A chicken funny....

Slow news day around the campground... but Carl had found this a couple of weeks ago:

Hmmm?????

Gracie gets a bath!

Gracie (our rig) had gotten very dirty on our Alaska trip. While many of our fellow caravan travelers conscientiously washed their rigs frequently, we did not... and the campgrounds where we've stayed since our caravan have not allowed washing rigs. Thousand Trails Bend-Sunriver had no posted restriction in their rules, so we decided to go ahead and try to get "the big chunks off" as Carl says!

Carl did most of the brush work...

... though I spelled him a couple of times.

I did the spraying on of water before the brush and much of the rinsing, and I did drying with a microfiber cloth (several microfiber cloths) to eliminate water spots as much as possible and to catch any dirt that the brush missed -- Carl helped with the drying too. I also used Dawn to pre-treat the areas around the fuel inlet where diesel spills almost every time we fill Gracie up - that did a great job to cut through the grime that collects there.

We didn't get a full "before" picture on the drivers side, but this shows how dirty it was in the back section...

 

... and a "before" picture on the passenger side.

An "after" picture from about the same spot on the passenger side - wow!

The Jeep also got a quick rinse and wash -- we *had* washed it at our last stop on the caravan in Prince George, BC.

Driver's side relatively clean!

We had thought that we'd do it over a couple of days, but we managed to do the driver's side and rear in a single 1+ hour effort, took a break, and came back (when the passenger side was more in the shade) and did it and the front in another 1+ hour effort. We did not wax, not even the wipe-on wipe-off wax, and we didn't do the roof. The front still has bugs on it, but not as many as before! 

We're pleased to no longer be carrying Alaskan dirt with us! Well, at least not on the outside of the rig... there are definitely nooks and crannies where Alaskan dirt still resides!

Around the campground

We enjoy walking around the campground.

When we arrived on Monday, the ranger at the entrance said that it was good that we were planning to leave on 9/30, as that was the date that they would be closing some areas for the season -- so we would have free access to any site in the campground for our stay.

When we were walking on Thursday, we saw a sign that indicated which roads (and thus sites) would be closed starting 9/30 -- roads F-L will be closed for the season.

We are on A (site A7) -- so this area will remain open. But the road that goes across east-to-west about midway in the campground marks the sections that will be closed -- all those north of that road -- well over half the sites in the campground.

Based on how many open sites there are in the campground, we don't think there will be any issue for people wanting to camp here to fit into the remaining sites. It also removes 3 bathhouses which will reduce the campground's daily maintenance requirements. There are two dump stations -- one up at the top of the campground, and the other at the bottom. The one at the bottom is currently not functional, so I don't know if they will have it working by Monday or whether they will continue to allow access to the dump station at the top.

We've also been trying to figure out a couple of issues on Gracie. 

Neither of our front large slides are working correctly. The passenger side (which was "fixed" in Elkhart, Indiana in May) was not completely fixed at that time and we knew that we'd need further work on it -- the front locking mechanism sounds like it is deploying, but it does not. The back lock on that slide works successfully, so we feel that the slide is secure as we travel.

In June, as we were leaving Elgin, Illinois, the locking paddle at the rear end of the driver side slide made a long grinding noise when it finished coming in, which we figured was not good. We waited as we drove across country making one night stays until we got to Liberty Lake (where we would be for a few days) to see if it would go back out. We figured if it went out and wouldn't come back in, we would have a few days to deal with it. Well, the front locking paddle unlocked when we activated the slide, but the back one did not unlock and the slide did not go out. Good news: getting it back in was not a consideration; Bad news: we couldn't use our big slide. We've been living without our big slide (the one that gives us most floor space) since June. 

Another problem started just since we got back into Washington state -- the electric burner on our Oasis (hydronic heater) stopped working. Last year, we had just one of the two elements working, and we got that worked on in Nappanee, Indiana at the Newmar Factory Service Center. They found that a connection had worked loose and arced, causing a burned up wire so one element was not working. The technician was able to find the issue (it took a lot of time -- a couple of days -- for him to dig into it and diagnose it) and fixed it.

