Richland, WA to Coeur d'Alene, ID 1 June 2013

 TV dish and jacks down, slides in, ready to unplug and head to Coeur d'Alene. This park had a lot of permanent people, but was clean and neat.

 These are apples being grown on trellises!  They are easier to tend and pick.  Ted knows a lot about this part of the state because he drove here once or twice a week doing agricultural research.  

Water from the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Reservoir behind the Grand Coolee Dam.  Note the irrigation drops.  These rigs lose a lot less water to evaporation than the older impulse sprinklers that were mounted on top.

Note the bare ground behind the wheat field.  In this part of the country rainfall is insufficient to grow a crop of wheat every year, so the only way to grow wheat is in a wheat-fallow rotation.  The fallow fields are kept weed-free, allowing an extra year of moisture to accumulate before planting.

 The road to Spokane stretches on.  

 There used to be a sign here that said, "Welcome to Lind, please drop in, Mt. St. Helen's did."

We took this lunch to the picnic table at the rest stop below.  A popchip blew off Ted's plate and a seagull grabbed it as soon as it hit the ground.

This is Sprague Lake.  The small town of Sprague is at the southeast tip of the lake.  The town was originally named Hoodooville after a local character William "Hoodoo Billy" Burrows.  It was later renamed for a Union Pacific executive.  How boring.  The lake is noted for large raibow trout and also has good bass fishing.

 For those who are new to our blog, this is what we look like on the road.  Ted's motorcycle is on a lift at the back of the coach.  Two bikes are on the back of the Jeep behind the coach.   

 As we got closer to Spokane, WA, the vegetation changed.  Lodgepole pines appeared eventually giving way to Ponderosa pines.  Different tree species, but it reminds us of Maine.

 Spokane, Washington coming up.

 

 We arrived at our resort at 2:30 pm.  Within 15 min. we were set up, including our dish, which automatically finds DirectTVs three satellites.  Gives us lots of time to play.

 One time saver is velcro.  These items ride like this all the time and don't fall, even during tight turns.  The red light on the wall indicates that our the water pump is on.  It provides us with water when we are riding down the road or choose not to hook up for the night.

These containers in the bathroom are velcroed.  Canisters, container of kitchen tools, toaster, lamps, printer, etc. ride in place, thanks again to the miracle strips.

Ted drives most of the time.  Penny puts the step-cover up, attaches a bungee to legs of TV tray and works on her computer doing email, journal, genealogy; knit; crochets; reads; navigates; looks up info for Ted about places we pass; and generally has a great time.  When tired of this set-up, the TV tray can be stowed behind couch and the footrest on the passenger chair raised.  We like to listen to books on CDs, thanks to a generous loan from Becky Cheek.

 When staying only one night, we try not to unhook the Jeep.  We usually eat in the coach.  Tonight, we walked to this wonderful restaurant. Ted had been here before, so he knew it was good.  At the end of this ramp is a floating restaurant, with a log cabin interior and windows all the way around looking at Lake Coeur d'Alene.

One of the views is the famous Coeur d'Alene Resort Hotel with it's floating golf hole.  The one time that we stayed there, Reba McEntire had just left the penthouse.  

Portland, OR to Richland, WA 5-31-2013

 After days and days of rain, the sun came out and blessed another new beginning or re-beginning for us.  As we exited I-205 in Portland, OR onto I-84 toward The Dalles (rhymes with owls), we finally felt we were really full-timing again.  The Dalles is a cute town in The Columbia River Gorge that may was named for the French word meaning sluice, a reference to the narrow passage between the large basalt columns in the river.  This is now covered by the lake behind the Dalles Dam.

For those of you who don't know, we sold our scenic house on Wednesday.  We did it for a number of reasons, but the exciting part for us was that we could return to full-time living in our RV while we still are healthy and see many of the places that we missed the last time.  

 I am sure that I have published a photo similar to this one before, but it is an iconic view as we drive into The Gorge.  Note the lush trees everywhere on this western side of The Cascades.

 We passed the Sandy River.  One of  the views from our former house is the mouth of this river, a favorite of fishermen. 

 The Dalles Dam is one of fourteen dams on the Columbia River.  They have a beauty of their own, but are very controversial among Native Americans and environmentalists.  They provide our region and even California with clean electricity, provide irrigation water, and control flooding from snowmelt in The Cascades, so their destruction would devastate the economy, no matter how much we might desire to return to the way the river was. 

