October 2019 – TooBusyForWork

Death Valley

We tried to camp in Valley of Fires on Thursday, but the two rigs in front of us got the last two big sites. We didn’t win that specific lottery, but I will definitely come back another time. Yes, the rocks are really, really red.

We decided to push on towards Death Valley. The plan was to stay at Stovepipe Wells, but the NPS campgrounds was closed due to no campground host. The private campground was full, so we drove south towards Sunset Campground. It is a NPS campground that never gets full; if it is getting close, they just open up an overflow area! Lovely place with a great view of the Funeral Mountains to the east. We stayed there 3 nights than moved into our reservation site at the NPS Furnace Creek campground. Huge site, incredible views, and full hookups! I have tried to score a campsite here for years, but we got lucky this time with the reservation. We will try here until after the 49er Encampment is over on 10 November, then start working our way home.

While we were at Furnace Creek we got a huge windstorm. It came in with a blast at 4:00 am, and it was obvious many weren’t prepared. It was making the slide topper flap so loudly that we ended up bringing in both of the front slides. They are so long, especially the kitchen slide, that the wind can catch them badly. We saw the poor camp host picking up pieces of broken awnings and pop up shelters the next morning. The Texas Springs campground popular with tenters is closed due to no custodians (!!!), so the tenters are forced to stay in Sunset when Furnace Creek is full, which is most of the time.

One of the interesting things at Sunset Campground is the music provided before the Encampment formally opens. A few guys setup a complete stage with sound system, and people come to play and jam. They are always considerate, and the music stops promptly at 9:00 or before for quiet hours. I had a picture, but it was so blurry I am not posting it. They played every night we were there, and it was a pleasant evening listen.

On Saturday we went to Pahrump to eat at a really great Thai restaurant we visit once (or more) each trip – Chat Thai. We actually tried again today, but the were closed! We ended up at Qu BBQ, which wasn’t bad, but the Thai place would have been better. Kevin is making a big Walmart and grocery run while I am posting this. There is no significant data service at the campground because Furnace Creek has a private network, so I have to drive quite a ways to get any service at all. Voice and messages work find though.

We have been able to take some nice 4WD trips though. We visited Echo Canyon, going by Eye of the Needle, and ending up at Inyo townsite and mill. Warning: lots of pictures ahead!

I told you I liked rocks! Look at the itty bitty window at the top.

The washed away parts look like they left a waterfall of rock

Eye of the Needle is appropriately named

Eye of the Needle is actually about 10’ high

Contrary to the sign, the mine was up the hillside quite a ways. This is the remnant of the mill

Fascinating subterranean house in good condition

Lots of artifacts were collected on this table in front of another decrepit building

I can never have too much of the rocks in DVNP

Looking down from the canyon towards Badwater Basin with the Panamint as a backdrop

Today we visited Hole in the Rock and an old travertine quarry.

Rabbitbush is about the only thing in bloom.

My favorite cactus, the many-headed barrel cactus

The weathering looks like little goblin houses

The “Hole in the Wall” is between the light and dark walls, 40-50’ wide and hard to see until you are on it

The quarry where travertine was taken for the Borax Company headquarters in Los Angeles

This has taken way too long! Even in Pahrump I am on a relatively slow data connection, so I am now done. Well, until the next dump of photos from wonderful Death Valley!

Salt Lake City #2 and St.George

It was quite cool and wet on Monday, so we didn’t do an awful lot. We did get some shopping done, and we had a good meeting with our financial planner. We have a short term financial contract that expires next summer, and I will be going on social security next year at age 66. So we really needed to chat face to face about some options. Now that we have talked through it, we can do the rest over email and the phone when the time comes. We ate dinner at a lovely Mediterranean place called Mazzo’s. I recommend it.