Carl has run a number of tests on the system -- it appears to be getting electric power - the breakers are fine. He cannot test all the way to the unit because that would require emptying the bay with all his tools, so we haven't done it.

We have an appointment at Freedom RV in Tucson for them to work on both of these issues. 

We feel pretty sure that there is an actuator problem on both of the slide locks. We actually had the rear one on the driver side replaced in 2020 (at the same place we took Gracie in May this year which was unable to get the passenger side one completely fixed). The fellow who worked on it in 2020 (who appears to no longer work there) said that these actuators were a component on Newmars that frequently fail. We are concerned that, if the actuator needs to be replaced, that it will take a while for a shop to get the part, so we have ordered one from Amazon to have it on-hand "just in case".

We are *hoping* that the problem on the Oasis is relatively simple for someone who is knowledgeable to work on them and that Freedom RV will be able to get everything fixed in just a couple of days.

Thousand Trails Bend-Sunriver

We arrived at Thousand Trails Bend-Sunriver on Monday. 

We really like this campground with its large sites -- though all of what you see in the picture is not our site -- we happen to be at a curve in the campground road, which meant that we could pull forward on the campground road and back straight into the site (easy parking without needing to worry about trees at the front of the rig as we turned into the site). And now, looking straight out our windshield, we see down the road and can see people walking or driving through.

Gracie in our site. It is a little unlevel -- the passenger side had to be jacked up quite a lot, so we have to use a step to get to the front door.

We are enjoying our week here!

Tuesday in Bend

On Tuesday, we headed into Bend to do a few things...

... we primarily wanted to see Reagan, a movie that friends had highly recommended.

The movie theater had us get our tickets at the concessions stand -- which meant that we were waiting behind people deciding whether to get the jumbo popcorn, or enormous popcorn, or astronomical popcorn! (Actually, I don't know what they were deciding on, I only know that it seemed to take an inordinately long amount of time for the couple in front of us to get their order placed and filled -- so I ended up going to a different line.)

After going to Oppenheimer a couple of years ago and being unable to hear a lot of the dialog, someone told me that theaters have devices that you can use to get closed captioning of the movie. Since we use closed captioning almost all the time when watching movies and TV in the rig, I decided that would be useful, so I asked about it when getting our tickets this time. The lady at the concessions marked on our ticket that I wanted a closed captioning device and sent me over to the customer service desk to pick it up. I had to wait for a manager, and he gave me some minimal instructions and a device that I was to wear around my neck that would receive the closed captioning signal, and then glasses that would allow me to see the closed captions.

My snazzy closed captioning glasses.

My assessment: they would be worth it for a movie where the dialog is hard to hear (Reagan was very clear dialog, so I really didn't need them). The glasses could fit over my glasses, but not very comfortably, so I took my glasses off (for the distance in the theater, I could see okay without my corrective lenses). The glasses, even without being over my glasses, became very uncomfortable on my nose and I had to adjust them a lot to try to keep them from being horribly uncomfortable. I don't know whether it was the glasses, or where we were sitting (about midway up the theater), or that I just couldn't get them adjusted correctly, but while I would prefer to have the captioning at the bottom, when I positioned the captions there, the captions were not very visible. I could get the captions to display at the top of the screen very clearly, and so that's where I had them for most of the movie.

Also, most of the previews did not have captioning, so I couldn't try to get them adjusted before the movie came on -- one preview did have captioning, so at least I got to see what I would be working with.

Speaking of previews... or rather, commercials -- there were about 25(!!!) minutes of commercials -- really commercials -- for many various products -- and some for concessions -- and some previews of upcoming movies -- between the time the movie was indicated to start (3:25pm) and the time it actually started (3:50pm). We were, of course, *paying* for the movie!!! (About $11 each) What the what?!?!? I'm sure the movie theater would say that the cost of the movie would be even higher without subjecting this rather captive audience to these commercials, but this was a bit much in our opinions!

