Rocky Point – Page 4 – The MoHo and Other Traveling Tales

Who said planning is the fun part?

Clear warm evening in Rocky Point at 83 Degrees F

When I first imagined what RVing would be like many years ago, I pictured an idyllic ramble around the country, taking my time, staying wherever I felt like staying for as long as I wanted, and just picking up and leaving when I felt like it. That might work in the desert southwest now and then, but not so much for a three month sojourn through Texas and Florida and back, during prime season.

In the midst of all the other doings around here, I have been trying to get a handle on those plans. Usually I like this part, and open up the various apps that Nina discussed so well in a recent post, start up my old copy of “Streets and Trips 2011”, open up Google Maps and my Google Calendar, and start planning a route. Even for our trip to Alaska, this was a fairly straightforward process. We didn’t even make reservations for that entire summer on the road.

Florida in February is a completely different story, and as Sherry warned me, I should have started six months ago! I not only have to plan a route, I have to know EXACTLY when I plan to be in any particular place and make real honest to goodness reservations. Ack! How in the world can I be sure that I’ll be in Chiefland, Florida on a specific date when there are many months and thousands of miles between me and that date?

I have dreamed of a winter in Florida with my kayak in tow ever since I started visiting Bel in Ocala back in 2000. Mo and I got our boats to Florida on our cross country trip in 2007 for one magical float on the Silver River before we trundled on back west to buy the new motorhome in Texas and continue toward home. I have read the blogs avidly, ‘pinned’ campgrounds and rivers and events, and they created the beginning of my google map. The problems only begin when I try to link them all up, figure out the route and the miles and the DATES…and then make reservations. Only by now, I have been working on this for a few months, and I am too late for some of the places I wanted to go! Yup. Sherry was right. I should have started this six months ago, but somehow I was too busy TRAVELING then to be thinking about what I was going to be doing in 2014.

Before I go into the ‘plans’, I want to remember the fun things I have been doing NOW.

Would you eat dinner in this place? We did, and it was a fantastic experience. The Cowboy Dinner Tree used to be just that. It was a big old juniper tree out in the Oregon Outback near Silver Lake where they parked the chuck wagon for the cowboys. It has evolved a bit, and now people come from who knows where to fill this place up every weekend. Reservations required, two choices: chicken or sirloin. Dinner comes with salad, rolls, bean soup, potatoes, iced tea or lemonade (oops another choice) and dessert.

It isn’t cheap, and it takes two hours to get there. We rode with some local Rocky Point friends so the distance was irrelevant, and the experience was priceless. It is a “thing” and I am glad we took the time to do it. Although I brought the completely ridiculous steak home and made fajitas two nights in a row and then two more dinners from the chicken. Sheesh!

This week was bittersweet in a good way. I worked the very last time for soil survey. Sequestration and budget cuts and no federal budget all combined to end my contract career, so I retired for the second time. So I am really really retired now. Completely. It makes for some nice travel time, and is the reason I can manage to be off work long enough to take off next winter for three months instead of just a few weeks at a time. I’ll be poorer, but richer in time. I am pretty sure it is a good thing.

Another delight this week was a visit from Vermont friend Jeanne, (yes the famous adventure woman, Jeanne, that I have written about before). Only this time she brought along her sweetie, Alan, and he won Jeremy over in about two seconds and won me over about two seconds after that. Jeanne, you done good!! As did you, Alan. A pair made in heaven, or as all Jeanne’s friends say, a Danielle Steele novel. It is just romantic beyond imagination. He is a forester, she is a botanist, they both had basically given up on finding a soul mate, and they met in the woods at work! Isn’t that just incredibly perfect?!

We were on the water by 7 with beautiful partly overcast skies, perfect water, and lots of birds. Jeanne and Alan planned to see Crater Lake later in the day, but weren’t in too much of a hurry to miss out on pancakes and bacon for breakfast before they left.