Tuesday was a very enjoyable day though. The weather cleared, and the mountains were beautiful. There was no way I could get a good picture, so you will have to take my word for it! We also did a major shopping trip to Trader Joe’s for the last time this year. A follow-on trip to Smith’s grocery stores for a pork butt followed. We were having friends over, and I wanted to make pulled pork. A good rub, a bit of chicken brother, and 60 minutes in the instant pot (plus 20 minutes pressure release) made a gorgeous base for pulled pork.

I decided on a baked potato bar with pork, cheese, broccoli, butter, sour cream, and green onions. I did debate how to cook 10 potatoes in the motorhome. Should I use the “automatic” function? Combo micro/convection but manual? Or do I do it the old fashioned way and just oil them, sprinkle with kosher salt, and bake them at 400 for an hour? I ended up old fashioned because I wanted a nice crisp skin on the potatoes, and it worked. Of course we also had the complication of the campground power going out! I had to run the generator for about 3 hours since I was using the Instant Pot, the convection oven, and the washer and dryer. Luckily no one was around to bother with the noise, though the in-coach generator isn’t terribly loud. Any generator is annoying to me though, but the bigger heating appliances don’t work on battery power.

We did have a great time with a bunch of my choir buddies. They even did the dishes! We were able to finish off the flan too.

This morning we were out of the campground a little after 9:00 am for the drive through town and on to St.George, UT. I timed it so I didn’t have to drive in heavy traffic, but oh my, was the road bad for about 5-7 miles in northern Utah county! It was a construction zone, and the road was uneven and had little wiggles, not curves, just wiggles that were hard to see the marking for. Once we got through that it was smooth sailing.

As we got near Kolob Canyon, the landscape started showing its renowned red rock beauty. The land is so big that I just can’t get a picture of it, but you have probably seen them other places. I started feeling I could breath again in the dry, clear air with space all around.

We are saying at our normal St.George spot, Temple View RV Park. We got a huge pull-through site, and the temperature of 80 degrees at 4:00 pm convinced me I could start wearing sandals again. We sat outside for quite a while, then went to dinner. As we left the restaurant, the hills were just finishing some reflected beauty. Again, my camera can’t capture the breath of the view, but I at least tried.

The view was somewhat spoiled by businesses

But I cut the businesses out of this one.

Tomorrow we head towards Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada. It has a no-reservation campground, so we are going to get there early. Hope we find a spot!

Salt Lake City #1

It isn’t that I think SLC is the best city in the nation/world, but that I expect to have two posts while we are here.

We did have an easy ride through SLC on I-15 because we timed it that way. I have found pretty much any city is the easiest to drive through between 10 and 2, so we cruised through between 12 and 1, arriving at the KOA around 1:30. This is a nice KOA with lots of trees and even some grass. The sites are big for a RV park, with maybe 10’ between rigs. We got settled in and generally just relaxed. The. Verizon signal is ok here, so I downloaded a number of television episodes in preparation for no signal in Death Valley.

Saturday we took a drive to one of our favorite places, Antelope Island State Park. Weather was definitely coming in, and sadly there was quite a bit of haze. I still took a couple of pictures of the mountains across the lake.

The lake surprisingly wasn’t too low, or at least not for late fall. When I first moved to the area in 2012, we could canoe all around the island. Now you can only paddle around the western side because Farmington Bat on the east is only a couple of inches deep near the island. Sad. All the people on the Wasatch Front are using up the mountain water before it reaches the Great Salt Lake.
We also did some shopping. A particularly interesting purchase was a dozen 4 oz. canning jars to make flan sous vide, as described by the server at the Basque restaurant a few days ago. I use my immersion blender to mix these up, and it works great. Here is Kevin’s sous vide setup using a small ice chest.

And inside were 8 jars of flan plus one jar of left over custard.

Sorry for the poor quality. My high res version got deleted!

The results (samples this morning) were fantastic! Smooth and silky, though not easy to get out of the jars.

