Month: August 2015

Bits and Pieces

They are like tents on platforms but have a simple interior wooden structure.  They have electricity, an electric heater, a table and chairs, a futon like couch/bed and a full sized/twin sized bunk bed.  The outside deck is covered and has a picnic table with a ramp leading up to it.  They are $15/night more than a regular campsite.  There are two where you can have a pet for an extra $10/night.  Every one was occupied every night we were here.

Actually, the park ranger said that every site was reserved and paid for every night we were here.  A very few were vacant but that is because the reservation holder was delayed or did not show up.  If a site is unoccupied for two nights they call to find out if the site can be released.  Even the camping area for hikers and bikers was mostly full every night.

There are many here from British Columbia.  Three of the five campground hosts are from BC.  Lots from Washington.

And cats seem to get special attention.

Crabs

One day we drove down to Garibaldi at the north end of Tillamook Bay.  It is a big fishing port.  Lots of boats and a great restaurant for fresh fish, the Fisherman’s Corner and a good place to buy fresh fish, the Garibaldi Cannery.  We stopped there to get crab, four 2 lb crabs to be exact.  And it was about $80.  They were cooked and on ice.  The lady who was working that day had her nine year old daughter helping out. The young gal finished cleaning the crab (remove the top shell and the nasty bits inside and on a few, the nasty bits outside). We loaded it into a cooler and headed for Judy and Bruce’s place.  Sorry no pictures were allowed. The table was covered in several layers of the New York Times, plates, drinks, bowls full of crabs ready to be torn asunder and bowls at the ready to receive the refuse. It was so messy that no one wanted to touch their camera. It was all fingers, fists, wrists and elbows until the poor fellows had given their all. And empty bowl on one side, shards filled the other bowl. I think they had to hose off the deck after we were done.

Eggs Mex Benny

Susan and I made Eggs Mex Benny one morning for the four of us. They are a fluffy, buttery buttermilk biscuit with sharp cheddar cheese, roasted corn and spicy chopped green chilis topped with cheesy scrambled eggs or poached eggs and a bold chorizo sausage gravy, a melty white mexican cheese and salsa.

The table (cleaned after the attack of the crab eaters) ready in full color.

And Eggs Mex Benny.  Yum.

Wanda’s for Breakfast

A local favorite is Wanda’s in Nehalem mostly for breakfast but lunch too. We got there at 10:00 hoping for breakfast at 10:30.  If was closer to 10:45.  Which is pretty normal.

No need to be impatient.  No more pictures, just eating. It was worth the wait.

Burritos

Cool hot poster. There was a great burrito shop.  Giant two person burritos for $6.50.  No sales tax in Oregon.

Stormy Weather

And the last couple days we were here it was stormy.  

But the deer fawns don’t seem to mind.

We are leaving in the morning and are almost all ship shape and Bristol fashion.  A couple quick things in the morning and we will be ready for a 9 ish departure.  Off towards Bend, OR then Ontario, OR then Idaho Falls, ID and finally up to the Grand Tetons National Park and Yellowstone National Park.  Four days on the trail, trying to avoid where we have been and the fires.

Lots more from there, I hope the internet connections and speed are better.

Roger and Susan

 

Riding the Trails

And the airport runway.

And then back into the campground where everyone seems to bring everything.

And the string.

And the sun goes down on another day.

More later,

Roger and Susan

Riding the Rails

Off we went. 

 

More exciting for some than others.

Through the woods and valleys.

Yes, that is smoke, lots of smoke, enough to make your eyes water and your throat raspy.  Massive fires in Washington, more than 1/2 million acres are burning.  A huge fire near Bend Oregon and the even bigger John Day fire in central Oregon.  This past winter’s snow pack in the mountains was about 10% of normal, much less rain in the coastal mountains and the Willamette Valley and much warmer than normal temps. 

We ate our lunch on the way up the valley.  We got as far as we could and stopped.  The engine disconnected and switched on to a parallel siding and backed down hill and then came up behind the train to reconnect so that they could pull us back down.  That was the plan anyway.

The front of the locomotive couldn’t connect to the other end of the train. So after several tries they went back around to the front of the train, connected there and pushed us back down.  Took some extra time but who was in a hurry.