After all the smoke that has been here, I was so glad to see perfectly clear skies by the time they got to Crater Lake, blue and smoke free and gorgeous. At least on the web cam. I had to keep checking to be sure that Alan’s first view of the lake would be wonderful. Jeanne wanted to show him all the cliffs she used to ski down when she lived here. Crazy woman.

Now back to the planning thing. Which is pretty much how that planning thing has been going. I work on it awhile, then something comes up and I get back to it later. Which is why I missed out on Myakka Springs and a couple of other places I wanted to see in Florida. Completely Booked!! We did manage to have a conversation with John and Carol from Our Trip Around the Sun who are going to be at Ding Darling Refuge on Sanibel Island and yes, I arranged a day, at 7 in the morning, when we will meet for a refuge trip that will hopefully turn up some spoonbills. Big on my bucket list. And yes, I have planned that specific day and specific hour from 3500 miles and six months away.

I know, I know. I have no right to complain. If you haven’t read Erin’s post about her plans for the next three months go check it out. That is planning on an Olympic scale! I think they have so many vacations nested in their vacation that it reminds me of those little Russian dolls. Ours will be just a bit simpler. We only have a simple vacation with a cruise vacation buried in the middle there somewhere.

We will amble through California, Arizona, New Mexico, and into Big Bend country in Texas, wander off to the coast at Port Aransas where I will get to walk the beach with Erin and watch her with that famous camera! We will continue east toward New Orleans, where we will take a 9 day break for a little cruise to the Western Caribbean, and after returning we will amble off to Florida for a month of kayaking and beaches. There is a saying about Florida, “I came for the beaches, but I stayed for the rivers”. Ahhhh. We will go as far as Key West, then amble back up the coast.

I have mostly reserved everything along the way. I think we will be in Blue Springs on Monday morning, March 3, at 10:02 AM. Or something like that. I know, the best laid plans can be severely disrupted, and I am trying to accept that with equanimity. Still. Those reservations are all prepaid, for Pete’s Sake! When we leave Blue Springs a few days later, I have no plans except for going north and west. I have no reservations. I have lots of blog posts about COE campgrounds and great places to see along the way, but we are going to actually stay loose during this part of the trip. For the month of March, we will just move gradually west and north toward home, following whatever route the weather and our mood dictates. I’ll let you know how that goes as well.

It is so great to have Deborah here to house sit for us while we are gone. She wants to keep the home fires burning and I’ll leave my truck with her so she can get back and forth in the snow. We will be bringing Abby, but I have decided to let Jeremy stay with Deborah for the trip. At least for now that is what I have decided. I’ll let you know how THAT goes as well. Sigh.

Lots coming up. More to tell, but this post is entirely too long so I’ll save it for later.

Next: MoHo interior renovations and we are soon off to the far northeastern part of Oregon!

Summer Doings

I am writing this post in late August, the 22nd actually, and a large thunderstorm has just passed over the east side of the Cascades. We don’t often get moisture this time of year, so it was a surprise, lovely and luscious and more than a little bit scary. Hopefully there is enough rain in the storm to offset any chance of lightning strikes starting more fires. The temperatures have dropped considerably this afternoon, and I had to actually put on a pair of sweat pants.

The month of August seemed to fly by, and somehow one of our favorite little gatherings slipped by without even a mention. For the past 11 years, Klamath Blues Society has hosted a Brats, Brews, and Blues Festival at the Pelican Marina in Klamath Falls. It usually runs from early afternoon to about 7 in the evening, with local blues bands on the venue for some delightful entertainment. The bands come and go and are at various levels of excellence, but for a small out of the way town like Klamath, it is still great fun to go listen to music on the shore of the lake and pay 20 bucks for a bratwurst and 6 beer tickets.

Each of those tickets buys a very small sampler of beer. but It’s all for a good cause, with proceeds from the event go to Camp Evergreen, a youth bereavement camp run by Klamath Hospice for children who have lost loved ones. A couple of local breweries are there to peddle their wares and this year the midges were absent and the weather was perfect. This year the event was in early August, and for once, Mo and I weren’t off traveling somewhere.

