A Summer to Remember

Sometimes you just have to be flexible, and the last few months have brought busy times, family times and some problems with our RV. Consequently, we let our blog go unattended. This is an attempt to catch up with a relatively brief summary of June through October 2021.

When I was last writing this blog, we were about to leave Jim and Mary’s RV Park near Missoula, MT. From there we spent 2 nights at Liberty Lake RV Park near Spokane, WA. We stopped there to spend some time with Jodi and Ken, our son in law’s parents. A great dinner and conversation were enjoyed, and we spoke about the grandchildren we share and love.

It is primarily because of those grandchildren that we went on to our next stop: Hells Gate State Park, ID. We met with Jeff, the volunteer coordinator, to discuss us spending a few months there next summer. It’s the closest park to Jake and Julie and the kids. Jeff showed us around and talked about the interpretive work done at Hells Gate. We loved the Visitor Center, the view of the Snake River and decided this would be a good new opportunity for us. After a few emails, we agreed to be there in May 2022 and to stay until that August. Looking forward to learning some new insights into Lewis and Clark and doing some evening programming.

We did a quick trip to Plymouth Park, WA and then Cascade Locks, OR and finally on to McMinnville’s Olde Stone Village where we have often stayed. The Plan had been to spend lots of time with our kids. But things changed and we had to be flexible – Jake took a great job about 6 hours away. He is the Principal of Colfax Elementary School. Colfax is a small Eastern Washington town snuggled into the Palouse Hills. It is a great position, and they bought a house there. So instead of playing with our darlings, we spent most of our 6 days together, packing and then we saw them off to their new home.

July 1^st came, and it was time to start at our volunteer position at Champoeg State Park. Our site there was large and beautiful. We looked out at a lovely view and had great neighbors there. We met with our Supervisor Dan who oriented us to the Visitor Center where we would be working. Our schedule was great – two days on and 4 days off – giving us plenty of time to see Doug’s dad, Creighton. We loved hanging out with him, bringing him lunches and sitting around talking to him. We also took advantage of using his laundry.

My job was mostly inside the Visitor Center which had great displays of the history of the area from the Kalapuya Indians, the fur trade, the development of the first provisional government, and finally the epic flood that destroyed the city of Champoeg. I loved the history and sharing it with our visitors. We showed videos and sold items from the gift shop. The only annoying and stressful part of the job was the stupid register which had connectivity problems, often leaving our customers stuck at that register way too long. But other than that, I loved my job.

Doug’s job was much harder – the Visitor Center is famous for its historic 1860’s Kitchen Garden. Doug (or Farmer Doug, as we called him) spend many hours watering, mowing, hoeing, weeding, and harvesting this beautiful garden. Typical of that era’s gardens, we grew plants to eat, plants for medicinal purposes and plants for beauty. I am not a gardener, but even I loved to walk past the bright pink 4 O’clocks, through the hops arbor and down the neatly trimmed pathways to see the vegetables and flowers.

Doug and I also took on another job – we did a weekly Bat Talk in the campground amphitheater. We enjoyed meeting the campers, talking to the kids who knew so much about bats already and answering their questions. Most nights, a few Little Brown Bats swooped down on us to be the featured stars of the program.

We had a small family birthday party for Creighton who turned 99. With Doug’s brother Nelson and wife Lydia, Bev and Barry we celebrated by eating Dad’s favorite hoagies. We kept it small because of the virus but we had a great time and now are planning the big bash for his 100^th!

During this time, we got to see friends from Kartchner – Jim and Randa joined us for a long, wonderful dinner at a local restaurant. Then Rocky and Chris visited us in Champoeg and brought a delicious quiche for dinner. One of the best parts of our travels is spending time with our wonderful friends. We also took a day trip to nearby Silver Falls State Park.

Our July and August went well until one morning we heard chewing that sounded like it was coming from our bedroom closet. Doug discovered that a squirrel had chewed through the wires to our back-up camera! We had been worried about all those squirrels and this repair was costly and took Doug 3 days to fix.

We decided to leave our pretty (and free) campsite and escape any further damage from squirrels. We went nearby to a campground in Woodburn. From there it was a short commute to Champoeg.

On August 27^th we took our motorhome to McCoy’s Freightliner for routine repair. During the day-long wait, we hung out at Riverfront Park on the Willamette River in Salem. After a quiet nap in our car, we walked into town, had a really nice lunch and then toured the capital building. We spent the afternoon in our chairs gazing at the pretty river.

We went to pick up the motorhome and were totally shocked when the transmission light went on as Doug tested it in the parking lot. It obviously wasn’t driving well. The techs took it back into the bay, and then without any warning, we were homeless! It seemed right from that beginning that this wasn’t going to be an easy fix.

