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

Sunday, October 14, 2012 Loraine’s report

Hello from the parking lot of Oregon’s Motor Coach Care Center in Eugene, OR. We came here on Thursday to have these guys start to put in a new refrigerator. Our old one gave up the ghost last Saturday night or Sunday morning, not sure when the power went off.

We have 50 amp, no water, no sewer, but it’s free to stay here. This RV repair place seems to be quite busy. They have about 8 bays, only 6 doors, and most are double depth. This Monday the manager said they are starting to change out two other rig’s refrigerator conversions to a residential one.

We drove back up to Portland on Friday morning to pick up the refrigerator they are going to be putting into our rig; it was raining extremely hard here, the first rain in almost 82 days, virtually a new record for this area. It has been an unprecedented run of sunny weather. After the winter and spring we had, the people here really deserved it.

It has been a long week and then some to be without a fully functioning refrigerator. We did go out last Sunday to Wal-Mart and bought a small college dorm size one to try and save some of our food. But the new one is just not functioning very well. The first few days, nothing was cold inside the fridge, and even Chuck’s milk turned chunky.

The bad thing was Chuck had to lift the refrigerator into the rig all alone, and that didn’t help his sore stomach muscles. His stomach was black and blue from one side to the other. I tried to help as much as I could, but getting it through the door was hard!

We’ve lost pretty much all of the food in the refrigerator. The freezer is working on the new small refrigerator. So we were able to save quite a bit of food from the freezer. I will be happy to get the new refrigerator in so we can resume normal living, it’s hard to go this long without a working refrigerator, wonder how the pioneers did it?

Monday we went to old farts day at the Silver Reef. We were meeting Steve & Sandy, who drove up from Lake Tyee, where they are staying. We enjoyed a nice lunch and visiting, played a bit; I think everyone just donated, not sure.

We made plans to go back to the Reef for Monday night football and the free hot dogs. We then continued our errands and went home to walk Misty.

Then back to the Reef. We met up with Richard/Sandy, Joe/Alice and Steve/Sandy, who came back from Mt. Vernon to watch the football game.

The guys watched the game and the gals played. It was good to see all our friends once again before we left. And I think Joe and I went up for the evening. Thanks everyone, we don’t know when we will be back in the area; it was great to see you all. Special thanks to Joe and Alice for letting us use their lot. We appreciate it!

Chuck saw his surgeon, Dr. Pietro on Tuesday and he said Chuck didn’t suffer any lasting effects to his surgery site, and all the bruising would fade. Chuck was good to go, even though there was all that bruising.

So the next day we left Birch Bay; getting out of Dodge just before the fall rains were to begin in that area; but we didn’t get far enough south, because we had the rains here. Oh well, that’s how it goes, into everyone’s life lots of rain must fall.

Yesterday we went up the road a bit and went to a rally put on by Guaranty RV Dealers. They gave us a bag of goodies for registering and a free lunch of chicken, pizza and green salad and soda. They had seminars in the morning and free driving classes in the afternoon. We ate lunch and looked at a few new rigs, then left.

Chuck wanted to look at another RV place just down the road. They had a new 2013 40 foot Phaeton, bath and a half. It was really pretty, almost makes me wish for a new rig, but not quite. If they had an Allegro Bus, now that’s another story.

With the replacement of the refrigerator we will have replaced the microwave, put in a new TV and refrigerator; we have repaired the clothes washer and dish washer. Not sure why we these appliances haven’t lasted very long in my estimation. Must be hard on them from being on the road.

So that was our week. We have to be here until at least Wednesday, then we’ll probably head south. I can hardly wait to see our daughter and granddaughter. That’s it for me…

Until next time….

Lorraine

10/14/12 Chuck’s Report

Once again, it’s great to be back on the road. Well, on the road is just a saying right now as we are sitting at a repair shop in their parking lot waiting to get our fridge replaced. We have a Norcold RV type refrigerator, runs on either electric or propane so can be used with or without hookups.

There has been lots of RV fires that were caused by problems with the refrigerators so Norcold issued a recall to install an over temperature device that would shut everything down if it detected abnormally high temperatures at the back of the fridge. We had the recall done over a year ago and no problems since - - until about 10 days ago. We came home and heard a beep-beep-beep sound coming from the fridge, usually an indication one of the doors wasn’t closed.