We were in the Mill District of Bend.

After the movie, we decided to eat dinner while we were out. We also stopped at the US Foods Chef'Store (Carl wanted a cleaver) and Walmart (groceries) in Bend. A fun afternoon!

Heading south to Oregon

On Monday, we left Thousand Trails Chehalis and Washington state, on our way to Bend, Oregon.

I was watching for the "Welcome to Oregon" sign, but nearly missed it with all the roads and traffic -- barely caught a picture of it through the screen on our front door!

Heading east on I-84 a little ways, could see Mount Hood in the distance.

Another view of Mount Hood as we traveled

This might also be Mount Hood as we climbed so we were closer to it.

Later, the road dropped into a valley...

... the scenery was so different at this point -- "golden" hills with brown grass.

When we got to Thousand Trails Bend-Sunriver, we got checked in and went to find a site. We knew from our previous visit here that there were many sites that could accommodate Gracie -- and they have recently upgraded all the sites to 50A, so that made all of the sites equally desirable. There are no sewer sites here, so all the sites are about the same. 

We decided to drive the area where we had parked when we were here 2 years ago -- at that time, we got one of the few 50A sites in the park and were glad to have snagged it. This time, even though we could have picked any part of the park, we found one near where we parked previously, and it appeared to have an area where we could put our Starlink Dishy out and have a reasonably clear northern sky view.

When we were getting ready to back Gracie into the site, I noticed something over on the far side of the site...

... zooming in, it was a bunny. I remembered from our last time here that there are many bunnies, and they look like they are escaped (or released or abandoned) domestic bunnies as they are much more colorful than wild bunnies I am accustomed to seeing. I took pictures because I figured it would take off once it realized this noisy beast was moving in to the site next door....

... but it continued to stay there while we parked and set up, eventually heading out to another spot.

Bend is one of our favorite Thousand Trails campgrounds. It has nice sites, and when we've been here, it has had a lot of sun. It isn't too far from the town of Bend where there are plenty of stores and things to see and do. There are also volcanic sites nearby which we visited when we were here in 2022. We've been looking forward to coming here and enjoying what this area has to offer.

Last day at Chehalis

Sunday was our last day at Chehalis...

One of our neighbors gave us a HUGE zucchini. I figured that I could use it for zucchini bread (in my opinion, extra large vegetables are not usually very good as veggies -- same with fruit). Carl decided to see if Miss Kitty would be scared by it (have you seen the videos of cats being scared by cucumbers? here is a compilation on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBrZsgy4-SQ). Miss Kitty is pretty chill -- she slept against it, and later balanced a foot on it while washing, but otherwise pretty much ignored it.

I made zucchini bread on Sunday afternoon. I couldn't find the recipe I've used in the past, so I just got one off of the internet. It came out more as very nutty bread with the moisture added by zucchini, but it is okay. I only used a very small part of the zucchini, but I've read that I can shred it and put it in the freezer in the measures that I need for my recipe, and it will work for baking later on; I hope to get that completed in the next few days. I froze all but one of the loaves of zucchini bread that I made too!

A picture of our site, C-12, at Chehalis. It may look pretty level, but it was not! Gracie's back end was way low when parked in the site, and we had to put chocks at the front wheels and use her hydraulic jacks to raise her up a long ways in the back. We liked the area of the campground though. Unfortunately, most of the sites at Chehalis are not level.

We headed out from Chehalis on Monday -- more tomorrow on that!

Getting some things done

On Saturday...

... we decided to take the Fantasy RV Tour sticker off the back of the motorhome. Since we have a ladder on the back, I could go up it and pull it off. We thought we had better go ahead and get it off the paint in the back before it caused any issues with the paint.

I took the one off the back of the Jeep also. We won't be able to get the one off the windshield on Gracie until we get somewhere that we can use a ladder (Venture Out, if not before).