So, we went to Bev and Barry’s house that night. We had grabbed a few things from the motorhome – just our medicine and a few clothes. We expected to be leaving with a repaired home the next day. Well, that didn’t happen. Here’s where we had to be flexible again!

It was a transmission failure even though it is a fairly new transmission with low-mileage and regular maintenance. Nothing happens quickly in these situations – you have to get answers, and no one works on the same schedule. You have to wait until the right “experts” are on duty. Then you have to wait while the ordering is done. We needed a rebuilt transmission. Parts are scarce now. Technicians are even scarcer. One of our delays occurred while our newly rebuilt transmission sat in St. Louis. Then the transmission is on site and COVID swept through the Freightliner facility – 8 technicians were out of commission.

Our total time without our motorhome was 45 days. We spent about half of them at Bev and Barry’s beautiful new home where we had a private bedroom with a full wonderful bathroom. But best of all we had them to keep us sane and be great company for us. Our time there was peaceful, and we are totally grateful to them and their warm hospitality.

Most of this time it was impossible to know how much longer our homelessness would go on. But during one period we knew there was nothing for us to do so drove our car to see the kids in Washington. We’ve done this 6 hour drive a few times now and although the Columbia River Gorge is breathtaking, I mostly just wanted to get there and see the kids. Julie and Jake welcomed us and offered to let us live there forever. It was a special time with the kids, and we loved every minute of it. Sharing their lives, their meals, their playtime is precious to us.

But our health took a hit. The long drive caused a blood clot in Doug’s left leg which meant a trip to first Urgent Care and then the ER and medication and compression socks. Also, our darlings had a bad cold which, of course, we caught. By the end of our week there, we knew we were getting sick. But we were okay for a wonderful First Birthday party for Beckham and got to see Jake’s family.

We sadly left them, drove back to be near the motorhome. We had made arrangements to stay at an Airbnb in Sherwood. By the time we carried in our many bags, we were coughing badly and felt awful. We were happy to be isolated in a beautiful place, but we were really sick while we were there.

After that place we had reserved another place in Newberg – not quite as pretty but again all we did was binge watch TV and cough. It turned out that I had pneumonia and Doug’s cough lasted another month.

We recuperated and didn’t feel like we had any germs left, so we went back to Bev and Barry’s still “patiently” waiting to hear we could get back into our home. We got some good news with an actual date of repair. We took a few days off and went to Cape Disappointment, Lewis and Clark National Historic Park and Astoria. Our little cottage on Long Beach was just a short walk to the beach. The weather was cool and rainy, but I got to walk on the huge empty beach. We wandered around the little town of Long Beach, did some sightseeing; I ate a Dungeness crab cake, and learned more about Lewis and Clark. It was a good break for us.

We still had to kill a few days and we didn’t want to impose on Bev and Barry who were getting ready for their camping trip, so we went to a Travelodge for a few days. It was a peaceful quiet stay there, with decent breakfasts and some simple stuff we brought to eat. Doug had another medical issue – because of the pain in his leg, he seemed to have thrown out his knee so now he has a knee brace but that seems to be something that is getting better.

One of the worst parts of all this was being unable to meet our commitment to Valley of the Rogue State Park, where we were supposed to spend the month of September working with Junior Rangers and doing interpretive and maintenance work. Although we could have driven there, we had no place to live so had to renege on that. We are very disappointed – we hate to not meet our promises and we were looking forward to exploring that beautiful part of Oregon.

Then the day came to pick our home up. Our rig, Meriwether, drove fine and we only drove him a short distance to the Emerald RV Park on October 14^th. While there we got a bonus day with Dad and then went to get brand new tires put on this wonderful motorhome.

The rest of our trip was mostly one-night stays to get south to Kartchner Caverns. We stopped in Canyonville, Redding, Lodi, Coalinga, Boron, Needles, and Gila Bend. So very glad to pull into our winter home!

Now we are firmly ensconced in our site in the Lower Volunteer Village. We pulled in on Tuesday, October 26^th and happily went to our first gathering – a Flamingo – with old and new friends. We will be working three full days with a nice long four-day weekend. After our long homeless escapade, it was a relief and a pleasure to just be in our motorhome, enjoying all that we love about it, but also now camping in the familiar, beautiful state park.

Looking forward to working hard, meeting up with family and friends, getting to see more of the wonders of this area and enjoying the beautiful weather. Our gratitude to everyone who got us through this debacle is immense. We are very lucky in so many ways.

I would like to mention right here our gratitude and appreciation to Bob Tiffin, the CEO of Tiffin Motorhomes. Doug called him to tell him what happened. Bob immediately agreed to pay a third of our cost for the transmission replacement. And he did. We sent him a copy of the bill and a check was in the mail to us a few days later. Now this is amazing customer service! It was one of the reasons we chose Tiffin because we heard about this kind of remarkable service and now, we are happy to be recipients of it.