanks. In the mean time, I’ll do like several other bloggers have done recently and be really happy that I can look back and see what I was doing this time of year back in 2010 or 2008 or whenever. I can’t count the times that Mo says to me, “When did we do….?” and I will answer, “Let me go check the blog”.

Today and tomorrow we will load up the Tracker one last time before bringing the MoHo back home. The kayaks are coming down and going on top, the bikes are going on the rack in back, we are packing shorts and raincoats, and everything in between. Wednesday morning we will head for Brookings. I haven’t a clue where we will go next except it will be somewhere right here in Oregon.

To Texas, no Mo, and no MoHo either.

Why in the world would an RV loving traveler drive to Texas without her motorhome? Kids! Always blame it on the kids. My daughter decided it was time to move to Texas and we decided together that it might be nice for me to help her drive the UHaul. Gives us lots of mother-daughter time, right?

Quality time in a loud bumpy truck pulling a car on a trailer, covering up to 800 miles per day. Blog stories about our regular RV travels are leisurely rambles from place to place with all the wonderful delights of carrying along your food and kitchen, your bedroom, not the least of all, your bathroom.

I kept thinking I didn’t need to really blog about this at all, since it isn’t really part of the MoHo Travels, but it is a record of what in the heck has been happening in my life, so here it is. Not leisurely, not filled with campground reviews and hikes and beautiful sights. Just the road, the unfurling yellow lines, the sunrise as we keep moving east, the glare of headlights as we continue driving into the night.

We drove down I-5, so familiar from the many trips Mo and I have taken on that route, with many sections repaired and much better than they have been in the past. We crossed the pass over 58, surrounded by snow but without any falling on us. We passed Desert Hot Springs buffeted by the desert winds, spending a night in a motel in Indio. Crossing Arizona and New Mexico, Deb got her first view of Mexico across the “mighty” Rio Grande overlooking El Paso toward Juarez, at 60 mph. I told her long stories of the history of the Rio Grande River and how it has been used and reused and dammed and diverted until the trickle that makes it to the gulf no longer feeds that sea with richness and the shrimp are dying.

We drove many miles within sight of the border, going through some border checks, and after 800 miles that day we slept again at a motel in Van Horn, Texas and rose before sunrise for the last leg into San Antonio. Deb was enthralled by the Texas Big Bend Country, the mesas and long vistas, her first view of this kind of landscape. I called Mo after many hours of no cell service and her first words were, “Have you been hit by a tornado?” I guess two tornados touched down in Dallas as we were approaching San Antonio, but that was north of here and they are now moving northeast so we are fine.

We covered 2030 miles together in 3 days of driving, with gasoline running 4.15 in most of California and 3.79 here in Texas. The UHaul got less miles per gallon than the MoHo and we spent just over $1000. bucks on gasoline, didn’t eat a lot, and paid 63 to 99 for the hotel rooms for the 5 or 6 hours of sleep we allowed ourselves. I had my cell phone, but I can’t believe how many hundreds of miles on a large interstate don’t support any bars at all, much less any kind of internet. I read a few facebook posts from bloggers here and there, but don’t have a clue what is going in the blog world except for a few really important things.

East on I 10 through Texas Nan is hanging in there while her husband fights to breathe. Pray for her. Al and Kelly are almost home, and my heart broke along with everyone else when I read that little Cora Motormouse was gone. I know Rick and Paulette are home in Canada, Erin and Mui went camping among the bluebells, Laurie and Odel are making tracks to central California, Karen and Al got their kayaks in some really gorgeous water, and Donna and Russ are having some doggie troubles. I’ll catch up eventually with the rest. For now, my daughter and her Texas honey are unpacking a big truck into a small home and I am sitting in another motel with air conditioning to adjust to the high temperatures and humidity. I plan to sleep a lot between now and the time I fly back home to Oregon and my simple life.

Trips like this one really make me see how lucky I am to have the chance to travel in a motorhome. Although the hard push of a fast road trip actually has it’s pleasures as well. White line fever he called it, wasn’t that Merle Haggard? There is something extremely satisfying about covering a lot of miles in a short time with a hard push. It was fun. I am beat to death and tired as heck, but it was a blast. I am really going to miss having my daughter as close as Portland, but I guess this will just be all the more reason for Mo and I to go spend some winter times in Texas with the MoHo.

