Happy Independence Day! I hope everyone had a great day with their families and friends! It was in the low 90’s here, sunny and a teeny breeze. I have been inside most of the day doing laundry and getting caught up on “stuff” since getting back from our five day road trip.
I am going to try this a little differently to get caught up…I always have too much to say and can’t get all the pictures to match up and it gets to be such a big project….so I thought I would first tell you what we had been up to and then add entries with pictures later seeing as I am back at the house and don’t have too much planned travel wise in the near future. Then as you have read this entry (hopefully) you might figure out what I am talking about with the pictures…you can always scroll back down to this entry if you need to. When I get overwhelmed with the information you get the point A to point B short version…this is the full version…just no pictures yet.
As most of you know the next few summers Larry is working for a friend hauling to, setting up, and maintaining on site a Helibase Communications trailer at forest fires around the western states when called. He is provided with the truck to haul the trailer and a camper so he is comfortable whether they are staged out in the middle of the forest somewhere or at an airport.
We were asked to pick up the camper for this truck in Yakima, Washington and as we don’t mind traveling and had nothing going on…no problem. We were traveling through some country we hadn’t had a chance to get to in our travels yet and got to revisit some places we hadn’t been to in a really long time.
It was a beautiful drive…with the three weeks of rain northern Nevada and eastern Oregon received last month it was unusually green and lush and the wildflowers…WOW. Sadly this tall grass and vegetation will go dry and brown and create some very intense fuels for wild land fires.
We had a long drive so we left Fallon early in Larry’s work truck loaded up with the stuff we needed for the trip back. We took 95 north which hooked up with 80 east to Winnemucca and then on north on 95. We had never been north of Winnemucca and we were surprised at the terrain and the ranches and little settlements…it wasn’t as desolate as we expected.
As you cross into Oregon the speed drops from 70 to 55…a mistake in our opinion…puts you to sleep it is so slow and boring and people are constantly passing which makes it unsafe. When you can see the same landmark or house for 5 minutes or longer….too slow.
AND the IDIOTS, we were in Idaho where the speed picked back up to 65 and up ahead there was a car stopped in our lane…a two lane highway I might add…no flashers on so I slowed way down and as we went around slowly and looking to see what was the matter….the insane woman had her window down and was talking to a motorcycle driver that was stopped on the shoulder! Not the best place to stop and chat or ask for directions….INSANE and RUDE! Not to mention down right dangerous.
So anyway, Nevada, Oregon, into Idaho and then back into Oregon…we decided to stop for the night at a motel in Pendleton, Oregon, get some rest and then get up early and drive the last few hours to Yakima in the morning.
The trip from Winnemucca to Idaho was all new highway for us and then from Idaho on up to Yakima was new to us also…beautiful, remote country but surprisingly populated…lots of farming and ranches.
We drove 580 miles and eleven and a half hours on our first day…Monday. I helped by driving for an hour or so, the bigger truck was different…it has dualies so I was conscious of that extra tire on both sides all the time.
Our motel in Pendleton was nice and clean and modern, but when they modernized this 50’s era motel within the last decade they slacked on the electric and the soundproofing. I had the coffee maker going and was blow drying my hair and our room went dark….Laugh. So we had to call the desk and they had to go push something somewhere. During the night I could hear someone in a room either next to or below us snoring away…plus for whatever reason someone from the room next to us had to go downstairs at 3 in the morning and talk right below our room….
On Tuesday we were up and out early, we had to be in Yakima at 10:30 to pick up the camper. The motel had a little continental breakfast downstairs which we partook in before we hit the road. We left Pendleton about 7:30, got fuel and headed west on 84 then hit highway 82 west in Washington to Yakima. Washington didn’t get the rain that Oregon and Nevada did and they were very brown…more what we expected to see the whole trip. The orchards and hops were all green of course but the hills were brown, brown, brown.
The camper and truck got whatever was needed done to them so they would work together and then we got the systems walkthrough by one of the salesmen….lordy, what should have taken a half hour took this guy an hour and a half! He was one that you didn’t try to hurry along or we would have been there twice as long…now mind you it wasn’t that we didn’t think there wasn’t anything new we needed to learn…there were a couple of things, but it was all the other stuff that we couldn’t get him past…oh well.
It just illustrated the changes in Larry and I…he played the guys game and just let him go knowing it was the only way we would get out of there while we were still young enough to climb up into the above cab bed. I on the other had kept my serious, stone face…can you get on with it mask on and he kept making comments about making me laugh or smile…geez….like I could sit there through that whole spiel with a goofy smile on my face….NOT. A person that can’t read their customer is annoying because they are convinced they know it ALL about everything better than anyone….that was this guys attitude.
