Here we are, on the road: We’re in South Beach, Oregon

Sunday, October 3, 2010 Lorraine's report

Today is the start of our 4^th year on the road; I remember leaving our stick home on a wet windy night, heading south. The rain was being blown sideways at the coach as we left that evening.

We were headed to Anacortes, WA, the Swinomish Northern Lights Casino. It was about an hour away and has an RV Park right on the water. We figured that if we forgot anything major that we couldn’t live without, then it wasn’t that far to drive back for it. Fortunately for us, we had all we needed and more.

I remember my niece, Kerri, and her family, Paul, Rose, Patrick and Joshua coming over that last afternoon, to help pack up the rest of the kitchen. I don’t think we would have made it out of there that evening if it hadn’t been for all their help.

Again, I remember all the help you all gave so willingly and unselfishly. Again I thank you from the bottom of my heart for all you did for us and continue to do for us whenever we see you.

I think since we have been out on the road, we have put around Forty thousand miles on the coach. We have been from Porto Penasco, Mexico to Fairbanks, Alaska. We have gone from the west coast and the Pacific Ocean to the east coast and the Atlantic Ocean, and back again, by different routes. We have stayed in 36 of the 50 states, and have not by any means seen all of one state, not even WA where we lived for 36 years. We have been in British Columbia and the Yukon in Canada and have been into Mexico about 90 miles to Rocky Point, or Porto Penasco.

It has been a rewarding time for us, getting to see our beautiful country. We loved spending time on the east coast and Washington, DC. We loved our trip to Alaska. And I love the desert. But most of all, we have loved meeting new friends, who we love to spend time with. Just want all our family and friends both at home and on the road to know, we appreciate each and everyone of you, and look forward to seeing you all again.

So on to the week. Well, as I wrote last week, I woke up feeling yucky on Saturday. I started taking Dayquil and Nyquil for cold and flu. It has helped. I think I picked up a head cold or touch of flu, not sure which.

Sunday Chuck took us to Camp 18 for breakfast. Camp 18 is a restaurant fashioned after what they would serve loggers for breakfast. The place is brimming with ambience, and the food is incredibly good and plentiful. It’s definitely a place not to be missed.

We came home and watched Seahawk football since it rained all day there in Seaside.

The next day we headed off to Cannon Beach, after the fog lifted. I love the ocean, the waves and the fresh wind.

Tuesday was moving day for us. We packed up the rig and moved to Lincoln City, to Chinook Winds RV Park. We got in and before we paid Chuck wanted to check out the Elks Lodge site and Whalers Cove, where we are now. We went back and paid for three nights.

When we checked in, we were given coupons for $$ off the buffet or the steakhouse. We used it that evening for the buffet. It was only $6.00 each for a delicious dinner. We both played for an hour or so, and we both went home winners.

The following day, I caught up on laundry during the morning. Then we headed off to Depot Bay and on to Newport. We had several things to pick up in Newport. And we enjoyed walking the sidewalk along the bay in Depot Bay.

We decided to head over to Mo’s for dinner so I could have their famous Clam Chowder. We had eaten at Mo’s in Cannon Beach and it was delicious. This time was different. The service was slow, the food arrived cold, both Chuck’s burger/fries and my halibut/chips, and the waitress never brought my cocktail sauce. Some of the waitress’s friends came in and she sat down and visited with them for a while, not getting our food out to us while it was hot.

When we were ready to leave, I filled out the back of the receipt given to us to pay. I then told the cashier when we were paying, how terrible the food was and how awful the waitress was to us. She got the manager to come over and the manager said that was not the way they did business, and she took the bill off the credit card. The manager said she was sorry for the poor service.

The next day we headed over to Spirit Mountain Casino. It was a beautiful day for a drive, and Spirit Mountain is about 45 minutes from Lincoln City. The trees are finally changing colors in the mountains here in OR.

We had no luck at all at Spirit Mountain. We were both down, and decided to leave while we still had the shirts on our back. They did have cheaper gas there at the casino, so Chuck filled the car up. We spent a quiet evening at home watching TV.

Friday was moving day again. We packed up the coach to move. We had another coupon for Chinook Wind’s breakfast buffet. It cost us $4.00 each for breakfast, the food was very good with lots of variety.

We headed south again to South Beach, OR, to Whaler’s Rest, a Thousand Trails/Encore RV Park. I drove the car since the entrance to the park is so hard to maneuver the coach and car. We set up the rig and had a nice home cooked meal, followed by TV.

Chuck had told me when we left in the morning that he felt like he was catching what I have had all week.

Saturday Chuck woke up feeling a whole lot worse, I could tell, he went back to bed after he took Misty for her walk. And he fell right back to sleep. He didn’t get up until I did.

I decided to head back up to Newport to Fred Meyers to get more medicine for both of us. Chuck wasn’t up to going. He is now taking Dayquil and it helps.

When I returned home, Chuck felt a bit better and the sun was trying to come out here where the rig is parked. So we took off to check out Beverly Beach. We enjoyed a pleasant drive north and a nice warm walk on the beach.

Our two favorite college teams were on TV, the Washington Huskies and the Stanford Cardinal. Another quiet evening at home, for the both of us, which is good since we are both not up to par.

Patsy, I’m so sorry over the passing of your dad. You have all our sympathies and love. You mean the world to us.

I would like to wish my niece, Kerri a very Happy 44^th Birthday. Wish we were there to help you celebrate. I would like to wish Patsy a very Happy Birthday the same day, the 6^th; hopefully those beautiful grandbabies will be there to help you celebrate.

