Musings from the Road Episode #5

 8/26

 

We shopped for travel supplies this morning.  There’s a local store chain, Fred Meyers, that dwarfs the largest Walmart.  It sells clothing, groceries, hardware, gardening, pharmacy, toys, furniture, kitchenware, wine and beer, and I can’t remember what else, but it seems like anything you could possibly need.  

 

The reason I know about the hardware area is because I needed something to lash my new ladder to the rear bumper on Mocking Jay.  I found what will probably work okay and lashed the ladder down — after I caulked around the rearview camera (bet you thought I forgot.)  

 

When we returned with our supplies, I decided to hitch The Hulk and Mocking Jay together for an early start tomorrow.  The hitch is black.  The receiver is black. The connection position puts both in the shade of an otherwise sunny day.  I couldn’t see either one while backing up to couple them.  After innumerable tries, I took an orange attachment that came with the new sewer hose and hung it over the latching mechanism, then I wrapped a Velcro strap, also orange, around a part of the receiver and gave it several more tries before a successful connect.  That took more than an hour and worked up a sweat.  After that, the rest of the hookup took about five minutes.

 

Tired and sweaty, I kicked back for a bit and had some good coffee with Doug while he boiled two dozen eggs on his outside propane stove.  Turns out, he and Lynn contribute food to the folks who manage the tent city population and the eggs were going to them.  Not a surprise.

 

We took them out to dinner at a mostly outdoor restaurant and had a wonderful meal with a good Willamette Valley Pinot Noir accompaniment.  Across the patio a birthday party was forming.  The cake, we speculated was either a cheesecake or a Crème Brule concoction.  Carol cast covetous looks at the chocolate flower adorning the center of the cake, which made for several funny minutes of pseudo-planning that would allow us to abscond with it.  We left before the festivities really began so never discovered the composition of the cake.  When Carol got the bill, it stated that no tip was necessary because the staff was well paid.  Based on the amount of said bill, the tip was factored in to the price of the food.  We left a ten percent tip anyway.

 

We’re pretty much ready to have morning coffee and leave tomorrow.  The plan for the return east is to stop driving early in the afternoon after 300-400 miles.  We’ll see how that works out.

 

 

3/27

 

We left Doug and Lynn’s about 0830 this morning, after coffee and a banana each.  We have ten days to get to New Paltz.  Labor Day, the eleventh day, we have a potluck dinner scheduled on our porch.  

 

I knew two things for sure when we started our journey home: we had enough fuel to get us to the Portland area, and we could be sure to find it there.  Turns out we found a Chevron station that included a carwash and an Instant oil change site with two bays.  Not only that, it was next door to the Willamette Coffee House where we obtained great coffee and egg and cheese on ciabatta bread for breakfast.  It didn’t even matter that it was American Cheese (is that anti-patriotic?)

 

We picked up I-84 just east of Portland and stayed with it until we got to a convenient exit to Scenic US-30.  We drove through the Columbia River Gorge on that route so Carol could ogle the various waterfalls.  We couldn’t stop at any because there was no place to park the more than 35 feet rig.  At the Multnomah Falls site, I invited a dozen bicyclers onto the road ahead of me and assigned us temporary protectors on this narrow ascent.  With the hazard/emergency flashers activated, I trailed them for a couple of miles at a crawl as traffic accumulated behind me.  Finally, at a longer-than-usual straightaway, I passed the group.  A couple of cars followed but I lost sight of the remaining line.

 

Back on I-84 we followed the Columbia for another few dozen miles.  We were still on the Oregon side.  On the Washington side, almost the entire time we paralleled the Columbia, the Washington hilltops were dominated by wind turbines.   

 

We have no specific goal, other than to arrive home the Sunday before Labor Day, so what I’ve done is pick a target city along our intended route then head in that direction and stop when we’ve covered enough miles or enough hours.  Spokane was the target tonight.  We are in Ritzville, seventy miles short of that target.  415 miles today.

 

By the way, I’m adding Muse Road to my list, maybe at the top.