When we got back to Wheeler …

Susan and I went to visit an Art Deco antique store.  What a knock out! The owner claimed he had the largest collection of Art Deco collectable stuff in the US.  No way to judge but there was room after room of amazing stuff.  We are familiar with the style, not exactly our style or time frame of preference, but this was amazing.  

And there was a fantastic fabric shop where Susan spied some old style heavy oil cloth that she figured would make a great picnic table cloth.  The store was mostly about quilting, hundreds and hundreds of bolts of beautiful quilting fabrics, lots of quilts hanging on the walls, a sewing machine near the front window busy sewing. They had some silky soft faux-leather upholstery fabric that caught my eye. 

So another adventure.  It makes us want to take the train from Duluth up the North Shore, something on our list for a long time, something we will do sooner than later now.

More later,

Roger and Susan

Wow, almost two weeks here at the Oregon coast have flown by.  It seems like we have been busy all day, every day.

I am going to try to catch up.  Judy and Bruce left yesterday.  They have a big wedding to go to.  We spent most of yesterday on the beach.  Internet access and speed here is not great especially uploading so I am goimg to try to do a few shorter blog entries (what I was planning on doing all along but busy got in the way).

Hug Point 

One day we drove up to Hug Point.  Parking was very limited and we were there at low tide, a popular time.  When the tide is out you can walk around two points to the north, each revealing another beach and one to the south.  Many years ago before there were roads along the coast and travel was mainly along the beaches a road was blasted through one of the points to let wagons through.  You can still see where the road went.

Well sort of.  On the left you can see the notch where the road went through the rocks.  Big high cliffs here and lots of caves.

There is a waterfalls here too but it has been so dry around here that the little dribble hardly made the rocks wet.

Most of this coastline is volcanic in history.  The Pacific tectonic plate is pushing under the coast line, push it up, bending it, folding it and forcing the coastal mountain range up.  Mount St Helens is maybe 100 miles from here.

We brought a picnic and our kites.  Not much wind though.

Hunter (12) needed something other than his phone to do.  So I took the two walking sticks and stuck them in the sand about 30 ft apart and said “Lets play horseshoes!”.  Hunter says we don’t have horse shoes so I say lets use sandals.  OK.  After some negotiation about how many points we were going to play to we got started. It took several tosses before we started to get the hang of it, how to hold the sandal, how much oomph it needed.  The game was on.  We were almost to the end of the first game and I said this is just the first round, wait until you see the second one.  So after round one, round two was the same game but we had to face the other way and toss the sandals backwards and over our heads.  Why not?  Nothing beats fun for having a good time.

See the flying sandal?  That is a round with Bruce.  It was fun and different.  Maybe a bit goofy but just what two people whose average age is 39 needed to do.

More later,

Roger and Susan

We made the long drive (35 miles) from Netarts Bay north up to Nehalem Bay State Park. This park is right on the ocean (a dune between the campground and the beach) and has 307 campsites, a large horse camp, a small airport and airport camping and many miles of ocean beach. Nehalem Bay is where the Nehalem River flows into the ocean. There is fresh water fishing in that part of the bay.

At the beach house it is a lot of interaction with mobile devices.

I did manage to get Hunter and Bruce to fly kites.

The campsites are reasonbly well spaced and have trees. Our site has shade almost all day long.

The beach is just over the dune on a path that starts out in the trees, climbs over the dune and then out on to the beach.

The beach here is several miles long and very wide and flat.  Even with the dune between us and the surf we can hear it all night long.  Nice.

Judy and Bruce’s place is up towards the far end of the beach in Neahkahnie.  They are one street up from the beach and have a great view.

The other end is a long way away.  

We walked almost to their place along the beach and back one day.  That was a 14,000 step day.  The next day we walked out from the State Park and into Manzanita and then to their place all along the bike route so we knew where that went.  That was a 15,000 step day.

We saw deer along the way on a watered lawn.  They seem completely unconcerned with people.

We had a campfire and a weenie roast the day before the state wide burning ban went into effect.  I baked home made hot dog buns as an experiment.  They were good.

More to do, more to come, Later.