This morning we went to our old church, First Presbyterian, and I sang in the choir. It was great fun hanging out with my old friends and singing again. A small group of us went to lunch at a great Greek place called “The Other Place.” It has been around for years, but we never went before for some reason. That was definitely our mistake! It has been family run for about 40 years, and the food was food was great. We both had breakfast, but some of our friends have the lunches, and they were huge. I want to come back because they also have liver and onions, a weakness of mine.

Boise

We left Oregon on Monday, headed to Idaho. We are staying at Country Corner RV Park just north of Boise in Caldwell. Nice place. It is about a mile from I-84 so it is remarkably quiet, unusual for a traditional RV park. There are obviously a number of long term residents, but the place is clean and orderly. It was a long drive so we just ate some pre-cooked food from Trader Joe’s. It was, as usual, lovely.

Tuesday we were very lazy. I made a full recipe of puffy pancakes instead of the half recipe I usually make because I wasn’t thinking when I looked at the recipe! It was tasty though. Once we ate breakfast we decided to visit the Boise Zoo. Interesting little place almost right downtown along the river. The weather was a bit cool in the shade, but these three seem to be frozen.

Actually the zoo had lots of statuary all through it, though I didn’t get any other pictures. It was interesting how so many of the animals were lounging the sunniest spot in their areas.

The African exhibit was interesting in that it included interpretations that included the people of the area. There was, among other spots, a section of recreated village and a safari camp set up.

As a long time tent camper, the set up was interesting. Lots of furniture inside the tents.

In general, the zoo still had many of their animals in far too small exhibits though they had done as much as their limited space allowed to improve. They obviously cared about their animals and conservation, but it was still rather sad. I think that is the reason I didn’t take many pictures.

Today we took the Viking Opal 650 sewing machine to a technician in Boise. It has become really hard to change needles. The tech worked on it a bit, but says I probably need a new part, and he didn’t have one. I can get needles in and out with some effort, so I will just wait until I get back to Iowa to get it really fixed. It seems like some kind of an assembly error.

We also ate lunch at the same Boise Basque restaurant we at in the last time we were here: Bar Gernika. It is a small place next to the Basque museum and heritage center. It advertises Basque comfort food, and the lamb grinders we had were excellent. Nice selection of brews too, but the star was the flan! I have never in my life had such silky flan. Luckily our server also does some of the cooking, and he helps make the flan. The key seems to be the sous vide cooking for 2 hours at 180. Since Kevin is always looking for good things to cook with the sous vide system, I am sure we are going to try this.

I also finished the mini-quilt for Lily’s carrier. I used a new technique for binding that uses invisible polyester thread. It looks nice, but I want to make sure we wash it every time we do laundry to make sure it lasts. Isn’t the fabric cute?

Tomorrow we are spending the night in Twin Falls, ID, then on to Salt Lake City.

Motorhome updates and the High Desert Museum

We were just lazily getting around on Friday, taking our time on a cold morning. We did exciting things like some laundry, and then we got our the tape measure again to see how different motorhome furniture would fit in the coach. We currently have one recliner and a huge sofa, and we really want two recliners and a much smaller sofa. We had gone to Countryside Interiors, a big RV furniture company, a few weeks back, and we came away with possibilities and a bunch of spec for sizes. We talked to some remodeling folks in Red Bay, AL, and we just couldn’t get the timing right to order and install the things we want. So we finally decided what models of furniture we want, and we decided to go back to Countryside to order it. The complication was it was 2 1/2 hours away over Santiam pass! We did it though, and we will get the furniture installed when we are at Quartzsite, AZ this winter. I am really excited! We would be able to sell our current furniture fairly easily there too. Then in April we will go to Alabama and Mississippi to get updated carpeting done (what we have now is really inexpensive and it spots dreadfully) plus some cabinet work including a television elevator installed. Yeah! We will then be comfortable for our hopes for trip to Alaska next summer.