 This is the back of The Dalles Dam. We are on the east side of The Cascades.  There are no more forests because we are in the rain shadow of the mountains.

 This grain elevator services the wheat farmers, whose farms are in the high desert behind these hills.  The majority of wheat grown in Washington is exported to Asia.  Barges carry the wheat to the ports further down river greatly reducing transportation costs.  

 We are driving on the Oregon side of The Columbia River, looking across at the Washington side.  This photo shows a rare town with a wind farm above.

 This photo shows the brush of the this part of The Gorge.  It looks like nothing could thrive here except cattle, but wildlife is more diverse here than might be imagined.  The greatest environmental threat here is non-native noxious weeds.  

But, this is becoming wine country.  For wine aficionados, this is on the edge of the Canoe Ridge District. 

 The McNary Dam is close to Tri-Cities (Richland, Kennewick, and Pasco), WA on I-82.  

 Just north of McNary are these crops that are irrigated in circles. Major crops in this area are potatoes, onions, wheat, sweet and field corn, and, of course, wine grapes.  Just outside our park was a field of concord grapes and several apple orchards. 

 A mine in the side of a hill shows that hearty pioneers were determined to find a way to make a living in the high desert of Washington

 Here is a field of terraced alfalfa.  Much of this will also be exported.

Irrigation from the waters of The Columbia make fruit trees a viable crop in this desolate place.  Above is the Horse Heaven Hills.  A few miles from here, we stopped for the night at 2:30 pm in a park just a few miles southwest of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation where the fissionable material for "Fat Man", the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, was made.  Ted did a lot of noxious weed work there.  Neither Ted nor the reservation glow in the dark.  It got so hot here that our TV turned itself off.  What a change from the rain and chilly weather of Portland/Vancouver.

We are headed for Rapid City, SD to establish residence.  As many of you know, the state of Washington considers anyone not living in a "bricks and sticks" place, homeless, and ineligible to vote (It's a long story).  South Dakota, like Washington, has no income tax.  South Dakota welcomes RVers to become residents because of their sparse population.  They even have businesses that help RVers do this in a day.  We will get our driver's licenses, license plates, and voter registration.  We will have a South Dakota address and postal box.  However, we have reinstated our Vancouver personal mailbox service for the majority of our snail mail because we will be in the Portland/Vancouver area many holidays.  We pay bills electronically, so snail mail is mainly for welcomed greetings from friends and family.  Junk mail is discarded by the service.  Both services will send our first class mail to us when we email them where.  

The Trip South: Part 2

 We spent a little time in Red Bluff before we took off.  We needed to restock our groceries and make the coach our home again. 

 For those of you who have never been there, Red Bluff is a cute little town. This photo, taken from Main Street shows Mt. Lassen in the distance.  One of those neat little serendipity places we have often run into.

 This is the view down Main Street in Red Bluff at night.  to the right is one of our favorite Mexican Restaurants, "Los Mariachis".  The food is excellent and the prices reasonable.

 Lots of cute little stores, like this antique shop next to the Mexican restaurant.

 The next day was pretty routine, but the second day out, we were driving through Stockton, CA when alarms started sounding and lights started flashing.  We were fortunate to be able to find a place to pull off the road.  Here we are on the hook.  Another story for our memory book.

 We spent the next week in the Lathrop, California Comfort Inn.  Nothing wrong with it.  We've stayed in far worse places, but we've both become spoiled by the luxury of our coach.  Lathrop was a bit forgettable, but we learned where to shop and eat.  If we had known it was going to take a week, we would have gone to San Francisco, but ....  Thank goodness we like each other.  

 We did get back on the road, and continued to one of our favorite stops, Orange Grove RV Park, just outside Bakersfield.  As the name implies, and this photo shows, it is in the middle of an orange grove.  Yes, they do encourage you to pick oranges, and we took only those that had good sugar spots.  Looked bad, would probably have been rejected by your local Safeway, but they tasted great.  Reminded us of the oranges we got used to when we had trees in our back yard in San Diego.  We had to stay an extra day here due to snow and wind in the Tehachapi pass.  The temperatures were below freezing at night.  We felt sorry for the orange growers.  We knew they had some long nights.