 

 

8/28

 

We left Ritzville (love the name) about 0830 and rolled onto I-90 to continue our return home.  Target today, Bozeman, Montana.  Temp this morning, 46 degrees.  Speaking of village names, we’ve come across: Othello in Washington, Hebron in one of the Dakotas, and Anaconda in Montana.  Some notable Montana roads: Bad Route Road and Whoopup Creek Road.  There are way too many like that to list.  How about a town named Diamond Ring?

 

One of the exciting (if old folks can really use that word) things about this part of the journey is the chance to, at some minor level, revisit the towns we ear-read about on a trip to Eugene a bunch of years ago. The book The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America, by Timothy Egan, is an exciting chronicle of the gigantic fire that scorched northern Idaho, some of Eastern Washington, western Montana, and into Canada.  Here’s a Wikipedia link for some more details: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwisp5rBoNXyAhWlIDQIHXSfCzMQFnoECC4QAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FGreat_Fire_of_1910&usg=AOvVaw2RRFjZ3UICKFw34gWSIGZ1

 

When we’re on a long trip, Carol often rents audiobooks from the library that relate to areas we’ll be traversing.  This was one of them.  We listened while traveling through Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Montana.  Finally, having finished the book, we arrived in Wallace, Idaho — on the hundredth anniversary of the fire (August 20-21, 1910)!  There’s a small museum in Wallace commemorating that fire, that we just had to visit.  Other areas around the town hold info about the fire, including directions to an old mine where one of the firefighters sequestered a group of his workers until the fire passed.  His name was Ed Pulaski.  There’s a kind of fire axe that he devised later that is still used by the Forest Service, called a Pulaski.  Coeur d’Alene is another of the towns caught in the conflagration.  I love the musicality of the name. 

 

We pulled off I-90 to have the lunch Carol had prepared and stretch our legs for a while, at Coeur d’Alene’s Old Mission State Park.  The church is the oldest building in Idaho, according to the info the ticket agent at the gate gave us.  

 

1A wedding about to begin

Apparently, it is also a masterpiece of carpentry and wood joinery, no nails, all fitted and pegged together and standing since the mid-nineteenth century.

 

We’re in a KOA campground in Butte, Montana for the night.  We took their last site with water and electric hookups.  It’s big enough for Mocking Jay but not hitched to The Hulk.  And it’s a back-in not a pull-through.  Backing in became an issue for a couple of reasons: I decided to remove the stabilizer bars from the hitch assembly for reasons that escape me now, and in the course of performing the steering contortions, the recharging cable that was lying across my steering wheel shaft migrated to a crevice between the wheel and the shaft and got twisted up inside it making steering really difficult.  It wasn’t until well into the operation with the wheel being hard to turn that I realized what had happened!

 

When we were situated at the site. I spent about an hour taking apart the cowling around the trouble spot and trying to unwind the cable.  I managed to free all but a few inches the end of which is jammed tight somewhere in the mechanism.  I cut the rest of it off and tested to make sure the wheel turned freely from lock-to-lock.  It does, but with a funny little click while making the turn.  Another item to add to my ever-growing list of things I need to attend to.

2Charge Cable Remnant and its shadow

 

 

8/29

 

36 degrees this morning.  We slept in — 0700 for me, twenty minutes later for Carol.  Unlike the previous stops on our return trip, I had to mate the two vehicles together with all that entails before we could pull out and continue our eastward journey.  I decided not to dump the holding tanks this morning because there wasn’t much in them.  Even with that task eliminated, we weren’t saddled up and ready until 1000.  When we started into our trip, the remains of the stuck cable poked up above the steering wheel — a kind of wire erection.  It disappeared again a while later.

 

We traveled through several mountain passes to Bozeman then stopped for our first meal of the day at an Olive Garden.  I don’t know what kind of restrictions the city government put on corporate retail construction but even Walmart has a western ranch-like look!  It took some fifteen minutes to get seated even though most of the seats were empty and it looked like there were enough waitstaff to handle a full house.  We deduced that the folks at the front of the house were trying not to overwhelm the probably understaffed kitchen.  That was verified when someone came out of the kitchen and gave the hostess a quick thumbs up.  