Pinnacles

One hundred ninety five. Miles. That is the distance that the San Andreas Fault has slipped northwestward since the Pinnacles Volcanoes were formed between 20 and 30 million years ago. What I found so incredibly fascinating about this place is that it was once just a simple stratovolcano, very similar to Mt St Helens before she blew.

It erupted and exploded and flowed and rumbled for a few million years before going silent. Then the Farallon plate that was diving below the American plate at last completely melted and finally stopped heating things up, and the Pacific Plate ran right up against the American Plate and instead of diving, it started sliding. The huge stratovolcano was literally split in two, while two thirds rode north on the Pacific Plate and the other third stayed behind on the American Plate.

Over time and many climate changes, the entire volcano was buried under eons of sediments then uplifted and eroded again to expose the multicolored hues of various versions of rhyolitic volcanic rock. The two thirds that forms the present day Pinnacles was uplifted more recently and is far more dramatic that the one third that has soft, old rounded landscapes, left behind 195 miles away somewhere in the vicinity of Lancaster.

We came to Pinnacles mainly to hike some of its many trails and stand on the top of what remains of the old volcanoes. We also came to possibly see the condors who are released here in a special breeding program attempting to bring them back from extinction. Of course, we also came for warm sunshine in March and spring wildflowers. We got most of what we came for, but this evening, after a bit of research, I am pretty sure our condor sightings were really just big, beautiful turkey vultures soaring over the High Peaks.

Waking to an absolutely gorgeous sunny morning at Coyote Lake, we drove less than five miles to Creature Comfort, a dog resort Mo found for Abby in nearby Gilroy. Mo was nervous about leaving her, worried that she might figure a way out, but once we arrived, the many tall chain link fences underlain with plywood barriers to stop the diggers eased her mind a bit. There were about 20 dogs running around all happy and of course they all had to come to the fence to greet the newcomer. Abby thought the world was ending of course, and we were reluctant to leave, but the woman caretaker said, “It is like kids in a day care, you just need to get out of here, and she will be fine”.

The trip south to Pinnacles was just a bit over 50 miles, but once past the small town of Hollister, it seemed we were wandering off into an unknown world. The green hills gave way to brown, even less rain here I guess, and there were a few huge estates and rolling acres of grapevines, surrounded by rangeland.

The Verizon signal gave out and the ATT bars disappeared and we were completely disconnected for the next two and a half days. We had decided not to make reservations, since we were coming mid week, and that worked out just fine, this time. In the future, we will probably make reservations since we learned later that this park can be completely full on weekends. You just never know. When we arrived, however, on a Wednesday afternoon, we had our choice of several of the electric only hookup sites in the main part of the RV park.

We settled in to a site with no reserved sign, and were told to come back after four to pay since there was no one capable of taking money at the visitor center. Interesting. There was a little store there as well, and I bought Fritos on the honor system, putting exact change in a brown envelope as instructed by the ranger at the desk..

The park was quiet, the sun was warm, there was lots of space between sites with many of them empty. Mo and I looked at each other and said, “Why not?”. We let Jeremy out to play, off leash. Sure enough, Jeremy was as great as I thought he would be, but it did help that there were no bushes or creeks for him to explore, just open space, and he hung around the motorhome sniffing and playing until he finally decided to go back inside on his own. It was nice to let him have that bit of freedom.

Mo and I studied the park maps, the trails, the geology folders, the small booklet that I bought (with exact change of course), and decided that our afternoon hike should be the three miles or so up to the reservoir beyond the Moses Caves. I had no desire to go through the caves, so we went around them and up some rather incredible stone stairs to the small dam built by the CCC and the reservoir. It seems we also neglected to plan for the fact that this was spring break week in this part of California.

There were lots of groups of kids in buses, and in the group tent sites, and on the trails. At the reservoir, we sat quietly with a small group of kids who were intently writing their reflections on “reflection” as they looked at the sky reflected in the water of the reservoir.Rather than retrace our steps, we took The Rim Trail which led up and back and around and down again to the parking area. Perfect 3 mile hike for a perfect afternoon. We knew we were saving the big one for the next day when we would have a full day to hike.