Even more perfect, my daughter Melody and son-in-law Kevin were the emcee’s for the event and my daughter Deborah now lives close enough to join us for a great afternoon. It was sooo much fun. We ran into our neighbors, Wes and Gayle, who enjoyed the event as well. Not as much as I did though, since I had my daughters there to get me up out of my chair and dancing. Once I started, there was no stopping. I would try, but then that dang beat would keep me going and laughing like crazy and trying to keep from falling on my face, I just kept on dancing with my girls. Haven’t had that much energetic fun in a very long time.

The other summer doings around here have been a bit less delightful. Our giant ponderosa pines have very long needles, lots of them, and every summer it is a big job getting them off the roof. Mo is the ladder climber in the house, since I get wobbly and goofy up there. I can do the roof part, but that part where you get from the ladder to the roof not so much. I watched her up there, holding the ladder for her ascent and helping jockey the blower cord around so it didn’t get in the way.

Other excitement around here has been even more subtle. I have been watching flowers bloom and trees grow while Mo mows. She built this place a year before I knew her and I was comparing some of the photos of what it looked like in 2002 and what it looks like now. It is so much fun seeing tiny little trees that were a foot or so high now reaching for the sky at more than 30 feet. Something has “grabbed” in the last couple of years and everything is growing like crazy. Starting to look like a jungle out there in spite of the challenging climate we have here in the mountains.

Somewhere toward the end of July we traveled a few miles east to the Running Y Resort for their “big” garden tour. One of the gardens there was carved out of all that rocky basalt with an incredible amount of work and planning. She won “gardener of the year” for some sort of statewide thing, and said she was amazed that she won over some of those lush Portland landscapes. We drove through the resort roads from garden to garden, marveling at the variety of stuff that could be grown in a dry rocky landscape.

The Running Y Garden Tour Winning Flower Bed

I also thought that I should have a garden tour of my own! Instead, when the kids come to visit, I just take them on the “garden walk”, telling them how things are doing and what is what in my Rocky Point landscape.

My Flower Bed

I still have issues with the deer, spraying the very smelly Liquid Fence at least every two weeks to keep mama deer and her babies out of my flowers. When we got back from the last trip she had nipped a couple of flower heads off the rudbeckia sunflowers, a plant I thought deer didn’t eat, but she hadn’t touched anything else. Next door at Wes and Gayle’s, she even ate all the herbs on the porch. I didn’t think deer liked strong flavored herbs, but I guess since all my flowers tasted like rotten eggs and old milk she figured something was better than nothing. Go me! Sorry, Gayle.

