Goose Lake SP, Oregon 6-6-08

I’m back! I just can’t seem to get up any enthusiasm for telling you about our daily walk, our trip to the library, my watercolor painting or Larry and I sitting and reading. We spend a lot of time talking and fixing the world but who listens to us?

The last few days we were preparing to hit the road again, so it was load stuff back into the trailer, cut the lawn, set the sprinklers, return books to the library and clean the house. I think it is nice that I clean the house before we leave so the spiders can enjoy it!

We pulled away from the house in Fallon at 8:40. We stopped in Fernley to fuel up, it was five cents cheaper then in Fallon. Then we headed up highway 447 past Pyramid Lake through Gerlach up to Cedarville where we headed west on 299 and then north on 395 to New Pine Creek, Oregon right on the border of California. Then just a mile west down the road to Goose Lake State Park.

The drive is one of my all time favorites. There just isn’t much in the way of civilization. Once we get out of Fernley we went through less than a dozen little dinky towns, I think Cedarville was probably the biggest. There are ranches and lots of open range land on the Nevada side. More irrigated farming going on once we hit California. The Surprise Valley is gorgeous and very green except for the very large dry alkali lake and is rimmed by mountains.

Larry flushed out a Horned Lizard, he almost stepped on it; we were walking around checking out the vegetation several miles east of California. I don’t know what this scrubby bush is but they appeared to be blooming in colors from yellow to red, up close it looked like the new growth was various colors, but after looking at my close-up photo of one it looks more like some kind of strange flower.

There was one area where for miles the wildflowers were stunning. Reds, oranges, different shades of yellow and a deep blue/purple…we never found a safe place to pull out to get pictures. It was the east side of a summit and after we started descending the vegetation started changing so less flowers.

I read very little when we are traveling since we started Full-timing. Any time we traveled in the past I always had my nose in a book…now, a lot of that was on the highways in California…boring, for the most part and we went back and forth over the same roads a lot. Today I would have missed the wildflowers, the Golden Eagle, the Bald Eagle and numerous other raptors, creeks and views.

This is our first time back to Goose Lake since we hosted here three years ago. We LOVE it here. It is very well kept, nice trees, birds and wildlife and QUIET! Even more relaxing this time because we aren’t working. It is very green right now and the lilacs are in bloom. We will probably stay a couple of nights. We even lucked out and hit Oregon’s State Park day and tomorrow we can “camp” for free. We have water and 20 amp power here, there is a dump station, the sites and roads are paved and it is $16 a night. No pull-throughs but quite a few sites are long enough for us to stay hooked up in if we want to.

We arrived here around 2:10 and we traveled 243 miles. It felt good to be back in the trailer and on the road again. It has only been a month since we returned from New Mexico but that feels like a life time ago already!

We will be in Albany, Oregon for a month. Michelle graduates from College on Thursday and then Seth’s 4th birthday is on Saturday. After the July 4th weekend we will head to Sutherlin, Oregon and hang there for a month until after my Family’s annual reunion and then who knows? We plan on heading back to Fallon unless something else comes up. With fuel prices being what they are hanging out longer is cheaper than going back and forth.