Returning to the campground, I went back to the visitor center to pay my fee, only to discover that our site was technically reserved and we would have to move. Seems as though whomever is responsible for putting out the reserved signs was letting down on the job. We took down the awning, tucked everything into the rig and moved across the way to a site we liked better anyway. It was lovely, with a huge live oak shading the picnic table and a perfect view of the mountain ridges to the south. We spent the evening entertained by turkey gobbles, quail calls and high clouds racing across the bright skies.

The next morning we packed up some tuna sandwiches and plenty of water to take on our planned six mile loop hike. There are several options in the park, but with only this day for hiking we thought it would be good to get to the High Peaks Trail. There are several ways to reach that trail, and we chose the Condor Trail, with an elevation of 1200 feet or so in 1.7 miles to the intersection. The morning was sunny but cool, perfect for hiking and the uphill climb seemed easy. The views were expansive and gorgeous, looking back over the park down to Bear Gulch where we started.

At the intersection with the High Peaks Trail, we walked south a bit to see the views, and then continued back north for the 2.7 miles down to the Bench Trail. During this time of week, there are no shuttles, so we stopped for lunch in the warm sunshine and rested our weary downhill legs. All four knees held up, but I was really glad for my hiking poles! It is a LOT of downhill with very few breaks. It was then another couple miles back to the parking area hiking along Bear Gulch, with more ups and downs than expected. Amazing how much more we felt those little elevation changes after several miles of hiking!

It was only mid afternoon when we returned, and we considered going back later to try a bit of the Old Pinnacles Trail. However, neither of us were really up for another six mile hike and on the map it appeared that it was almost 3 miles one way to see the Balconies Caves. Instead we decided to explore the campground a bit and discovered a huge complex of primitive campsites that could probably hold a small rig, but with no hookups, and every single one of them was reserved for the weekend, and many of those included Thursday night! We couldn’t imagine all those tent campers showing up, but we left before finding out on Friday morning.

When we reached Bear Gulch Visitor Center after our hiking loop, there was a grad student from South Carolina taking a survey of your park experience. It seems that the park is considering limiting access to large groups, perhaps limiting the number of people who can enter the trails at one time, and even requiring shuttle only entrance into the park area. We saw some illustrative posters of differing numbers of folks at different sites along the trail. I was incredibly surprised. We had the entire morning and hiked the entire trail without seeing any other hikers until the very end where we met a young couple from Costa Rica, just up from the Bench Trail. But at the parking lot there were suddenly screaming hordes of children, climbing over rocks, yelling, running up and down and generally doing what kids do on Spring Break. Maybe the High Peaks trail is too long for them and the Moses Cave Trail and the Reservoir are the goal of a spring break day. The other goal seems to be rock climbing, with several areas filled with young ones attempting their first ascents. We laughed as we overheard several children saying “not me” when asked who wanted to go first and then hearing the high voice of a young girl piping up with “I’ll go first!”

We were blessed with two days of perfectly gorgeous, coolish, sunny weather, an uncrowded campground, empty trails, wonderful hiking, lots of wildlife, and the possibility of seeing the endangered condor. We studied the maps again, read Merikay’s account of hiking the southern loop of the High Peaks trail and decided, Yes, we will come back to this park again in the springtime. We will avoid Spring Break Week, we will make a reservation in the campground, hopefully for number 91 again, and we will hike the rest of the trails that we didn’t have time to hike this time.

Yes, it is a bit out of the way, but it is a lovely place to spend a few days if you time it right. Kinda nice being off the grid entirely.

We found the sunshine on the Spring Equinox

There is a certain color of green in the California coastal range that comes after the winter rains. Sometimes when the sunlight pours over the hills, that green can be so intense it feels as though it expands your vision into something psychedelic. The timing has to be just right, and this year is a dry year so that neon green is a bit less dramatic, but still there if you look at just the right moment.

Our moment was during a late afternoon hike to the Coyote Ridge Trail in Coyote Lake County Park, high above the hills of the Santa Clara Valley. After waking to rain in Garberville, driving through rain as far south as Santa Rosa, negotiating huge lines of cars buying gas for 4.15 a gallon at Costco, and transiting the Bay Area freeways, we were happy to find our little park in the hills just a bit north of Gilroy off Highway 101.

We found this one using Streets and Trips, researched it a bit, and made the decision that it would be a good overnight stop on our way to Pinnacles. Just a few miles east of the freeway, the park could be in another world entirely. Rising from the valley, we drove a very narrow, winding road to the park entrance, and then after a couple of serious switchbacks, dropped down to the broad but small valley that is the home to Coyote Lake.