Leaving the prettiest place in the world…

For the other prettiest place in the world. Or maybe there are others, but do you remember ever saying “That was the best ever”, and knowing that the next one would definitely be the “best ever”? Leaving Rocky Point on a clear summer morning seems a bit silly, unless of course you are heading north toward Sisters and a quilt show that probably rivals one of the best ever. Although I have never been to Paducah, Kentucky or to the Sisters show before either.
The MoHo is all loaded up and we are ahead of schedule. Just enough time to write a bit about what has been and what is yet to come.
Best little trip recently was a quickie north to Collier State Park where I met up with Jerry and Suzy, a couple of RV bloggers I have followed for some time now. To say they are a delightful couple is an understatement, and as usual, a couple hours of visiting time at their sweet comfy rig in the shade flew by. We didn’t even have to go out to eat! You know how you set that one up sometimes….just in case something or another is awkward and you need a table between you and a waitress to mediate. I am so glad I got to meet the two of them, and look forward to their next trip our way so they can come out to Rocky Point for a visit as well. Don’t you just love their traditional matching tee shirts?
The delphiniums finally bloomed in front of the cabin, just in time for the wind and the sprinklers to knock them over. Soooo glad I got a photo of them the morning before that happened. Then I decided it was time to entertain some local Rocky Point folks for a nice dinner. I think the last time I had Wes and Gayle (our next door neighbors who winter in Tucson) over I fed them hot dogs cooked on a pitchfork. This time I went all the way with a French Country dinner including appetizers and an Apple Galette for dessert. It was great fun to have someone to cook for, but once a year might be enough for that kind of dinner!
I invited another local Rocky Point couple to join us, Jim and Mata have lived here for decades. Jim was the contractor who built Mo’s house and Mata is one of the first members of the local quilt guild of which I am the newest member. I even had fun! Isn’t that the point? Although most women know how hard it is to have fun when you are doing a dinner party with the timing thing always in the back of your mind.
Tomorrow is the quilt show, and we will be meeting up with Roger and Nancy in Lapine for an evening of fun before taking their car to Sisters. (The MoHo will wait safely back in uncrowded territory!) Nancy and I get to play why Mo and Roger hang out in the park. That way we can look and shop to our hearts content without worrying about them getting bored with the whole thing.
The next day we will all travel east toward Newberry Crater and Paulina Lake for some high mountain forest service camping. Did you notice no car on the back of the MoHo! Kind of fun to load the kayaks on that trailer, nice and low! Hopefully we will get a spot close enough to the lake to make up for the fact that I have yet to order those little wheelie thingies that Sherry and David have. Oh boy! camping, kayaking, family, and quilts!!! Does it get any better anywhere??

Snow in November Snow in March

Home in Rocky Point Oregon: current temperature 36 Degrees F high 43 low 25 partly sunny

Winter is long in this part of Oregon. The snows start in earnest in November, with a few skiffs sometimes showing up in October. The snow can be deep, and while we can get down to zero F for a week or so, the winters aren’t nearly as bad as places like Minnesota or the Dakotas. Still, they are long. I love winter at Christmas time. I love winter in January when I can enjoy it and then take off for California. I love winter in February least of all, and ever since I moved from California to snow country in Northern Idaho back in the early 70’s I have done everything possible to get out of winter in February.

But winter in March is different. Even though it is cold and the snow is really tiresome by now, it feels different. The days are getting longer, just a bit, but it isn’t dark any more at 4:30 in the afternoon. When it snows, it is usually a bit wetter, and there are patches of blue amid the fluff of snowy clouds. The air feels different. And the birds are back.

Early in the morning I can hear them down by the lake, but they are out on the water in places we can’t get to yet with the snow and ice all around. Still, we walked down there this morning to get the mail. Gingerly picking our way through the re-frozen slush in the driveway and hoping our boots didn’t crash through the crusty snow banks down by the water. When I went in to town yesterday, in the midst of a blustery snow storm, I saw open water along the edges of the lake, and saw that the swans had returned. I only had the iPad with me, and there was traffic and snow, so it was a quick photo, but it still made me really feel the difference between the deepening winter feeling of December and the promise of winter eventually ending. Maybe not in March, but still eventually it will end.

There is an aerial survey of the birds in Klamath Basin that is updated regularly, and even back on January 30, we had almost 44,000 tundra swans in the refuge complex. I love the swans especially, and the snow geese, they look like flapping sheets in the wind when they fly in unison and rise and fall over the landscape.

Horse Fever horses in Ocala will always bring back great memories of sharing this with Bel I am still having a bit of trouble writing about Florida. My friend Bel, in my life for 19 years, passed away while I was there. I was with her when she passed, probably the hardest thing I have ever done, and yet a gift I will always be grateful for. If you read my blog in the past, you know about Bel and my visits to her, my worries over her access to health care, some of her life difficulties. This is our happy fun travel blog, how in the world do I talk about this here? I guess I just can’t. Up close family, up close friends, real words coming out of real mouths with sound, seem to be the only appropriate way for the moment. I didn’t plan to say anything at all when I started this blog, and yet some of you are those real friends with real words who were there for me on the phone and on Facebook, of all places, as I was going through it. So I needed to acknowledge that somehow after all and thank you. Enough for now.

