November 30, 2015: Heading South
Sunday morning, November 1, came with mixed feelings. While
we were certainly ready to hit the road after spending October in one place, we
were sad to leave a place we love and people we really like. I hope we see the
same folks next year. We signed up again for October 2016 before we turned in our
keys and books and pulled out.
As I mentioned in the last report, we have catching up on coach maintenance and repairs, starting with the transmission
fluid replacement in Salt Lake City,
then new tires and rebuilding the Aquahot heating system in Tillamook. Our
first stop on the way south was Eugene,
OR, for our appointment at Kaiser
Brake and Alignment. Kaiser specializes in heavy truck and RV chassis work. We wanted to get the front end aligned to match the
new tires and get the engine coolant (14 gallons!) changed, too. All
went well until the road test, when they didn’t like something about the
brakes. Ripley is our first coach, so I don’t have any basis to judge what
does and does not “feel” right. Back at the shop it wasn’t good
news. The front disk brakes had been incorrectly serviced with the wrong grease, and the calipers were frozen on the pivot pins. The calipers had to be removed,
cleaned and flushed, and new pads installed. Luckily the disks were still good. The rear drive axle brakes hadn’t
been serviced properly either, and needed new drums and new shoes. The only good
news was that the tag axle brakes “just” needed disassembly, cleaning, lubrication
and adjustment. What we thought would be several hundred dollars turned into
almost $3,000. As painful as that was, we should be able to count on at least 5
years before having to repeat any of these items. We are now completely caught up on all maintenance and are confidently looking forward to heading east next
spring.
We stayed at Armitage
Park campground in Coburg,
just north of Eugene.
It is another of the really nice Lane County parks like Richardson Lake,
where we stayed in September. Armitage is a very attractive, spacious
park laid out along the banks of the McKenzie
River. It is much smaller
than Richardson Lake, but the camp sites are huge. We
stayed in site #8, a pull through that was so long that we didn’t have to
unhook the car dolly going in, and still had room to park the car in front of the
coach when we did unload it. Armitage even has cable tv at each site, unheard
of at publicly owned parks. We’d go back to Armitage in a shot.
We stopped in Grants
Pass, OR, for a
couple of days last year and had differing opinions of the area, so we decided
to visit again. Beaver Creek RV Park turned out to be a quiet, comfortable, friendly
place with all the amenities that we needed. It’s located just north of Grants Pass in the small town of Merlin,
not far from the Rogue River and the Rogue River – Siskiyou National Forest. The park is home to a large flock of Canadian geese that really got Schroeder’s
attention!
It is also about 6 miles from Wilderness Images, a really
interesting place that does great work rehabilitating wild birds and animals.
If the patients can’t be successfully released back to the wild, they are
provided lifelong homes at the refuge. Eagles, hawks, vultures, bears, mountain
lions, and many other birds and creatures live out their lives in relative
comfort and security in return for being gawked at several times a day. Many of
them do seem to enjoy being the center of attention, though.
 |
| Over 1 million beads on this bear |
Grants Pass is also home to Fire Mountain Gems, one of the largest suppliers of beads and beading related products in the world. They carry over 280,000 items, a dazzling array of shapes, colors and sizes sourced from every corner of the world. When Kayeanne discovered that tours are given there was no question of what we were going to do one afternoon. The whole operation seemed very well managed. I was very interested to hear that they did all of their own web design, hosting and creative in house. They clearly have a very capable staff. The founders still own and run it, too. Pretty impressive.
We had heard many good things about Ashland, OR. Among other things, it is the home of the longest running Shakepeare festival in the world. It turned out to be just as nice as promised, although the festival was closed for the season. We spent three nights at the Point Campground in Emigrant Lake County Park.
Although the lake was closer to pond size due to the drought, the setting was really peaceful and quite beautiful. We just about had the whole place to ourselves, too. Located three or four miles from downtown Ashland, it was about perfect. Ashland has a large, active Unity church and Kayeanne enjoyed attending on Sunday.
With more than two weeks before we needed to be in St. George
to see Liesa and Luis for Thanksgiving, we spent a lot of time pouring over
maps, checking the weather forecasts and flogging the internet for campground
information. We really wanted to go east across Oregon, through Klamath Falls and
then head south on US 395 down eastern California to Reno, but the weather
already looked too cold with many places expecting snow (!!). We avoid snow or
worse, freezing rain and sleet at all costs, so that route was put aside for
warmer weather. We had already been up and down the coast a couple of times, and
even the best coastal route added about 400 miles to the trip. We
reluctantly focused on the most direct route, straight down I5. Neither of us
like I5 very much. It is fairly rough and pretty boring once you get south of Redding, but it is the
shortest way to St. George. Once we resigned ourselves to it, we decided to make the best of it and revisit one of our favorite areas, Grass
Valley and Nevada City, CA (see blog #5).