The campground is lovely at this time of year. I can imagine that the summer heat might be daunting, but right now the temperatures were a perfect 70 degrees when we arrived in late afternoon. A large herd of resident deer wanders around the lush grassy site, and even now after dark I can hear the turkeys gobbling.

I know it is mid week, but this park was completely empty when we arrived, and later this evening, one lone camper slipped in to a spot across the field from us. There are 18 sites with hookups, not cheap at $30 per night, but that includes a fee for the dump station we passed on the way in.

The strangest thing about this park is the strict rule regarding NO swimming in the lake. You can water ski, use jet skis, kayaks, motorboats, but you can’t swim. Makes no sense to me at all. Abby saw the water and got all excited so it was sad that we couldn’t take her down to the lake for a dip.

The best thing about this park are the trails. There are 28.5 miles of very nice trails, and we only managed to get out on 3 miles or so of the Coyote Ridge and Valley oak trail. All are dog friendly, with leashes required of course, but with no one else in the park, it seemed fine to let Abby run free. I did get a bit paranoid about the poison oak, but it wasn’t right on the trail in too many places, and hopefully we managed to keep Abby out of it.

We found amazing sunshine, and warm temperatures. All the driving, all the rain, all behind us. Sunshine ahead and I am sitting here after dark in capris and a tee shirt. Great way to celebrate the beautiful balance of light and dark that this Equinox day brings.

PS: As we packed up this morning, I learned some new things about the park. On summer weekends it is packed. During the week, however, there is almost always at least half of the hookup spaces available. In summer it is hot and dry and brown. The lake is kept at 55 percent of maximum because it is on the Calaveras Fault and they figure that the Anderson reservoir below Coyote Lake and above the Santa Clara Valley floodplain could hold the overflow in the event of dam breakage. There are only a couple of mountain lions about, covering 100 square miles each, not enough to keep down the deer population.

I had no bars for Verizon MiFi and no bars for the ATT cell phone and no television signals. I suppose someone with satellite would have had good open sky. I am now posting from Highway 101 as we head for Pinnacles, another place with no bars. We’ll be back in blogworld on Saturday. There isn’t a cloud in the sky and the prediction for today is in the 70’s. Yes!

It’s all good

Really, it is. But sometimes it is also funny. When we arrived in Brookings yesterday, we both had taste buds set on the perfect fish and chips at the funky little restaurant we found last fall. Of course, being a small town, and a funky little restaurant, you never know when they will actually be open. I had the bright idea, “Let’s run down to the harbor before we get the rig out of storage and make sure the Chetco Café is open today!” Smart idea. Mo went inside and got the hi ho from the help that they were open until 7 tonight.

Yesterday afternoon, in all that gorgeous sunshine, we ambled around town, checking on some of the different properties we have been eyeing, and then ambled right back down to the harbor for a mouth watering supper. Except…as we pulled up, at a few minutes before 5PM, the last car pulled out and a big CLOSED sign was on the door. Foiled again.

We then ambled nearby to another place touting fish and chips and thought we might give it a try. People inside laughing and eating, locked doors?! Oh. It is 5:01 on a Sunday in Brookings Harbor. We seem to repeat this story often when we come to Brookings in one form or another, but we didn’t give up and ended up at a place called the “onion grill” with a sign that said, Steaks, Seafood, and Chinese Food. Hmmm. Once inside we had our choice of an American or Chinese menu. Well, what can it say. It IS a small town. The fish and chips were adequate, the service was fine, the ambience was filled with many retired folks slipping in from afternoon services and they all seemed to know the very cheery and friendly Chinese lady running the shop.

I knew this day would probably be rainy, so wasn’t the least bit surprised to see clouds when I woke this morning. Time to drive south. A quick check of the weather confirmed what I already knew. Rain and more rain for every destination south. Ah well. We are cozy and we are on the road and we will have fun, rain or shine. The Weatherunderground cheered me up considerably when I saw that in that moment it was exactly 14 degrees in Klamath Falls. Good to be where the chill is in the 40’s not the teens. Did someone say it is March?