Saturday we went to the High Desert Museum south of Bend. What an outstanding place! We started with the exterior exhibits which include a lot of native plants, but the high point for us was a turn of the 19th century farmhouse and sawmill. The interpreters were fully in character, and the entire thing was fantastic.

Sheep were everywhere in the area, so of course they had a sheepherder’s wagon

World War I meant labor shortages, so Caterpillar tractors came into use by “Cat skinners” similar to mule skinners

The sawmill was only used a few times a year for the family and neighbors.

And I do think the chickens ruled the roost

We spent well over an hour visiting the outside exhibits before coming into the indoor exhibits. I don’t have many pictures of them because they keep lighting low to protect artifacts, therefore no flash photography. I did get a picture of some of the animals though.

There was a heat lamp right above where this guy was lying

There were lots of other animals too, but too many people around them to get good pictures. The interpretative exhibits were phenomenal. The Native American one was unique in my experience. It wasn’t oriented toward history alone, but how natives had incorporated their history and culture with that of the Europeans. It was amazing. Summary: if anyone is in the Bend area, make sure you take a few hours to go to this museum.

Today we are just hanging around and doing some repairs and housework. We are leaving tomorrow morning, making our way to Boise for a few days before heading to Salt Lake City. We will see how far we get.

Crater Lake

It was cold last night with a low of 15 degrees under a clear sky. We decided it was too cold to go to the outdoor High Desert Museum, so we decided to take the long trip to Crater Lake instead. Good choice! The sky was clear though there was some haze from nearby prescribed burns. We were lucky with the weather. There definitely was some snow on the ground, but the temperature on rim was in the mid 30s. They generally close the north gate we used and the rim road by 1 November, sometimes earlier depending on snow.

We drove the western side of the rim road first because of the sun direction. Yup, the water really is that blue!

There are lots of color on the rocks from minerals and lichens.

An exposed yellow pumice layer that has eroded into hoodoos

This color is some mineral and some lichen

There is a small island the guidebook calls a ghost ship but I think it looks like an abandoned castle.

We had lunch at the old lodge. It is late in the season, and the menu was limited but excellent. I love eating in the old National Park lodges. Most of the time the food is locally sourced and well prepared, just as today’s lunch was. There was a ranger in the main room giving a presentation to a bunch of school kids, and I learned quite a bit from her about the area as I listened along with the kids.

There is another volcanic cone in the lake, Wizard Island. Interesting looking place. In the summer you can ride a boat there, assuming you can walk down the 1.1 mile trail from the rim and then back up again! The boats are all stored for winter this late in the season.

There was a prescribed burn southwest of the lake.

There are other obviously volcanic peaks in the area. Here are two that I don’t know the names of.

We enjoyed the trip, but it isn’t a place to return to in my opinion. We did have an excellent trip to Trader Joe’s as we came into Bend, so it was a truly excellent day! I miss Trader Joe’s sooooo much.

A lazy sewing day

Kevin and I decided to just play catch-up today. He needed to get some things for the motorhome, and I really needed to get the fabric for a quilt cut out. We did have brunch at a place called Mo’s Egg Place, and I was pleasantly surprised. They had lovely pumpkin pancakes, and Kevin said his biscuits and gravy were pretty good.

After brunch, Kevin went looking for a thermostatically controlled extension cord and a tiny ceramic heater to use in the wet bay. It is going to be 15 degrees tonight, and the bay needs a bit of extra help with temps that low. We are running on our tanks, not connected to the campground facilities. That keeps external hoses from freezing. Our neighbor next door didn’t do that, and his hose was frozen this morning. Kevin loves shopping, and he took about 3 hours looking for the items in various stores in Bend and Redmond. He was successful,with the heating supplies, but he couldn’t find the specific screws he needs to repair a small piece of plastic trim around the basement slide out, so he just left again.