On a different project, about a year ago, Carl had gotten a smoke tube to enable him to cold smoke hard cheeses (Amazon link here), but had not had a chance to try it. He had gotten several cheeses (cheddar, swiss, gouda, and colby jack) to try it out. He had a little trouble getting it started (we left our propane torch in Mesa), but he finally got it going. When he went to check it about an hour later...

... he found that too many pellets had lit, the smoker had gotten too hot (not a *cold* smoke!) and the cheese blocks had fallen over and melted. Oh no!

We decided to let it go ahead and finish -- once all the pellets had burned up (smoking for about 2 hours), we brought it in and put it in the refrigerator for the blocks to solidify. (It isn't supposed to melt.)

Once it was solid again, we cut the blocks into cubes.

We actually thought they were pretty good. We preferred the gouda and colby jack smoked. The swiss was rubbery, and the cheddar seemed to have too strong of a flavor (we had gotten extra sharp cheddar, possibly a milder cheddar would have been better). Regardless, we'll try it again in the future and see if we can improve our technique!

Visiting Mount St Helens

When we were coming to this area, Carl asked if we would be close to Mount St Helens... our original travel plan did not have us very close, but we decided to make some changes and ended up in Chehalis which is not far from the National Monument. Friday was predicted to have relatively clear weather, so we decided to make the drive and see if we could see the mountain.

We knew from research online that the road to the National Monument's Johnston Ridge Observatory was temporarily closed due to a landslide that had taken out the access road. The road is not anticipated to be open again until 2026. So, we'd need to access other facilities and not have quite as close a view as we would have it it were open.

We stopped first at the Mount St. Helens Visitor Center -- a Washington State facility.

Information about places to learn about and see Mount St. Helens

We saw a video at the Visitor Center that identified the events that occurred the months and days before the eruption, information about the eruption itself, and aftermath. I looked to see if that video was on YouTube, and I didn't find it, but I found this one which was interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ec30uU0G56U&t=8s

We had heard about the massive numbers of trees that had been blown down by the blast and wondered if any had been harvested -- we found this information in the visitor center.

Mount St. Helens before the blast...

Mount St. Helens after the blast

A view of the inside of the visitor center

A view of Mount St. Helens from outside the visitor center. It was 30+ miles away from this point.

Even though the other information centers would be closed by the time we got to them, and we knew we could not get to the Johnston Ridge Observatory, we decided to drive further east toward the volcano on SR 504.

At Elk Rock Viewpoint - about 10 miles away

At Coldwater Creek bridge, the end of the road - about 7.5 miles away...

... and a relatively clear view too! This was the closest we could get with the road closure.

On our way back we stopped at Castle Lake Overlook and read through the information boards...

A little over 8.5 miles away -- the clouds had moved back in but we could see a little of the peak. In the middle of the picture is Castle Lake which was created by the eruption debris damming up the Toutle River.

As we drove, we were also mesmerized by the trees...

... these were in the Weyerhauser commercial forest land, there were signs in many places indicating when they were planted -- so all the trees in a large swath would have been planted at the same time.

To our eyes, they looked blurred as they were all of a similar size and all seemingly identical. The photos don't really capture how neat they were to our eyes.

We stopped at an overlook at a bridge -- the information boards here were sponsored by Weyerhauser.

The bridge was quite impressive -- you can also see where forest harvesting is proceeding on the far side of the bridge.

It was quite an interesting afternoon. We had specifically chosen to go later in the day because the weather forecast indicated that we would be more likely to have clear skies -- but by making that choice, we missed out on seeing the other two information centers, Weyerhauser's Mt St Helens Forest Learning Center (https://www.weyerhaeuser.com/company/values/citizenship/mount-st-helens/visit/) and the U.S. Forest Service's Coldwater Ridge Visitor Center (https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/giffordpinchot/recarea/?recid=40401). The lady at the Washington State Visitor Center who talked with us gave a glowing recommendation of Weyerhauser's center.