About the only place to stay in that area is the Nevada
County Fairgrounds RV Park. As I said the last time we stayed here, the setting
is beautiful but the RV park should be an embarrassment to the area residents and the fairgrounds trustees.
I don’t think it has seen any upkeep in years. The sites are gravel and very
unlevel, the roads are dirt and any rain turns the place into a quagmire. The
restrooms and showers look like something out of a prison camp film. And then they charge $10 a day for a picnic table! Whoever is in charge of the place should be fired.
That said, we really enjoyed revisiting Grass
Valley and Nevada City. Last year, Ed
and Christine Woznicki camped with us and we toured several interesting places
related to the area’s mining history. The private tour that we got of the North Star Mine Power House Museum was especially memorable for me. This year we kicked back and spent a lot of
time just walking around the fairgrounds and through both towns.
Try as we might, we just couldn’t find an interesting place to
stay between Nevada City and St. George. Every place we looked at was either already getting snow, too cold, way
off track or sounded crumby when we looked it up on the web. Finally, in some
desperation, we looked at…..Bakersfield.
We were surprised to discover that Bakersfield
is becoming a snowbird destination. Several recently built parks have gotten strong
reviews and offered reasonable prices. With some trepidation, we made a choice and headed down the road to A
Country RV Park, on Rt 58 just east of the city. The park turned out to be
quite nice, immaculately maintained, with large paved sites and all the
amenities. It was too cold to use the pool, but the nice showers and the
laundry got a workout. About the only drawback was noise: this park is located
next to the freeway and across the highway from a very active train line.
Bakersfield
turned out to be better than we feared; it even has a Trader Joe’s. I’m not a
big movie fan, but I did want to see The Martian, so one evening off we went.
It was a great movie, keeping me on the edge of my seat the whole time. It
actually wasn’t too implausible, either.
We took a day trip to Kernville, about 40 miles east of Bakersfield. Kernville is
located on the Kern River which feeds Lake Isabella
(more like Isabella Pond now) and is very popular during warmer weather
for river rafting, fishing and camping. We about had the town to ourselves at
this time of year. We can heartily recommend Cheryl’s Café, where we had
excellent cheeseburger soup, really good burgers and great fries. The dogs were
thrilled with the leftovers.
We returned to Bakersfield
on a couple of my favorite motorcycle roads, through Bodfish, Havilah and Walker Basin. It was great to see that country
again; the curves never seem to end and the cows still hang out on the road. I hope that area doesn’t get
“discovered” anytime soon. It really is pretty special.
After a week(!) in Bakersfield
it was time to head for St. George. It is roughly 400 miles, usually more than I
like to drive in one day. The plan was to cut the trip in half by spending a
night at the Escapees Pair-A-Dice RV Park in Pahrump,
NV. We got a reasonably early
start and arrived at the turnoff to Pahrump much sooner than expected, so
we decided to push right through to St. George. The coach is much easier to
drive with the new tires, so I wasn’t too tired when we arrived.
We usually stay at Willow Wind, a nice park in Hurricane, about
15 miles from St. George, but the drive back and forth to Liesa’s house two or
three times a day got pretty old when we were there in August. This trip we decided to stay in town despite the
higher cost. Temple View RV Resort is only a mile or so from downtown St.
George and less than 10 minutes from Liesa’s place. It is a larger park than we
usually stay in, with a few hundred spaces. The majority of the sites have
permanent residents in park model (non mobile) RVs, but still had almost one hundred
sites for transients. The esthetics could be better and it needs a real dog
park, but overall it fit the bill giving us easy access to Liesa and Luis (L
& L). Good cable tv and usable wifi went a long way to making us happy, too.
L & L did a great job on their first Thanksgiving
dinner. The turkey was done just right and all the supporting dishes were very
good, too. Kudos to both of them. Liesa got her Utah drivers license a couple of weeks ago,
so we went car shopping and found a nice Toyota Rav4 for her. Our close friends
Ted and Judy Anderson drove from California to see the coach, visit Liesa’s apartment and spend the evening catching up. They
are Liesa’s godparents and hadn’t seen her for over three years, so there was a
lot to talk about. All in all, the week passed quickly and we really had a good time.
Just over a week after we arrived, it was time to move on. We headed to Simi Valley on November 30, to spend a week visiting friends. We will be in the
Temecula-Hemet area through Christmas, and then on to Yuma for the New Year.
More soon,
Bob