 We finally did make it to our winter quarters here in Palm Desert.  Doors and windows open, short sleeved shirts, sandals, the company of friends and cousins who overwinter,  Penny's brother and sister-in-law not far, and good restaurants---

---and the company of Marilyn and others.  This sculpture was in Chicago, but now resides in Palm Springs.  We tried to catch the old man behind looking up her dress, but he caught on and returned our look.  Off to dinner with friends and a live musical at the McCallum Theatre in Palm Springs tomorrow.  Probably, at least one more show there or at one of the local casinos where several of the big names play before we leave.
Life on the road is good!  

The Trip South: First Leg

We started our trip south on December 28th. We had taken the coach through the Siskiyous shortly after Thanksgiving and left it in Red Bluff, California. That negated the need to winterize and made our trip through the Siskiyous in late December less problematic since we could do that part in the Jeep.

As we drove through the lush pastures of the Williamette Valley, we noted two things.  First, whether we looked east toward the Cascades or West toward the Coast Range, we could see plenty of snow in the mountains.  We also saw many more sheep than we were accustomed to seeing.  I guess either lamb or wool is bringing a good price these days.

Encouragingly, we saw a lot more mill activity than we had seen the last several years.  Outside a peeler plant, piles of thin sheets of wood wait to be glued into plywood panels.

We saw lots of other RVs on the road.

Around noon we began to ascend into the foothills of the Siskiyous.  The deciduous trees here are covered with lichens.  Despite appearances, they cause no damage to the trees since they make their own food and extract their own water from the atmosphere.

A few miles further on, we began to see snow on the roadsides.

Near the Siskiyou Summit, there was more snow on the road, but there were only a few places with snow in all four lanes.  We would have been able to traverse this in the RV, but were glad we didn't have to do it.

A few miles into Northern California, the sun began to peek through the clouds, and the road became much clearer.  We were able to relax and enjoy the scenic drive.

We were tired by the time we arrived in Red Bluff, but it was good to be back in our coach.  So far, this trip was proceeding exactly as we had planned it.

Our Summer and Fall

When we returned from our travels early this summer, our yard, once again became a priority.

Ground cover had grown between the steps that our son Brent had placed two years ago, and his plantings began to stabilize the hill, mountain goat-steep, to the west of our house.  There is no way the photo shows this steepness.  Come visit and walk it yourself.  

We did, however, have a few things working against us.  One night this was a beautiful, thick bunch of chrysanthemums.  The next morning, we discovered that we had fed the deer.  Still, if this is what we have to endure to enjoy their wanderings back and forth through our area, it is a small price to pay.

 We had been worried about erosion on the east side of our house, so we decided to put in a series of retaining walls to stabilize the area.  Brent had put the steps the year before.  Here, Ted has completed the lowest wall, and partially completed the second.

 The walls have been completed and the side yard partially planted.  Ted is air-layering cuttings

for use here in 2013.

We see a lot of the surrounding landscape from our decks, but sometimes our view is impaired.  This summer, that happened a lot.  Mount Hood is almost completely obscured by smoke.  While we had our share of fires, this smoke was blown across the Pacific from fires in Mongolia and Siberia.

 It did, however, make for some spectacular sunsets.

 As I said, we do have our share of fires.  This one was in a wildlife preserve below us.

 It burned through the night and well into the next day.

We did have lots of other distractions.  Here, the mighty 4449 Pacific Daylight, steams, a few hundred feet, below our house and into the Gorge as she had so many times has in years past.  This engine, painted Red, White and Blue, pulled the Freedom Train through every state in the lower 48 in 1976.

 We also got to watch our grandson, Tyler, play baseball and football.  Here, he eludes that last tackler before the end zone.  This was one of three touchdowns he scored this day.

 Soon enough, fall set in again and we were privileged to see Mt. Hood once again covered with snow.

 We love our days when we can see forever from our back deck, but those of us who love the Pacific Northwest begin to get a little antsy when summer turns into fall and we still have blue skies.  Winter has its own type of beauty.  Here the sun gleams through a hole in the clouds and glints off the Columbia River at the entry to the Columbia Gorge National Scenic Area.

Turning to the west, we see the evening begin to fall.

The lights begin to turn on in Gresham, an eastern suburb of Portland, Oregon announcing the start of our evening city lights display.

As the sun falls below the horizon, the sky seems to be on fire. The steam in the foreground is from Georgia Pacific, the paper mill, that made our little neck of the woods what it is today. The local high school calls itself "The Papermakers".  That is how important this industry is to our economy.

We love the Pacific Northwest, but as the winter begins to set in, our thoughts once again begin to turn south as we prepare for another winter in the desert Southwest.