 

Our ear-reading on this return trip is A Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  It’s well… I don’t know what exactly to call it: theatre of the absurd, magical realism?  I’m sure there’s an abundance of scholarly opinions on what it is.  That said, it’s an entertaining, if confusing, distraction from the boredom of the interstate highway system. 

 

The target today was Miles City.  We stopped about forty miles short of that.  Just south of Forsyth, Carol found this small quaint RV park, Wagon Wheel Campground.  The sign for the office pointed to a mobile home, with three pickups parked in front, nestled in a grove of trees.

As we stepped onto the porch, a woman our age looked up from the TV she was watching in what was clearly her living room.  She greeted us at the door then turned and walked into an alcove of an office, apologized that the only pull-through site would be occupied later in the day and said she only had back-in sites.  We paid for one then she escorted us out to the porch and pointed to two sites clearly visible from where we stood.  “Take whichever one suits you,” she said.  

 

We settled in, played a great game of Scrabble (380 something to 360 something, I won) then ate and went to bed.  376 miles today.

 

By the way, Kelly and family didn’t suffer any damage to self or property in Ida’s onslaught. 

 

 

8/30

 

55 degrees at 0455 this morning.  We’re both up and rested with plans for an early start.  We lose another hour today, somewhere in North Dakota.  Today’s target is Bismarck, North Dakota.  While I disconnected Mocking Jay from the hookups, Carol took a morning walk to explore this quaint RV park.  By the time she returned, all was ready for the short trip to dump the holding tanks (get the picture of the division of labor here?). She told me of a bunny who didn’t move when she approached except for a nose twitch and wondered if it could, in fact move.  Turns out the Bunny (rabbit if, you prefer) was right near the dump site.  I set up and dumped the tanks, all the while talking to the relatively static bunny, until I’d completed the task.  In the process of closing up that final element of our travel prep, I must have insulted the critter with some off-hand comment because it hopped away to a campsite across the road.  I don’t know what I said.  Assuming the bunny’s youth, I avoided any comments about how sexually adept its species appears to be.  Instead, I stuck to neutral subjects: the weather, the latest baseball scores, that kind of thing.  But who knows what triggers the exit of a bunny.  Couldn’t have been a lack of interest.

 

 

We stopped for breakfast in Miles City at a restaurant that claims breakfast all day.  While dining we changed our target from Bismarck to Minot, our plan being to avoid the Chicago area by traversing Minnesota and Wisconsin to the north and scooting around the Upper Peninsula of Michigan toward Detroit and pick up I-80/90 around Toledo.  Got all that?  Anyway, we will avoid the Chicago mess, even though it will be a longer ride.  On the upside, both of us remember a funky little café in the UP that we visited on two separate trips.  Neither of us remembers the name.  Both of us remember what it looks like —I even have a photo or two of the of the place somewhere in my archives.  I hope we’ll happen on it this trip. 

 

On the way, we saw petroleum well pumps, some operating, some not.  They reminded me of the Drinking Bird toy that I remember from way longer ago than I care to admit.  I won’t go into an explanation.  There’s a YouTube video displaying one, I believe.  Anyway that’s what they reminded me of.r

 

 

In spite of our early start, this was the lowest daily mileage so far —325 miles.   I know we’re both tired of the drive, in spite of how much we love this kind of travel.  Getting old sucks.  We’re settled in at the Roughrider Campground — full hookup and Good Sam discount.  We walked the perimeter of the campground, probably the longest walk we’ve taken on this trip.  

 

Today is a laundry day, probably the last until home.   Tomorrow we should be in Northern Minnesota, maybe Wisconsin.  No pics today.  It’s hard to shoot while I’m driving.  Actually that's a fib.  I rigged a platform on the dash so I can attach a camera.  there's some movement both horizontal and vertical and it's an easy reach over the steering wheel to snap a quick picture.

Between bugs on the windshield and driving while pressing the shutter,  there're very few if any photos worth keeping.  It does relieve the boredom some though.