Roger and Susan

“Saturday morning. The sun is out. Off to the Farmer’s Market in Tillamook.  It was about half farm stuff and the rest craft things.  I got a nice wood block printed T-Shirt.  I just don’t have enough of them. And corn and beans and tomatoes and blue berries and black berries and peaches, oh my! It was a whole block of near downtown Tillamook both sides of the street.  There was music and ready to eat hot food too.

This was a fire department water truck.

And a 1939 John Deere.  Looks just like the one in a Foyle’s War episode.

And a spectacular 1951 Dodge Power Wagon with front and rear engine driven winches.  Very brutish looking.

And many single cylinder stationary gasoline engines. The box on the top with the hole in it held water for cooling. A governor would limit the speed by only allowing the engine to fire about once every 15 revolutions.  As it started to slow down the governor would allow the intake valve to open and the engine would fire, “chug”  and the the flywheel would keep spinning, and what ever it was hooked to kept working.  Water pumps were very common.  A gallon of gasoline would last almost two days of continuous use. 

You can see and hear one of these engines run on youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nV4yDOc3TA

Here is a gasoline engine driven Maytag washer.  There were many of the engines for these around but just this one functional washing machine.

And a Minneapolis Moline tractor.

Then we drove up the coast a bit to Garibaldi where we had a very nice lunch of local fresh caught fish.  This is a working harbor with lots of fishing boats.  They seem to mostly favor very large outboards.  Getting out of the harbor and through the surf looks challenging.

This 26′ boat had two 350 hp outboards.  There was another of similar size with two 400 hp engines.

Sunday we went to the beach.  It felt good to be on the beach.  The ocean is beautiful here, bright blue sky, white clouds and very green hillsides behind us.

Our beach chairs worked well.  We brought a lunch and enjoyed a day doing not much else.

Tomorrow we move about an hour north to Nehlem Bay State Park.

More later,

Roger and Susan

Netarts Bay is about 30 miles south of Nehalem Bay, down US 101.  This is a very windy narrow road, lots of hills and some of the worst pavement, dips, bumps and uneven roadway that we have seen. I am glad that we aren’t going very far on it and at the same time sorry to see it in such tough shape.

Its Oregon, its the coast, its summer, its cloudy and its rainy.  Actually better than the 90s and 100s we have seen over the last couple weeks.  Netarts Bay is famous for crabs and clams and oysters. The tide was out as were the clam diggers.

We thought Pheasant Ridge was a bit tight but this is even closer, but that is OK.  We are here and there is lots to do in this area.

The guy across from us spent an hour moving in and out, a little to the right, a little more to the right trying to find just the right spot and when he was all done he still couldn’t get one of his slides all the way out.  And then he was putting down wooden blocks and trying to level his coach on hydraulic jacks.  It made me pretty happy to have a computer controlled air bag leveling system on our Foretravel. Push one button and the coach levels itself.

This morning (Friday) it was seriously misting so we went off in search of indoor things to do.  

First stop the Tillamook Cheese plant for a tour, samples and what ever else there was to see and learn.  Everyone else had the same idea. It was packed. Tillamook County has quite a bit of flat land along the Tillamook River where there are many dairy farms from as far back as the mid 1800s.  Cheese has been made here for a very long time.  The Tillamook Cheese brand is actually a co-op owned by the farmers and workers.  1.76 million pounds of milk come to the dairy every day.  Every day they turn out about 176,000 pounds of cheese, mass quantities of cheese. And yogurt and ice cream too.  On average cows produce 70 pounds of milk a day (isn’t that amazing!).  So that is the milk from more than 25,000 cows getting milked twice a day.

This is not a very good picture.  Shot at an angle through glass, it is not focused well and the color came out odd.  They were packaging one pound bricks of cheddar cheese. The cheese is made in enormous closed vats that each turn 60,000 lbs of milk into 6,000 lb of cheddar cheese three times a day. The new cheddar cheese is pressed and cut into 42 pound blocks that are wrapped and sealed in plastic and sent off for aging.  In the picture above the 42 pound blocks are cut into 1 pound bricks.  All the scraps go into making shredded cheese. The bricks are weighed, wrapped, sealed, boxed, the boxes go into bigger boxes. Those go into cases and then back into refrigeration for shipping.

They make many other types of cheese as well but most of it is cheddar.  