I needed to get a new quilt cut out, and I got it done! I had to review the pattern (lots of colors and pieces), starch all the fabrics (lots of bias edges on this one), then cut lots of pieces. Here is the result.

The arrows are various gray tone low contrast fabrics and the background is a dark gray. There will be a single red arrow, and I will have it turned the other direction. I bought the fabric as a kit, and I am quite happy with the fabrics. However there are a few extra pieces that I worry about! I had a friend who makes custom cutting templates make plexiglass templates for the flying goose parts (the arrow heads). Well worth the money! Thanks Diane. I don’t think I will get the sewing machine out yet since we will be sightseeing tomorrow (though we haven’t decided where yet).

Cascade Scenic Byway

We woke up to nice temperatures (mid 50s), but that was the best part of the day. A storm front is moving in, and temperatures are going to get much colder over the next few days. We figured we had better get moving on our next scenic drive. The problem was there were so many clouds we couldn’t see a lot! We drove right by Mt. Bachelor, and all I could see was the bottom of one chair lift. Sigh. There was some natural snow left from last week’s storm in the shady spots, and the ski resort was obviously making snow too.

We did enjoy one detour on the route. We went to the historic Elk Lake Guard Station from 1929. It is owned by the Forest Service and serves as an interpretive center these days. Sadly it was closed for the season, but we took the old road around Elk Lake anyway.

The big thing today was definitely lava. There were lots of cinder cones and lava fields everywhere, either huge flows or fingers that snuck in here and there.

We do some productive things in Bend like going to the grocery store and pharmacy. Great fun /sarcasm. But it has to be done. We have been having bad luck with grocery stores, but I picked up some good ground beef and some salmon. I made meat loaves in individual silicone cupcake holders tonight. The pound of hamburger made 10 cupcakes. I used the combo setting on my convection/microwave to cook 5 of them, and they were yummy. I am freezing the remainder for a later meal. Tomorrow night I will bake the salmon. I have discovered I am much better with baked salmon that I ever was cooking it in a pan or on a grill. Even Kevin, not fond of most fish, likes it baked.

It is going to be cold enough tonight (25 degrees) that Kevin put the water and waste hoses away in the bay. Those freeze easily since they are narrow. The motorhome itself will be fine to 25 without doing anything else since the wet bay is heated by the same furnace that is used in the living space. It never gets as warm since it is only one vent, but is does fine with a low in the mid 20s. However it will be much colder the next two nights (15 and 19) so he also put an incandescent trouble light in the wet bay. We keep a remote thermometer in there to monitor, and that should be enough to keep the water flowing. The daytime highs will be 50 or above, so that helps too.

I think we are just staying close tomorrow. Hopefully I can get a quilt cut out. Oh, and I got a request for some toys from my daughter, so I may do some there too. It might even let my back recover some. It has really been killing me since I got a bad back spasm a week or so ago.

Out of the rain forest!

We spent the weekend at the KOA outside of Albany. It was time for full hookups and laundry! We were able to get some prescriptions refilled, stock up on some more food, and generally just enjoyed staying “home”. We had hoped to go directly to the Bend area, but the weather was just too iffy.

Sunday we headed north on I-5 back towards Portland, Sandy, and Mount Hood to get a less strenuous climb over the mountains. We don’t have traction devices for the motorhome, and the ODOT website said we needed them to drive Santiam Pass on Hwy 20 towards Bend. It wasn’t a bad drive, and the views of Mt. Hood were again spectacular. We decided to stay in Redmond, north of Bend a few miles, at the Deschutes Fairgrounds. Very nice full hookup sites with long concrete spaces, a small patch of grass, and extra pad for the car, all for $35 a night. My back has been acting up again, and I was in real pain, so we planned on just hanging around the motorhome again. Warmth and lots of acetaminophen have been helping, so we decided to drive the McKenzie and Santiam Passes Byway after a lovely brunch at the local Pancake House (yeah for Dutch baby baked pancakes!).

