We’ve had a busy couple days; we’ve been on the move and also had to make some repairs to the motorhome. Most of the trip we’ve had no set destinations or time schedule, we just followed our very loose trip plan. A few weeks ago we looked at the calendar and map and decided we needed to be at the upper west corner of the US early in July. With the 4th being a holiday I made advance reservations at an RV Park in Washington and we’ve been working our way up there.
On Sunday afternoon when we retracted the slideout I heard one of the driveshaft bolts break. This has been a reoccurring problem, one I’ve repaired twice on this trip. We did a Google search for a town on our route with both a Wal-Mart and Lowes or Home Depot and found one about 50 miles in the direction we were going in Grants Pass Oregon. We resupplied at Wal-Mart, the one stop shop for travelers and got the bolts needed to fix the slide out at Home Depot.
Lots of old Hippie type panhandlers in Grants Pass. I saw one hanging around an RV couple as I was walking across the parking lot so walked over to see if they needed any assistance. After the homeless guy left I mentioned that there seems to be a lot of them here in Grants Pass. The couple, who are from Oregon said there were a lot of Hippies living in the area in the 60’s and apparently some of them never left. Millie was also targeted by a women with a small child asking for money for food. Millie replied that when she was done in the store she was entering she would take them to the adjacent food mart and buy them some groceries. When she exited, they were nowhere in sight.
Back on the road we stopped again to photograph some elk that were grazing near the highway and then went on to our coastal destination at the Oregon Dunes National Recreation area. Unlike the east coast where the dunes police will arrest you for stepping on a blade of beach grass, this area of huge coastal dunes is open to beach buggies, quad runners and hikers. We stayed at one of the parks in my thousand Trails membership called South Jetty, it wasn’t much to speak of, but I just needed a place to repair the slideout. I removed and replaced all four bolts in the driveshaft system, lined everything up and the tightened all the bolts. The slide is working properly now and hopefully will not trouble us again. That problem has however been replaced by a new one. The last few times we used the levelers, the hydraulic pump sounded strange. At Pacific City the system failed completely, more on that as I work on it, for now it is just an inconvenience.
On Tuesday morning after a jeep tour of the dunes rec area we motored up the coastal highway, marveling at the scenery and trying to decide which was the nicer coastal drive, California or Oregon. Along the way we stopped at an attraction called the sea Lion caves. We descended 300 feet in an elevator to a cave that is open to the sea and inhabited by sea Lions. Nothing like this on the east coast, it was very interesting. Moving on, after driving about sixty miles on the coastal route we turned east and headed for our night stop at McMinnville. To our delight, this RV Park is the nicest one we’ve stayed at the entire trip and we can walk to the Evergreen Air Museum. As it was already mid afternoon, we walked to the museum with the dogs and viewed the outdoor display of aircraft. On Wednesday we will tour the indoor part of the museum. I’ve been to larger aircraft museums, but don’t think I’ve had this much anticipation about visiting one. The Evergreen is home to Howard Hughes’s legendary airplane, the Spruce Goose.
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