You can visit the creamery and see cheese being made.  On this rainy day it was very busy. The line for free cheese samples was long.  There were two places serving ice cream (not free), lines even longer.  They were the biggest two scoop cones I have ever seen for about $3. Most folks got it in a bowl, about a pint.  

And there was a gift shop where you could buy cheese of course and all sorts of cheese, Oregon coast and Tillamook related things.

And a cafe for breakfast or lunch.  The line was long but moving steadily.  It was still raining. So we had lunch there.

We had to laugh. The menu was almost all things with cheese.

Cheese curds, tatter tots with cheese, mac and cheese, grilled cheese, cheese burgers, cheese soup. Oh ya, it was a cheese factory.

Lunch was big and tasty. 

Next stop was the Latimer Quilt and Textile Center.  This is a local center that promotes quilting and textile craft. There ware many items on display and for sale as well as supplies.  It was in the old Maple Leaf school house that was built in 1892 and used until 1958. 

One big room had many folks working on quilts and other projects.  Lots of chatter too.  One lady was spinning yarn.  There were quilts on display, some for sale and drawers of things that had been collected over time.  One drawer had items from one lady’s sewing basket from the late 1800s. 

Another room had a display of baskets made by a local person.  Some were woven from grasses, some from bark, some from very thin pieces of wood, all very nice.

The third room was full of looms. There were two of particular interest, a beautiful walnut 60″ wide loom and a very warm cherry 48″ wide one.  I have always thought that a loom would be a nice woodworking project.  Where to put it ???

There was a driving tour of barn quilts.  We followed the map and saw several, missed a few.  There were barn quilts on many buildings in Tillamook. Interesting to see the different designs.  We keep talking about doing one for the shop and the barn at home.

Then we went to the Tillamook Naval Air Station Museum.  During WWII the Navy built giant hangers for bilmps that patrolled the coastl waters looking for submarines.  They built 48 of these around the Atlantic, Gulf and Pacific coast lines. Two were in Tillamook to cover the coast from southern BC down to northern CA.

Cloudy and misty as you can see.  These monster buildings we 192 feet tall, 296 ft wide and 1076 ft long. A modern day Nimitz class aircraft carrier would fit inside.  During WWII they stored 7-9 blimps inside each hanger.  

There were about 20 aircraft inside the hanger including an F14 Tomcat.  Outside there was a Boeing Super Guppy.  They were made from B29 bombers left over from WWII the giant bodies were retrofitted to much of the existing structure.  They were originally used to carry many of the parts from the early space program and later for large cargo.

Both ends were hinged and could be opened to load the cargo.

The smaller round section in the front is the front end of the original B29.  Modern cargo planes, the 747s, the C5A and two Russian behemoths are much bigger than this.  

It was a good day to see all of this. Tomorrow the sun comes out.

More later,

Roger and Susan

We stopped by Portland near my sister’s home at the Pheasant Ridge RV Resort in Wilsonville.  It is a pretty nice place, a little tight but for an in-town RV place just fine.

There were 132 spaces all on a hill side site.

There was a Target nearby as well as a Fred Meyer (sort of like an upscale WalMart, not quite a Target) and a Home Depot not too far away.  Traffic was shocking.  Non-rush hour time from downtown to Wilsonville is about 25 minutes.  Rush hour starts very early and last untill 9:30 and then again by 2 until at least 7.  Rush hour time then is about 90 minutes.  So we managed to get to Judy’s in the off times.

We went there for supper on Wednesday. Thursday we went over just after rush hour and then headed for the Zoo.  We wanted to see the new Elephant Habitat.  It is not quite done yet, fully opening in Nov. 2015.  About 1/3 of it is open now for the seven elephants there.  The remaining sections have a valley that the elephants can walk through, a river and a pool for them to do elephant things, a building that they can go into that will have seating for visitiors, a health care facility and more.  Near the entrance to the main building there will be a stone bench in my nephew Eric’s memory.  It will be in a nice place where people will want to pause.

When we were in Santa Fe we were seriously looking at kinetic sculptures.  We always do. But we never buy.  This one was really pretty cool, a large moving sculpture that flew in 3D.