So we finally were able to get on the road back south…without the steps to the camper…they apparently are added on at the dealers and they had sold the last step that was the one we needed. (it will be shipped to us) The door was waaay up there and the bumper was narrow and high too….the first few times I went in Larry had to give me a shove from the rear! I have never been particularly agile…mounting a horse was always entertaining and I have never just hopped over a fence…nope….painful for me and hilarious for whomever I was with! Getting back down out of the camper I looked like a very timid monkey clinging to the handle and the wall feeling for the bumper with my foot and then finally reaching the ground without landing on my back or pulling some vital muscle…laugh!
After leaving the dealers we grabbed a really good hamburger at Miner’s, which seemed to be a Yakima hot spot right next to the mall. We must have missed it when we were in Yakima four years ago…we hosted a month near Yakima in August of ’05…wow, so much time already.
Now we had to drive until we found a Walmart to get all the stuff one needs when staying in a camper and getting the food we would need for our return trip. We wanted to shop in Oregon and it was two and a half hours before we got to the Hermiston, Oregon Walmart. We did pretty good, I made a list and we started at one end of the store and with no backtracking…a very good thing because this Walmart was one of the HUGEST Walmarts we had ever seen…twice the size of most Super Walmarts….we had seen one other like it in the south somewhere. It would have been exhausting to go back to the other side if we had forgotten anything!
We had to get creative in the food/cooking department…no microwave and we had left the box of cookware in our garage…and cookware has, like everything else gotten so expensive we didn’t want to buy something we already had, so we bought a cookie sheet and some frozen meals we could cook in the oven. We were way tired by the time we got to the food so we just got the basics. We still had to get to a campground and get everything put away and figured out in the camper.
It was about 7 p.m. when we left Walmart, we got fuel and then headed on down the road to find a place to stay for the night. We headed down good old US Highway 395 and scoped out the first campground we came to. It was Ukiah-Dale State Park and as it was getting dark it was as good a place as any to stay the night. No hook-ups and we were on a creek, but we were tired and just wanted to get everything put away, have a snack and get to bed.
I haven’t slept in a camper in 25 years and climbing up into that bed being that tired was a chore…I had to use the kitchen counter as a step…humiliating and funny…laughing didn’t help much….I was worried about poor Larry’s eyes! He was still down below and behind me. Though he was so tired I think his eyes were mostly shut.
Here is another bitch note from me to the manufacturer of small spaces…why, why!?! would you put speakers that hang down into a space that is minimal and head knocking to begin with? Why wouldn’t you use flush mount or hang the speakers in the corners pointing back to where you would be lying in bed….NOOoooOOO, they are mounted right in the middle of where one wants to put ones head when maneuvering around in less than two feet of clearance. We both knocked our heads on them and as I type this on Saturday evening I have been informed that they are not there now...Larry says they have been drop kicked through the goalposts of life.
We slept pretty good our first night in the camper…we got a little cold, but I kept the hatch open in the roof above our bed so we wouldn’t die in our sleep from the new smell fumes. They didn’t burn the heater off at the dealer’s so that would have killed us quicker…laugh. We got some stuff moved around…you don’t have hardly any room in a camper and things keep getting moved back and forth until it all gets figured out. We had breakfast, took a little walk and then hit the road.
We left Ukiah-Dale around 10 and drove to check out the town of Ukiah to see how it compared to Ukiah, California…it was smaller than the California town had ever been, one street, remote but in stunningly beautiful country.
We only drove about a few hours or so on Wednesday and got into Clyde Holliday State Park west of John Day around 1:30. Ooh wee…they had showers and they had just finished cleaning them….off I went for a shower…last one was at the motel…I’m not too sure about this roughing it stuff….no laughing…now a days this is roughing it for me… Now I know I can do anything…I could sleep on the ground in a tent again if I had to…but I don’t have to and I don’t want to…ever.
Which brings me to another question….were there always this many bugs in forest campgrounds? The mosquitoes were after our blood and the other bugs just added to the general annoyance. Larry can tolerate sitting in the sun where they didn’t bug him so bad…I can’t handle that much sun so I just got real cozy with my book in the camper. It was nice to laze around horizontally for a bit, then we took a walk…this campground is on a river and they have nice trails to walk that are graveled. We had power and water hook ups. While on our walk we opened all the windows and vents and fired up the heater so it could burn off all of its smells.
We had decided to take the trip back a little easier rather than haul all the way back in a day …no reason to push that hard…plus being in the camper gave Larry time to figure out where to put things, what was needed and what might need changing.
On Thursday morning we took a walk out along the path that goes along the river and then cuts in and meanders along a big Bullfrog pond. That’s what I call it because the frogs were doing their bullfrog croaking and if you stopped and looked hard you could see their big heads poking up out of the water and duckweed all over the place. There was also an Osprey nest that was occupied by a lovely Osprey family…and there were lots of flowers…poppies, yarrow, wild rose and bachelors buttons.
