The MoHo and Other Traveling Tales

Finding Covered Bridges in Oregon

The map below of the bridges we have visited is available publicly on Google Maps titled “Covered Bridge RV Trip May 2012” (thanks to Rick for helping me figure out how to find the right html link for this map)

I have spent the last few days trying to figure out just how to write about this rather amazing trip. The combination of navigation, location, photographing, researching, and finally enjoying the bridges is a bit daunting to write about. I decided that first I would just drop in the map I made on Google, then give a truly great website link, and later go into more detail. Future posts will be organized by county and will have my own thoughts and some of the photos (you know of course that I took way to many!)

We started with the ODOT website for the covered bridges and downloaded the PDF with coordinates and directions to each bridge. Mo painstakingly drafted the approximate location of each bridge on a paper map and I used that to try to navigate with the Garmin, Google on the phone, and my trusty Gazateer for Oregon.

There are many websites for covered bridges but the most amazing resource that I found is called “Bridgehunter”, an extremely thorough database of bridges throughout the country. Read the “about” section to learn about how and why this website was started and how it is maintained.

In the next few days, as I write about the bridges and our wanderings, I’ll link to Bridgehunter for each one, and if you choose you can read about the history of the bridge, see many photos both current and historic, (in addition to mine of course), see a google map to the individual bridge and even a google street view if one is available.

Wandering

My soul is filled up with green. We have been traveling through long narrow valleys filled with luscious spring greens, reminiscent of the hills of the Carolinas where my family heritage resides. Never lived there, but I remember feeling at home and completely familiar when we drove through the little town of Cherokee in North Carolina, among the hardwoods and rhododendrons. These hidden Oregon valleys are much like that. I can imagine how wonderful it felt to the pioneers crossing the Oregon Trail when they at last reach the verdant, green paradise called Oregon. Familiar, welcoming and nurturing after all those miles crossing prairies and deserts, day after day of brown and tan and gray.

Oregon is many things, but right now, west of the Cascades, it is green, thick, lush, vibrant, neon, chartreuse, every possible shade of green you could imagine and more. The green somehow fills me up, makes my insides vibrate and tingle, makes something inside me expand. Mo and I have spent the last few days wandering slowly through a part of Oregon that we usually pass by at 65 miles per hour on the interstate.

The Willamette Valley is large, and extends from Eugene to Portland, bisected very nearly through the middle by Interstate 5. I can’t count the times I have driven this road, usually to get from one end of Oregon to the other, as quickly as possible.

I was often heading south from Northern Idaho, where I lived for more than 30 years, traveling for the holidays to the youngest daughter in Medford, then later in Corvallis. Then later again traveling north when that same daughter lived in Albany and I was in Klamath Falls, and north again to spend time with the oldest daughter settled in Portland. Always moving as quickly as possible, noticing the green and the blue skies in the spring and the brown and smoky skies of fall, but never really seeing it. Not like I have seen it this week.

Searching for covered bridges is more about the back road journeys than it is about the bridges, although after seeing so many, I find myself feeling great affection for them. At first we thought they all looked pretty much the same, but in actuality there are subtle nuances and each bridge has it’s own personality, its own character. Some are tucked away in little unknown canyons crossing small streams, others on big rivers like the Suislaw in a valley we never knew about before this trip.

There will be more to write about the journey, the places we found, the roads we traveled, the individual bridges, but that will come later, this is just as Erin says, “a teaser”. At the moment, I am still just soaking up the green. Enjoying the rain and the brilliant sunshine between the rains, the wild clouds moving across the skies, and green, always green, everywhere green.

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.