Until next time…….Lorraine

10/3/10 Chuck’s report

Today is the third anniversary since the start of our fulltiming life, three full years on the road. We actually wanted to get started earlier but we hung around for almost a month because we had an offer on our house. Unfortunately the deal fell through and we still own our house, have leased it out for the past three years.

Boy what fun we’ve had during the last three years! We had some plans/ideas of what we wanted to see/do and found those plans were too small. We agreed we would try this for lifestyle for 3 - 5 years but soon realized that isn’t near enough time to experience all we want to see in this great country of ours. We have a map we use to keep track of what states we’ve been too, over 35 last time I looked. But even though we say we’ve been to a state, that doesn’t mean we’ve seen all we want in any state. We’ve also been to Mexico and Canada during our travels.

We’ve found we like to travel no more than two days in a row, usually no more than 5 hours per day. We like to stay in one area for a couple of weeks and use our car to see the surrounding area. We’ve put more miles on our car than we have on the coach (49.000 vs. 42,000) in these three years.

Although it was hard to leave our friends and family back home, we’ve met a lot of good people and made lifelong friends with some of them too. In fact, without that four letter word (w-o-r-k) getting in the way we can schedule our time and travels to suit us, not follow a work schedule. We’ve kept busy, sometimes too busy but other times we take life slow and easy.

We have found our highways throughout the country to be in fair to poor shape. For what we pay in taxes on the fuel we buy, we should have the best roads in the world, I would think. At least they should be in better shape than they are, especially the major freeways. Maybe if the money raised from fuel taxes went to road repair??

Last Sunday after we posted our blog, we drove out to Camp 18 for brunch. This is an old logging camp, 18 miles from Highway 101. Our friends, Bill/Barb, took us to this place two years ago and we liked it enough to go again this year. They have some old logging machinery on the ground, lots of wood carvings and the restaurant is built from logs from the area. The foods we’ve tried have been very good with large portions, we’ve never left there hungry, that’s for sure. The rest of the day we spent inside our coach, watching both the rain and some football.

Monday proved to be a better day, weather wise, so nice we headed for the beach in the afternoon. We spent a couple of hours, went to three different beaches and two overlooks. We like the Oregon beaches, one of our favorite places to camp. We’ve been camping here since the early 70s, when we had our truck with a camper on the back.

Tuesday we left the Seaside area and headed out for Lincoln City. We weren’t sure where we would stay but had a couple of places in mind to check out. The first place we stopped at was the RV park at Chinook Winds Casino. We found this place to have nice spots but most of them were not level, some pretty badly out of level in fact. We asked if we could leave our coach there and check out the other places and they agreed. We checked out the Elks and found it to be too remote plus they don’t have full hookups. The next place on our list was too far out of town, didn’t have any cell phone or internet service. So we decided to stay at the Casino RV park after all, found a spot we could get level but it required us to use all the leveling boards we carry. But once we got everything level and settled, we decided we liked this park.

At least the Casino was good to us, they gave us 1/2 off a buffet and that was at the senior’s price. Both Lorraine and I won on the slots so that helped us like it some too. They had a large group of slots out of service, we found out they were putting in new machines that night.

Wednesday was once again a slow day for us, we did some work around the coach, Lorraine did laundry and I worked on a broken drawer latch. That afternoon we went into town and checked out a couple of the local beaches. Later we went to dinner at one of the local “hot spots”, Mo’s. This place is very well known for it’s clam chowder and good food. Lorraine ordered a bowl of the chowder and found it to be just as advertised, very good. She had a shrimp salad that she thought was good too. However, both our main entrees were not very good, Lorraine had Halibut and chips, I had a hamburger. Our waitress was visiting with some of her friends, in fact she sat at their table for awhile and by the time she delivered our food, everything was cold. Lorraine filled out a comment card and when we paid we told them we didn’t enjoy our meal. They said they were sorry and didn’t charge us but even so, I don’t think we will go back to that place again.

Thursday we drove back towards the interior to visit another Indian Casino, Spirit Mountain. We’ve been there before but this time we found the slots to be really tight, neither of us had any luck. We only stayed there for a couple of hours before we both had enough and left, for sure not worth the trip for us. We returned back to Lincoln City and picked up our mail we had ordered earlier in the week.

Friday morning we went back to casino for a breakfast buffet before we headed out on the road for Newport, or actually South Beach. We are in a 1000 Trails park, Whaler’s Rest, with full hookups, including 50 amp. The interior roads here are very narrow, making it hard to get into the sites with a big rig, but with Lorraine guiding me, we made it just fine. We had to readjust in our site twice to get satellite service though the trees but finally got everything the way we wanted and set up the rest of our stuff.

Lorraine has been fighting a cold for the past week so we’ve tried to slow down some, she gets tired very easily. Well, Friday I decided to join her with a cold of my very own. Lorraine always gets a flu shot per her doctor’s advice, I don’t get a flu shot. Anyway, yesterday morning Lorraine needed to pick up a couple items from the store and I elected to stay at the coach and rest. After she got back, we once again headed out and spent a couple of hours enjoying the sunshine at the beach.

I’ve been talking about all the rain we’ve encountered in September. At least this week we’ve had more days without rain than with rain, that’s always good. We are for sure into the rainy season now so we are going to enjoy each and every sunny day we get from here on out. We figure once we get into California we will be out of the rainy area and for sure once we get to Laughlin and Palm Springs.

Our plans for next week will be to continue slowly heading South. We aren’t sure how long we will stay here before we head inland, we will decide that as we go. If I remember right, that’s about the same thing I said last week. Oh well, tough life we have, huh?

So now I’ll add some pictures and get this posted.

Why we like the Oregon beaches.