On the way home from Florida I was so happy to have almost three full days in San Antonio with my daughter Deborah. She took off work on Thursday and Friday and we spent our time together driving around to places she loved in her new home, seeing where she worked, eating great Texas food that her sweetie prepared for us. I ate ribs and cole slaw and Texas beans and cheese bread and brisket and omigosh…the heartburn! I am not used to eating like that, but it sure was fun to let go for a few days in spite of the heartburn.

We checked out some quilt shops and picked out fabrics for the quilt I will make for her someday, we wandered off to Palmetto State Park and Lyndon B Johnson State Park, and spent a night in lovely Fredericksburg. It was cool and breezy while I was there, but the sun was brilliant and gorgeous. South Texas is a great place this time of year, even though the blue bonnets have yet to burst. The grasses are greening up, and did I mention that sunshine? Ahhhh. It was so healing to be with Deborah, who knew and loved Bel, to have her to talk with about it. I was blessed by two daughters on this trip actually, with Deanna re-routing a Tampa load to go through Ocala, where she met me for a long breakfast full of big hugs. Daughter Melody stayed with me on the phone a lot and son John called a few times as well, and of course Mo and Maryruth and my long time friend Laura from Coeur d Alene, a respiratory RN. It was wonderful to have so much support and understanding.

It was good to get back home. I did a deep clean on the house before I left, and Mo was away at her brother’s while I was gone, so we came home to a cozy, clean, wonderful home. Mo beat me home by a day, so when I returned the house was still sparkly but was WARM with a nice big fire going. Snow still on the ground, but sunshine and blue skies were wonderful. And silence. The nights are so dark and starry under the hot tub and the silence is just so SILENT! No street lights, no traffic, no trains, all the stuff of towns and cities are absent here in the forest.

We are settling in, enjoying home a bit before we decide just when to wander off to the cottage in Grants Pass and maybe get some beach time. Here at home I have a big quilt to finish binding, and fabric to play with, soil survey work waiting and all sorts of “retirement” projects that I still have yet to get to after three years as a retiree. I am never, never bored. Ever.

St Paddy's around home-002

February This n That

Home in Rocky Point, Oregon Sunshine and 49 degrees, low tonight 27

We returned home from our January travels just in time to get the last of the Christmas lights down and the Valentine decorations up. I know, I am a little bit crazy that way. I love to do seasonal decorations.
Besides, it gave me a chance to get out my first little quilt table topper
that I made last year as a very tentative, brand new quilter. Funny how the imperfections become a bit endearing after a bit of time has passed. No one really cares but me anyway, and it is fun to see my progress.

Leaving sunny California behind, we drove once again into another cloudy inversion over the Rogue Valley. The little cottage was waiting, all proud and excited to show off her brand new hat. The roofing job was completed with just a few glitches and a little bit over bid, but Mo is happy with it. There was a lot of repair involved, and several layers of roofing, dating all the way back to 1926 had to be removed. Someone asked me to show a photo of the cottage, so here it is again, with the new roof of course.
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We put the MoHo to bed and traveled back over the pass to Rocky Point, relieved that there wasn’t much new snow since we left in mid January. Everything was in good order, with the driveway accessible, the house warmed to a balmy 55 degrees by the backup electric heaters, and everything in good shape.

It is good to be home, but February is really my least favorite month of winter, and if I didn’t have to be working for a couple of weeks, I think we would have just gone back over the mountain and right on over to the coast! Ah well, that will come next month when I return from Florida in early March.
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In the mean time, the sun has been shining daily and the nights are cold. The snow is still very deep and the driveway is completely frozen into a sheet of solid ice. I can’t stand up on it, and when I tried to move the truck it just slid sideways for a bit before deciding to go forward. The only way to get outside and enjoy the sunshine is in the mid afternoon, when I put on the snow pac’s and trudge up an old side road by our place that isn’t completely iced over. I leave it to Mo to get the mail, which entails walking down the glare ice driveway to the sheet ice road to get to Rocky Point Road, completely bare and dry.