There was also a Zoo Train that took riders on a short trip.  Looked like it was right out of Disneyland of the 60s.

And then for dinner we went to The Country Cat on the east side of Portland (took an hour to get there). It was featured on Guy Fieri’s “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives”.  They are famous for their grilled foods and for their cast iron skillet fried chicken.  Since it was my Dad’s Birthday and his favorite birthday dinner was fried chicken that is what Bruce and I had. I haven’t had real pan fried chicken like that since my Grandmother made it, and no wonder, it was fried in lard after being brined and then soaked overnight in buttermilk and then dredged in a flour mixture.  Wonderful.  Great mashed potatoes with a sausage gravey and bacon braised collard greens.  I also had a very nice vegetable soup in a ham hock broth withwheat berries.  Susan had a very tasty crispy fried Pacific snapper with a fennel slaw and parsley rice.  Judy had a “Potted Judy” cheese with crackers and raddish leaf raviolli and wild mushrooms tossed in hazelnut browned butter served over English peas and baby turnips. And there was dessert …

A very nice visit for a couple days.  We are off to Netart’s bay on the coast for four nights and then back up to Nehalem Bay State Park until the end of the month.  Judy and Bruce have a beach house (well a quarter share of it) about a mile away.  They are going out on Friday for two weeks.  Eric’s family will be there for a week as well.  It should be a good time.

More later,

Roger and Susan

Well I thought I should mention that Susan deserves great credit for her patience at St Anthony.  There wasn’t  too much to do there if you weren’t out riding on the dunes.  She did go out a couple of times. The going straight up the dune when you couldn’t see over the top and the turning across the face of the dune when the Jeep was tilted (especially to her side) about 45° was not included in the definition of the sissy ride she wanted to go on.

We left the dunes on the 9th and had two long (7-8 hours) driving days ahead of us.

The first day we headed south from St Anthony and then across the bottom of Idaho towards Oregon. We followed the Snake River in much the same way Lewis and Clark had done and then later folks heading  west on the Oregon Trail.

 

There were places where it was quite flat and the Snake river pretty placid.  Other places where the river twisted its way through narrow gorges.  The Oregon trail followed the river.  Some places it was tough going, many places had not much water for the animals or it was bad water, not much for them to graze on either.  It must have been hot, dusty and difficult for everyone and all of the animals.

Just across the border into Oregon they had a trecherous crossing of the Snake River at Farewell Bend where they came up on the bluffs and left the river for a long trek through the low mountains north to the Columbia River.  Today there is a State Park at Farewell Bend.

They were watering in the park but everywhere around the park was parched dry.  Grassland fires were burning in Washington and the air was very hazy and smoky smelling.

Our campsite looked out over the river.  The big green island in the middle is normally not seen.  The river was about 30 ft below its normal high water mark.

Look closely at the vertical pilings that hold the docks in place.  The top of the white part of the poles marks the normal high water level.  It is very dry out here.

There was a lot of road construction. During one slow down we were following this truck with very shiny rear doors.  Pretty interesting view of our coach.

We didn’t actually start to see trees until we were quite a way down the Columbia River and then it was  a pretty amazing drive.  We were heading to Ainsworth State Park, only an hour east of Portland.  The air was still smokey.

Looking across the river towards Washington the burned hillsides tell the story of where the smoke came from.

We got to Ainsworth State Park late in the afternoon, another long day of driving, about 6 – 7 hours.  It is not hard driving the coach and Susan drove a couple hours but we rarely drive that long.  It is a long way to the Pacific from Minnesota and there are some vast distances to cover.

Sorry no pictures from Ainsworth.  We try but sometimes forget.  It is a small campground off old US 30.  It has very narrow roads and is on a fairly steep hillside.  Our spot was a pull througn, one of about 15 way up at the top.  That made it easy, didn’t even have to disconnect the Jeep. It was in the 90’s that day and by 10 PM it was still in the 80’s.  We had the AC in the coach on earlier so it was cooler inside but still a warm night.

In the morning we are heading for Pheasant Ridge RV Resort in Wilsonville, OR only 20 minutes from my sisters house.  But wait,  if there is traffic (they have very, very long rush hours and it is very congested) it is more like an hour.  We will be there for two days.

More later,

Roger and Susan