After our walk we buttoned up and hit the road, heading for Burns and then on down to the Lakeview area. We had breakfast/lunch at the Apple Peddler in Burns after getting fuel across the street at 11:37 (Larry just looked at the fuel receipt), and we left Burns about 12:30.
We had been on 395 from Burns to Lakeview five years ago, but it was after dark when we came through then and we missed seeing Abert Lake…we knew it was out there glimmering in the moonlight, but we couldn’t see how big it was and I missed seeing the Abert Rims big square looking block edged top…so impressive…at least to me…I like rocks, mountains and geology; so much energy and violence to create something so beautiful. But then that is just Planet Earth as I think about it…..
Larry decided we would go find Willow Creek Fremont National Forest campground east of Lakeview off of highway 140. We had camped there way back in September 1978….thirty one years ago….really roughing it….though still not on the ground…laugh! We just had a camper shell on the bed of Larry’s longbed pickup truck that he had made a platform in for our sleeping bags, which is where we slept. We had all the usual camping gear…stove, lantern, etc. It was memorable because it was 10 miles down a gravel road and we were absolutely by ourselves in the middle of nowhere and back then I was afraid of everything…though I never wanted to show it. BUT, because we had passed two guys with guns hunting on our way in my vivid imagination kicked in and I was sure they were going to come into camp and rape, pillage and kill both of us. I insisted we sleep with our heads near the door so we could hear well and then the coyotes started howling which just amped my fear up…..Larry of course knew I was afraid and after I finally fell asleep...Larry was awake all night. Needless to say we left there the next morning…we still laugh about it.
Well it is still out there in the middle of nowhere, but I’m not so fearful anymore…thank goodness…very taxing managing all that fear…but the mosquitoes were really, really bad….being on a creek, but I think with all the rain in June and all the vegetation the mosquitoes are just worse. We haven’t been this bothered by mosquitoes since we were in North Carolina… Anyway, after taking a walk we decided to drive higher up and away from the creeks to see if the bloodsucking creatures could be avoided.
We found a track that headed up hill and ended up in an old burn overlooking a beautiful valley and way off in the distance another valley overlooked by a table mountain and the wildflowers again….flowers just everywhere….Indian Paintbrush, Indian Tobacco, yarrow and lots more I don’t even know the names of….three or four different daisy looking flowers, oh and there were a lot of aspens. For the first time in I can’t remember when we were miles away from any road, highway, train, town, people, houses…the only sign of civilization was the occasional jet going over way high up. The birds were our music and the wind whispered through the pines and the aspens were doing their quaking…that was the only sounds…there was the occasional mosquito….until……it was dusk…then it was bombardment of every mosquito within a mile it seemed. They were bouncing off of every screen and doing their darndest to squeeze their little bloodsuckers through the mesh….we had some bug spray and that was the only way we could get the door shut without letting a cloud of them in…whew.
We had a really good sleep, no trains, no one talking, no barking dogs, no booming stereos or racing engines…so peaceful and I wasn’t scared that bigfoot or a crazed bear was going to rip into the camper during the night…nice…ahhhh. We were tempted to stay another night there, but decided to leave the forest to the bugs and the birds and chipmunks, so after a leisurely morning we hit the road around quarter after eleven.
We headed back up the gravel road to civilization and caught highway 140 west back to Lakeview to 395 south and then on back to Fallon through Cedarville and Gerlach….that is one little traveled road through a lot of open rangeland…oddly enough we haven’t traveled south on it before this…always north…different view of all the mountains.
It being the Friday of July 4th weekend we hit a sobriety check point west of town…wow, what a lot of cops and cars from two counties. We got to the house around 6:10 or so and it was 95 and almost that in the house….hit the a/c and then brought our things in and put them away…didn’t take long.
Then it was go through the mail and go through the 50+ emails now that we are hooked up again. It was nice to come home and Larry didn’t have to cut the lawn or pull dandelions…the rocks look just as nice as when we left them….smile. Oh, we traveled about 1,450 miles over this five day trip.
It was a great experience to be able to use a camper again and get out in the wilds….at least as wild as I’ll probably get as far as being out in nature….smile. We just have never been ones to drag our trailer over dirt and gravel roads and cram it back between some trees…to valuable to beat it up so…not to mention the cleanup.
Before it got dark Larry had the camper and truck scrubbed and shiny, it was filthy….we hit a swarm of bees south of Lakeview…pelted us good….just after getting the windshield cleaned of course and Larry had to make a bunch of jokes about the Bee movie…we’ve seen it many times with our grandsons. He even waxed it…
Today he worked on getting his work home cleaned and organized, while I did laundry and cleaned and puttered. I started the day by going to Walmart and getting that out of the way before they got busy with the last minute snack and ice shoppers.
We had a lovely BBQ of zucchini and garlic cooked in a foil packet on the grill, and smoked kielbasa which we put on sour dough bread and corn on the cob….yum…followed by little apple pie blossoms, a nice quiet day.
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