Speaking of mail…it doesn’t seem like there is ever anything in there at all except advertising. Not sure I would miss it if I didn’t have it at all, but I know I won’t miss Saturday mail. We don’t put anything in the box that is worrisome, mailing from town if we need to, and we don’t get anything troubling either, choosing instead to receive almost everything electronically. Packages are usually delivered via FedEx or UPS. Lots safer that way, I guess, unless of course everything gets hacked. UhOh. I hear the mood of February sifting into this journal. I have no right to complain at all, I am sitting here with the glare of brilliant sunshine on snow coming through my window and lighting up this room.

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Lots of RV’rs have been talking about mice lately, so I thought I would add my little story to the conversation. I store bird seed in a big, strong, heavy plastic garbage can. We seem to only have ground feeders around in the winter, so I thought that maybe they would appreciate a bit of seed scattered over the snow. Opened the bin to find several very fat, very dead mice in the bottom of the container. Seems as though they figured out how to chew through the plastic, but then couldn’t get back out of the bin. ugh. I don’t do dead things, so whined for Mo to come and fix it. I would hate to live alone at moments like this. I guess we will have to find something stronger to hold the bird seed when those little guys are winter hungry.

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Within a few days of arriving home, I got a call from Heart to Heart Quilters in Merrill letting me know that my first big project, a queen sized quilt, was ready for pick-up. My daughter Melody had the day off, so I picked her up and we drove the half hour south to Merrill together. In addition to picking up the quilt, which was quilted beautifully, we spent a long time in the quilt shop looking at fabric and patterns and day dreaming about the day when I will again tackle a big project and make a bed quilt for her. She let me know that a lap quilt would be nice…but gee Mom, I would really love a big one. I told her she would be lucky to get it in the next ten years. This last big one only took me a few months to finish, and in all fairness, I certainly wasn’t working on it all the time.

I also managed to finish the quilting and binding on the baby quilt for Alison’s newborn little boy. Alison is the wonderful soil scientist who worked for me in California who moved to Florida. I am tickled about the chance to visit her next week while I am in Ocala with my friend Bel, and to deliver the quilt in person. I thought frogs and bugs and blue and green would be a great theme for a little boy who lives in Florida, right?

I will manage to get in a good 80 hours of work before I leave next Thursday for the Sunshine State. Of course, the weather there has been fabulous, with temperatures in the 80’s, and as soon as I get there the highs will be 60 or something. I have no idea why that happens to me when I go to Florida, probably it is because I just don’t get to stay long enough. Mo and I are still having the conversation about next year and my wish for a Florida winter. We will see. In the mean time, we are going to focus this year on getting the cottage in shape and keeping our getaways fairly close to home.
Just thought I would throw in a shot of Jeremy enjoying the lovely new wool hearth rug in front of the fire. I know he is completely sure that I bought it just for him. He is getting so skinny, and of course it shows in the photo. At his prime he was 13 pounds of long limbed lithe beauty and now he is down to less than 8 pounds. He is on special vet food, limited ingredient diet, with a bit of tuna and fresh meat now and then. He is such a sweetie, so personable and loving. At nearly 17, though, it seems that he gets a touch of kitty Alzheimer’s now and then. I read recently about some of the challenges involved with having an “elderly” cat, kind of a bit like an elderly human, I guess. He gets anxious if he can’t see us and they say that is because old cats lose their vision and hearing and that makes them more fearful.
He still loves nothing more than riding on the dash in the MoHo, and waking me up at 4:30 am with a loud purr and that sneaky cat claw chin slap that most cat owners will recognize.
I am excited about my upcoming trip, looking forward to seeing how Bel is doing in person, and most of all looking forward to seeing my daughter Deborah in San Antonio on the way home! I booked a jump flight so I could do both at once, just couldn’t stand the idea of flying over Texas and not getting to see my girl!