This time the doors were closed and we found there was no power to the fridge. I checked the over temperature device and found it was tripped with a red light lit up like a Christmas tree. I said Shucks or something like that and looked things over. I found it had four wires, a 12 volt in, ground, 12 volt out and one that escapes me at the moment. I figured I could connect the 12 volt in to the 12 volt out and bypass the device.

I wasn’t too worried about bypassing this device as we had no signs of overheating and figured the device was just bad. I had read where many folks had to replace this box, some even more than once. Of course, this was all happening on a weekend so I couldn’t get any help from a RV service place otherwise I would have just replaced the box and gone on.

Once I bypassed the device, the fridge ran just fine on propane but I couldn’t get it to work on electric. No problem, we have a propane tank onboard and it was almost full, should last us like this for over a month. I had plans to get a new recall device on Monday and restore everything back to normal.

BUT (and there is always a but, isn’t there?) sometime on Saturday Lorraine noticed the fridge wasn’t a cool as before. I checked and everything appeared to be running fine so I just raised the setting. However, on Sunday it was pretty apparent that it was not cooling much, if at all. The freezer stuff was still solid but the fridge wasn’t cool but it was still running on propane.

Sunday afternoon we had been invited over to our friends Glenn/Jan for dinner. I had worked with Glenn at the refinery for most of my time there, sometimes even on the same crew. So after watching the Seattle Seahawks win their football game, off we went to their house. We had a great visit and dinner with them, its been a long while since just the four of us had sat and visited. They are retired too, have a nice place with three acres with shop, barn and garage. They also have a a nice looking home in Arizona and try to get there often.

They also had a neighbor that wanted to get rid of their motor home and talked them into buying it. So now they have two houses and a nice diesel pusher. They wanted to talk to us about our time on the road as they have some decisions to make. We were happy to give them any info we could about this great lifestyle and are looking forward to hearing about their final decisions. Good luck Glenn and Jan, I’m sure you will make the correct one for you two. And thanks for the dinner and visit, we really enjoyed ourselves.

After we got home we checked the fridge and made the decision to purchase a small apartment sized one to try and save our food. We headed off to Wal-Mart, found one that would work and brought it back home. By now it was going on 9:00 and we knew we needed to get this done before stuff started going bad.

I managed to get the fridge out of the back of our car and out of the box with no problem. Now, however, was the task of getting it into the coach. I knew it would fit through the front door but I was still pretty sore from having surgery 4 days earlier and it had to be “man handled” into the coach. With Lorraine on the top end guiding and me lifting and pushing it, we managed to get it in and on the floor.

After resting and catching my breath (I’m still having trouble with my breathing) we get it into its spot and Lorraine gets it plugged in. We start moving stuff from the fridge into the much smaller one. Of course, we knew we couldn’t get everything from the bigger on to the smaller one but figured without water bottles, soda and beer, it would be close. Once we started moving things and with Lorraine throwing away some stuff, we got it done. There had already been a few things showing signs of spoilage so we actually ended up with three garbage bags of stuff to put in the dumpster.

By now it was after 10 so we left the stuff in the freezer, everything was still frozen except for the water in the ice maker, and called it a day. Next morning I moved the stuff from the freezer into the small freezer on the new one plus in the bigger one we carry in the basement.

I then turned off the fridge and went outside to block in the propane. We made the decision to just go ahead and replace the fridge because after looking things over, I found where the propane burner area was pretty thin and there were signs of ammonia leakage, or at least that’s what I convinced myself.

Monday morning I called this repair place to see if they could get us in to replace our fridge with a residential type. They said if we could get here they would start on Friday morning. All we had to do was get here and bring our credit card. He told me that have replaced over 40 this year alone so it wasn’t a new thing to them at all. I told them to put us on their schedule and we would be there on Friday.

Monday we had plans to meet with our friends Steve/Sandy at the casino for old farts day buffet, $5 for lunch with $5 match play on the tables. We had a good visit with them then played the slots and tables for awhile. I think the gals were down some with the guys about even.

We wanted to go to Lowes to check out some refrigerators for ideas of what we could use in our coach so we told our friends bye and wished them luck for the winter. We also told them we would be back to the casino to watch Monday night football and invited them to join us if they didn’t go all the way home.

