Yet another blog….. 
We are in another campground. 5, 6 – I’ve lost track of how many since we left home. Two or three weeks – maybe four in this one. Cell is good. Sites are reasonably far away from each other. Lots of trees so some shade. We are at a higher altitude, so temps are a bit more moderate, but colder at night as well. Water-electric only and currently we are on 30 amp and the pedestal sockets all look a bit burned. But they work. One AC is enough, but we could (and did for a few minutes) run both. We hope to move to 50 amp sites today, presuming people move out on time. The voltage on the current site was a bit low. Our built-in ems/switch didn’t or doesn’t cut out for low voltage, but our Victron Inverter kicks in automatically when the voltage gets low and it was momentarily kicking in yesterday afternoon. These campgrounds (Thousand Trails) are pretty busy – especially on weekends. We try to schedule our moves for Monday-Wednesday, Tuesday being ideal for open spots. Still, we sometimes end up taking what we can, then picking sites that will clear out the next day and moving.
Update – we did move the next day to a pair of 50-amp sites. We are settled in, hopefully for the full three weeks.
Washington and Oregon, it seems are a vast volcanic wasteland. Yes, the scenery is great. 
Lots of trees do grow here. But away from the coast, much of it seems more desert-like, at least late in summer. Nearly every peak you look up at is a volcanic remnant. There are volcanic rock cliffs and fields of lava. Even the gravel on the roads in the campground is a form of pumice. At first glance, it looks like normal granite gravel, but it is anything but. The ground under car, truck and RV tires it turns into the fine, gritty, grey “moon dust” as some of the locals call it. What passes for soil; a slightly brown version of moon dust barely seems to support life especially with the meager rainfall that makes it in off the coast. We are, after all, in what they call the “High Desert”. The fine dust sticks to everything and with little to no rain, it sticks there until washed off. Oh, and there are fires burning all around us. Soon we hope to head a bit east, away from the fire
We sometimes see deer in campgrounds such as this, as we did in this one our first day – a doe and two fawns. Today, a buck wandered through, eating berries off the bushes. A couple of days ago, they visited our kids campsite. This morning we saw four domestic bunny rabbits running loose. Seems they are permanent residents of the campground. The grandkids are naming them all. Bandit, Goldie, Butterscotch, Oreo, Midnight, and more…
We continue to have minor repair issues. The auto stop mechanism on the front passenger side window shade disintegrated. They offered to send me a new one. I couldn’t find a manufacturer name – but I knew my powered galley shade seemed to be MCD. But MCD insisted the shade wasn’t there. I asked Tiffin who made them so I could order parts – and they sent me a whole new shade!! We need to rework the gas fill on my daughter’s gas tank fill – it doesn’t allow the gas pump handle to properly seat down in the fill tube and thus won’t properly auto-shutoff when full, leading to never filling the tank all the way in order to avoid spills. Every day something needs to be repaired. Some days it is gluing a grand daughter’s toy back together or using a pin and epoxy to repair a plastic horse leg or getting out a needle and thread to fix a hole in my jacket pocket, a shirt, or a sock. Today it was going through and greasing all the bearings on one of the girl’s bikes. One down, three to go.
Update: the shades arrived and have been installed. Tiffin sent a return label – can’t imagine they want to pay to send back the broken shades – have asked. I’d rather scavenge the still-working parts to avoid another request for a shade. There are 9 other manual shades in this RV.
We have rope lights, we wanted to install under the rig. I got them installed a couple of days ago – a four-hour-long, dirty gritty job. “We” aren’t sure we like them. Kind of looks like we left the basement lights on. 8^} Now, my wife doesn’t like them….. We carry the bikes on the truck, on a hitch bike rack. The license plate isn’t visible in that configuration – I need to find a way to move the plate to the bike rack or somewhere else on the truck where it can be seen from the rear. I’ve ordered a trailer license plate + light bracket to do so. We don’t want to end up helping someone fill their quota of tickets.
Oh, and we finally stopped by an RV dealer/body shop to get an estimate on the repair to the right front fender that someone hit. The amount was ridiculous – over 5 times what Allstate says it should cost. Now we have to get yet another estimate and try to resolve the cost differences. The other person was clearly at fault – so in the end, this shouldn’t cost us, other than the never-ending hassle of getting estimates and trying to arrange a repair when most RV service places are at least a month out. Our best bet is to find a regular body shop that is familiar with working on RVs (fiberglass, diamond coat etc).