We had a perfect plan. I would drive the Tracker to the quilt shop while Mo took the MoHo on down the road somewhere for us to meet after my shopping spree and hook up. Perfect. Forty five minutes later I left the shop with a large bag of goodies and went off to find Mo and the MoHo. Pulled in behind her to hook up and….hmmmm….no hitch? Seems as though Mo had left the hitch back at the perfect camp site, pretty as you please, thinking that maybe we might want to get into the back garage of the rig before morning. (Our hitch gets in the way of our drop down spare tire so we usually take it out when we are camped and want our campfire chairs)

So back we went again, one more time backtracking through town to Harris Beach. The park was quiet, nearly empty, and our hitch was sitting right where we left it the hour before. Any other time we would have hooked up right away, but not this time. Those hitch stingers aren’t cheap, so we were glad it was still there.

On a good note, the last time we put the rig in storage we made sure the tank was full. Rumors were already flying a month ago about rising gas prices and we did OK on that one. Filled her up at 3.73 per gallon and today the price at Freddie’s is 3.99. Of course, tomorrow when we fill up in California the cheapest price I have found so far on Gas Buddy is 4.49. I am wondering just how much this will dampen the travel plans of many of us out there. As happened before, it seemed that most RV’rs kept on driving, but ate out less and camped cheaper when possible. Giving up our freedom still isn’t an option. What would the price of gas have to be for you to stop driving? I still can’t answer that question for myself yet, hope I don’t have to.

It was a very gray and I hate to admit it, a rather boring day. Hence the rather boring photos. We drove south again on 101, along the ocean for a time, winding around the curvy, rough, landslide prone roads. We drove through the deep darkness of the redwoods on a cloudy, gray, cold day. Neither of us cared much for getting out of the rig and we just kept driving. We talked about all the sights we have seen on this road. We passed Big Lagoon, and Stone Lagoon, and some kayak launches. No kayaks on this trip and we were glad we didn’t have them since it is so cold and wet.

We passed our turn to the Lost Coast from the trip last year, we passed the turn to Loleta Cheese Company where we usually buy fabulous cheese, we drove on by the Eel River and the turn to Ferndale where we like to take photos of the Victorian buildings. All places we have enjoyed so much in the past, several times.

We thought that maybe we have driven this road too many times, and lamented that we have to drive too far now to get to anywhere we haven’t driven before. Then I remembered last year and how the only way we could get anywhere was to travel down I-5. Ugh. This is WAY more entertaining than driving down I-5. I knitted for awhile, I played with my pile of colorful fabrics, and in just a short 185 miles we turned into the Richardson Grove RV Park.

We learned the hard way last time that we need to stop this far north of the Bay Area to avoid getting trapped into a very expensive night in a not so comfortable park. Here the Passport America gets us a good nights rest for 16.50, full hookups, no cable. Mo found to her dismay that the electric cable to the Tracker had come undone and was all mangled. Who knows how long we drove without lights. We piled into the car for the 7 mile trip back to Garberville with hopes of finding some place to buy the part. Now I would imagine that at times, Garberville could be kind of cute, but cute doesn’t exactly equate to a part for a Toad. Lucky for us, however, Napa auto parts was in town, was still open, and had the part. Back to camp in the rain, winding through the truly gorgeous Richardson Grove, I wished for more light and a camera, and no rain, so we could maybe stop and wander. I am from Oregon, I should know how to hike in the rain and love it, right? Not.

Once back home, I put the bbq out on the wet picnic table and let the raindrops sizzle on the top as it got hot. I have to say that dinner was amazing. I bbq’d the chicken breasts with olive oil and garlic, and topped them off with a drizzle of the habanero pineapple jam, cut up some leaf lettuce and a tomato and topped that off with the award winning Rogue Blue Cheese and some 18 year old pomegranate balsamic vinegar, split half a baked potato from the microwave with Mo and settled down with our cute plastic wine glasses from the festival and we had ourselves a feast.

Tomorrow we will leave early in the rain, navigate the Bay Area and finally arrive somewhere new tomorrow evening. I think I saw a lone group of poppies today, all closed up in the rain, but they gave me hope for the drive south. The grass is getting greener, and I see hints of bursting spring leaves on the lower shrubs and on a few of the willows along the creeks. There are daffodils here and there along the road. When I think it may have been a bit of a boring day, I just have to go look at the photos of the snow at home.