The Road climbs out of Sisters to give some great views.

Mount Washington through a bit of haze from a proscribed burn

Toward Santiam Pass we took a detour to Camp Sherman, a lovely little community of (mostly) summer homes along the Metolius River, a National and state scenic river.

Camp Sherman along the Metolius River – gorgeous

After crossing into the west side of the Cascades at Santiam Pass, we were back into the dark, cold, and pretty dreary rain forest. It did have a few redeeming features though.

Sunlight through trees on the west side of the Cascades

These little mushrooms seemed like they were growing out of this low rock edging, though it was covered with moss

I really do appreciate the rain forest, but I am very tired of feeling closed in with greenery everywhere. Luckily the forest did open up as we headed back east.

The lava flows neat McKenzie Pass were amazing. Kevin describes them as having the appearance of a huge plow being used in wet ground, leaving grooves and big clumps of rock. It is astonishingly rugged, and some are very recent. This flow is estimated to be only 2000 years old, but a few trees were trying to take hold.

At the edge of a lava flow, a tree is trying to grow

Mount Washington from the other side showing the scars of the big fire and lava flows

The foreground of this picture is lava, the middle ground the remnants of a huge fire in 2003, and then Mount Washington rises up again. Impressive!

Tomorrow we plan on driving the Cascade Lakes Byway and going to some museums and interpretive centers.

Highway 101

We left the Marina RV Park on Sunday just before noon and moved an entire 2 miles down the road to South Beach State Park. We did do a few things around the Marina area. Here is a picture of he bridge I managed to drive over. It might not seem to big to many, but I am terrified of heights! I psyched myself up before hand, stared only at the roadway, and did my calming breathing.

There are a number of lighthouses around. This one is a state park just the south side of the bridge. It is no longer operational, but pretty cool to see.

There is a newer light on the north side of the bay. I couldn’t get a decent picture because of the rain and my lack of mobility, but you can at least get an idea about it.

We enjoyed just sitting by the beach in Newport and watching the people. I was hobbled to much to join them, but it looked like they were having fun.

South Beach is a lovely place with big sites, most with quite a bit of shade. It is very quiet at night, though it has been too cold and rainy to do much sitting outside. We planned to ride our bikes a lot here, but I got another back spasm! I was completely hobbled most of Monday and still some today. The beach is only a 1/4 mile from the campground on a combination bike/pedestrian path, so hopefully I will get better soon.

We have found some interesting plants. This is a Western Strawberry Tree. Even the red (ripe?) berries were hairy and hard.

Another one I had never seen before was this one with tiny pink/white flowers. I have no idea what it is, so if anyone know, please tell me!

Yesterday we took a trip to Junction City to see about some furniture options for the motorhome. We currently have a huge sofa with a queen sized bed plus a single recliner. We would really like a smaller sofa and two recliners or theater seating. They did have some options, but it sure needs a lot of thought. On the way back we drove 101 from Florence back to Newport. There are some famous sights along here, especially Thor’s Well and he Spouting Horn. We were lucky to catch both when the tides was right to show off.

Thor’s Well fills some from the surf on top, it mostly from holes in the rocks below the surface. The video link needs to be clicked to view.

Not quite centered, but after the water runs away

This mist from Spouting Horn comes from surf forced into a tiny crack that explodes upwards like a geyser.

Today we drove north from Newport. A few sights.

Devil’s Pinchbowl fills through the caves below it.

There were lots of people on the beaches. Note the two trees on a barren rock island.

We basically just pulled into every wayside we found, and there were lots of them. We were happily surprised to see four gray whales too – two singles and another pair. We kind of followed them south down the coast for a good while. You can always tell where the whales are when you see 4-6 whale watching tour boats in the same area. 😀 Both Washington and Oregon have gone to great lengths to provide access to their beaches. One spot we stopped at even had some Tillamook Ice Cream! I had chocolate with more chocolate. Yum.

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