And – I realized the cell booster is connected through the wrong kind of coax – which may be affecting how well it works. We bought a directional antenna and I didn’t see the kind of improvement I expected. Then I remembered we installed that booster “in a hurry” and just used what coax we could find (75 ohm, run of the mill coax), and what should be installed is low loss 50-ohm coax designed for that purpose. I now have the correct coax and need to run it from outside to the inside cabinet location of the booster. Update – coax installed, but I got weirdness on the cell signal. When I connected the correct coax – cell improved somewhat – for a while. Then I installed the directional antenna – and same result, cell improved a bit for a while. I’m thinking the tower is close enough, that it adjusts power levels down to what it thinks is necessary. We will have to restest at some other location, where cell isn’t as good as it is here.
We did replace our old hotspot with a new Netgear Nighthawk M1 a couple of months ago, which is working fairly well. Sometimes, AT&T doesn’t work so well, but we are making good use of “unlimited”.
We also got the e-bikes out at the last camp – and did some riding around the campground. We have yet to take a longer trip out on them, but they are fun to ride wherever we are. It’s a bit of a chore to get them on and off the truck – batteries come out, fold-down handlebars and seats. Then lift them up – lock them on and I have a heavy homemade tarp I strap down. The first two tarps I tried flapped in the wind on the highway and shredded on one day’s travel. This one appears to be holding up well. They come off when we plan to stay for a week or more. It’s nice to be able to not have the backup warning beep incessantly when the bike rack is on AND be able to see out of the backup camera. It is also possible to buy a cable to extend to a new camera mounted farther back on the bike rack, but the cable is $80+ so I’m thinking I can make my own.
We were thinking about adding a kayak to the menagerie – which seems to have turned into planning to add a kayak. In the era of Covid, it appears kayaks are in shorter supply than toilet paper. We don’t want a cheap one – nor crazy expensive. Just a tandem we can hit the water quickly with or even take fishing (we did some fishing down on the gulf). Deb has a model picked out – if we can find one locally that is the required color, and a roof rack – it will be ours.
Update: We found a place nearly three hours away that had a couple of orange kayaks of our chosen model. The model we wanted came in three colors – we preferred the Caribbean blue, orange was our second choice, and ugly green our third. We couldn’t order it over the phone or on the web, so a trip was the only way. We got there – and low and behold, there was a blue model on the floor. Seems the someone managed to order it – and it sat in the back of the store until they canceled – one hour before we got there. So, we got our kayak and managed to get it home to the RV using some temporary foam supports and lots of tie-downs. Rack parts are on order – seems finding exact fitting rack parts for our vintage ford truck take a bit of work. So, does, it seems, finding a decent place to go kayaking.
Update: Our first trip out, we choose to skip the small stream that runs past the campground, due to lack of decent places to get the kaya into and out of the water (80 pounds and 13 feet long). We went to a park on the Dechutes river – seemed calm enough, but when we got out on the water we realized it was a 4-5mph current. We did manage to get the kayak up the river a way, then coasted down and loaded back onto the truck.
Our second trip out, we picked a small lake 35 minutes away. It was too busy, and we could see people walking out 100 feet from the launch area, still barely getting their ankles wet…. So, we went to another nearby lake that looked better – launched, went about 100 feet, and ran into a sand bar. Rerouted – and more sand bars. About 500 feet away from the launch, after getting out and towing the kayak, we gave up. We talked to some other people and got pointers of where else to go – but apparently, with no rain and most of the mountain snow gone, low lake levels is the norm in this area.
The third time, however, was the charm. We found a small volcanic lake with a non-busy boat ramp and lots of beach. It was surrounded by hills (caldera walls) so somewhat shielded from the wind. We still have a lot of practice before we will consider ourselves “experienced”, but it was a good trip.
Finally, in my spare time, I’m working to get my brother’s books onto Amazon. He wrote a dozen books – some history of our ancestors and several about the Central Wisconsin Veterans Memorial Cemetery (and other cemeteries), near which he lived. He did extensive research on the veterans (and their wives) that are buried there as well as providing many corrections to the official record-keeping there. James G. Gardner passed last spring and he asked me to take care of his library. I knew he wanted to make his set of books more available, so that is what I’m working on.