We checked out a Lowes, made a stop at Walgreens then headed back to our coach. After walking and feeding Misty we returned back to the casino. They have free hot dogs during the game with drawings after each quarter for those who put their ticket in the bin. Steve/Sandy called and told us they were going to meet us there along with Joe/Alice and Richard/Sandy. I think most of the folks played the slots some and we all had hot dogs and a good visit with each other.

Tuesday morning I had my follow up check with the surgeon. By now I was bruised from lifting the fridge and I was hoping I hadn’t pulled the stiches. He checked things out, said the bruising should clear in a week or so and released me for travel. He left the stiches in place, said they would dissolve and fall out.

We finished some chores and stopped by to see Joe/Alice one more time before we left the next day. We had been staying on their lot and owed them some money, they made us a DEAL and told us to make sure to see them before we left the next morning.

So Wednesday morning we got everything ready for travel, met with Joe/Alice for a few minutes and got on the road. It was very cloudy and heavy dew, even had to turn on the windshield wipers a few time but the longest steak with no rain continued. We got out of there before the rains started, YEA. We wanted to make it though Seattle and make one overnight stop along the way.

We pulled into the RV park in Rochester and got set up. I was tired so I took a nap, then we went to Subway for dinner before we went by over to the nearby casino. We didn’t stay long, or should I say we stayed too long as both of us lost. So we returned back to our place and called it a day.

Next morning we got on the road for the trip through Portland and to our planned stop here at Oregon Motor Coach Care. This place is one of the best repair places on the West coast, they don’t sell any, just repair/renovate and service coaches. We stopped by here about three years ago to see about getting some damage on our coach repaired. They were too busy to help us but checked everything out and said we could make it to Red Bay with no problem. They didn’t even charge us for their time.

We got here in the afternoon and checked in. They have sites along the perimeter of the parking lot with 50 amp electric supply but no water/sewer. They said to pick a spot and someone would be right out to talk to us. A bit later, here comes the service manager who introduced himself and checked out the fridge. He said they could start on Friday as scheduled but they didn’t actually have the replacement and couldn’t get it delivered until Tuesday. He asked if we would be willing to drive up to Portland to pick it up from the warehouse, they would supply us with a small trailer to pull behind our car.

So Friday we got their trailer and headed out to pick up our new fridge. Remember I was just talking about the dry spell in the area? Well, it decided to break that spell in a big way, it started raining soon after we got on the road and continued all day. Lorraine had a couple of places she wanted to stop along the way too so we made the most of it. By the way, Portland traffic is almost as bad a Seattle and in a rain storm in unfamiliar area, we didn’t really enjoy the ride.

We got the new fridge and stopped at the Woodburn Outlet Mall on the way back. I only went to a couple of places with Lorraine but spent most of the time in the car. There was a pickup that pulled up alongside the trailer but as soon as they noticed me sitting inside, they hurried off. I wondered if they were planning on stealing whatever was in the trailer but they left before I could get their license number and call security.

Anyway, Lorraine finished her shopping and we continued back to our coach. While we were gone, they pulled the old fridge out and closed off the hole. We go back in on Monday morning when they will do some cabinet modifications before they can install the new one. Tuesday they will install the new one and trim it out. They had to remove a window and it will have to be removed once again to get the new one in.

So it will be Wednesday or maybe even Thursday before we leave here with a new residential type fridge/freezer and a bit lighter in the wallet. Our good friend Mark had already replaced his himself and said when we got to their place in Louisiana he would help replace ours. Wish we could have waited that long, Mark, but we had to do something now. Thanks for the offer however.

The weather has been great, until Friday when the storm went through. The TV new was talking about over 3” of rain in places along the coast in Washington, I’m sure we were over an 1” on our trip to/through Portland. The forecast is for more rain through Tuesday, typical fall weather in the great NW.

Our plans are to continue down I-5 through the rest of Oregon and California before we cut over to the Bay area to see our Daughter, Grand Daughter and son-in-law. I have called the VA in San Jose about seeing a pulmonary specialist but they said I have to see a regular doctor first and they will refer me to the specialist. This will be our first time with the VA for more than a physical so hope it goes well. I’ve heard horror stories about how bad it can be but we’ll try it for ourselves. Wish us luck!

Lorraine did take some pictures of our ride down here from Blaine, mostly of the trees as they turn colors. So I’ll add them and get this posted.

Bruising on my belly, really didn’t hurt too bad though.