Visit to Hines…

Didn’t really see much of Battle Mountain, mostly due to the virus. I just arrived, parked, set up, and closed the door. Got on line and streamed an old Seahawks game still available for free on the NFL Gamepass website. They were only offering it due to the virus, otherwise it’s either $49, $99, or $149 per season…price depends on when you start using it. The later in the season you subscribe the less expensive it is.

Next morning, got fuel, and headed north on I-80. Here’s some shots of the area.

And here I am traveling though the high deserts and lonely valleys along I-80 from Battle Mountain to Winnemucca. Big ass valley off in the distance is where Winnemucca was established off to the left were you can’t see it. Pretty obvious why pioneers decided to stay there once you get down this road a few more miles. Lots and lots of volunteer water filling the surface ponds and the underground reservoirs that comes from the heavy snow fall in the winters and spring rains on the surrounding hills and mountains. All that green up ahead is supported by surface water in the spring, and underground wells later. And there’s a moderately sized river that runs through the valley as well. Pretty neat area. You should visit.

And here in Winnemucca is where I make the turn onto north bound US95. Note the 2 casinos. I am pretty sure there’s several more.

And shortly after (Winnemucca isn’t all that big) back into the high desert.

And soon I’m in the long flat valley of eastern Oregon. With snow off in the distance.

It doesn’t take very long to travel from Battle Mountain, Nevada to Hines, Oregon…just over 4 hours. Stopped for fuel after arriving ($2.69/gallon), than headed to the Sands RV Park in Hines for a weeks stay. Cost is $132/week all services paid, and $325/mo if I’d stayed longer. When I got there, grabbed the only 50 amp space available which luckily happened to be open.

As some may remember, I’d stayed at this grungy little RV park before. I was there for a couple months in ’18 I think? and entertained the possibility of buying the park as the owner offered it at $165,000 though the broker he had listed it at had listed it at $195,000. Pretty good price. Back then I stayed there a month or two, and installed a Wifi expansion system that covered the entire park where before my work, it only covered 3-4 RVs nestled up near the office building. That was a fun project, but the owner was and is an ass. Paid me $20 for all the work I’d done and accused me of soooo much stupid sh1t I had nothing to do with. Like he’s blaming me for all the trouble he’d had with every tech he’d met over the previous 10 years. So that left a bad taste in my mouth. I didn’t regret only getting $20 because he did pay cash for the equipment I installed, and I got high speed Wifi out of the deal for a month or two…and since the only other RV park in town charges double his monthly rate (and had better coverage with their Wifi but not as good as my setup) I felt I was getting paid sort of with being able to use my own installation.

Well, after I left the place and headed south back then, I contacted the guys RE broker and asked some standard questions you ask when you’re buying a business and turned out the broker was/is brand new. Heard he just got his license (not sure he even has one after my experience with him). In addition, he works for the city of Hines. So I asked him for documentation about the liens the city had on the property…as far as I could tell, there where 2-3 liens.

The owner also talked extensively about the trouble he’d had with the city about the edge of the property where there were apparently buried gas, water, and electrical that the city had a lien on for services. I needed the specs on that because that area would be needed for access by giant & heavy RVs. One of the other liens, I understood, was for an alley right of way right down the middle of the property which I could see as it was obvious and currently used quite often.  It’s position could conflict with expansion plans. A third lien was the city sidewalk at the front of the property that bordered the main highway. And it was there that there was a strong stench of sewage…right in front of the businesses office that faced that road. I know that the cities main sewer was probably under that street and the stench could be a broken main under the cement floored building OR under the sidewalk OR perhaps bubbling up from under the street or coming downhill from a neighbors business. NOT a cheap repair! I needed to know if that was the cities problem, or the properties.

So I needed some pretty concise info about the wherefores and whatnots of those liens. But even though the RE guy also worked for the city, he couldn’t (or wouldn’t) tell me the specifics. I couldn’t even get him to send me a recent plat of the property which shows that sort of thing. And as a broker, he apparently didn’t know how to get that info from the MLS that realtors have access too even if the city wouldn’t tell him (city can’t legally withhold that info so his excuses were bogus, he was either to lazy or not knowledgeable enough to find the info). A few years back I had a licence as a RE Broker in Oregon so I know some of this stuff.

After several back and forth emails with the guy, eventually devolving into him just refusing to get the info I requested, or demanding that I look it up myself from the city he works for, I finally gave up. Screw that. I’m not going to buy some property only to find that it’s not suitable to expand or improve the business because of those liens. And it was/is definitely in need of improvements. Some of the ideas I had for improvements and expansion required knowing the extent of those liens.

I decided to stop here at the Sands RV Pk this year and see how things are going in Hines. I’m sort of parked on the alley because that’s actually a RV space and the only one with 50 amp. Last time I stayed here, the owner told me that I had to close my awning if any city vehicle wanted to use the alley. Okay, no problem.

And over there is someone who needs a new roof by the looks of it. You can see the slight depression there in the ground…that’s an old stream bed and from what I heard, it would become a pond during heavy rains. That small building is the ‘laundry’ room if you can believe it. So grungy no one uses it.

The owner lives in that RV in the background. The trailer in front wasn’t there the last time I was here. I guess the reasoning of having it parked there was to take advantage of the shade trees the other spaces to the left side of the park don’t have. All the other sites with shade were likely filled when this guy moved here.

The place looks the same. I bumped into a friend from my last visit still living here and he tells me the place was finally sold a couple months previously, for $200,000. So the owner did a bit better on the sale. He and all his tons of junk is supposed to be out by July. Doubt he’ll made it because he hasn’t even started and he’d mentioned in the past that he wants to keep all of it. I wonder if the new owners had an easier job than I did getting that info on the liens. I saw online the owner had changed RE offices so likely they were able to find the info.

Anyway, a couple days later, I headed up onto the hill to the west of Hines. That pond off in the distance in this pic is across the highway and the golf course from where the RV park is.

Here’s that old cement building that held tires during WWII in downtown Hines. Now I’m not sure what it is but there do seem to be people living in it. Or working in it as there’s always cars parked around back in the alley. Note the RV parked under cover. Maybe those are apartments on the 2nd floor?

Then one day, the wind picked up and there was a snow storm of these little leafy things blowing off the nearby trees. It really looked like a snow storm for almost an hour. When the wind finally died they all settled on the ground, I walked out and discovered my car, with two windows rolled down, which was now hosting thousands of these things. Than I closed the windows. Dammit.

Here’s that alley’s right of way, where that blue truck is parked. The RV park has spaces to the right, and to the left, so you can see why knowing all the specs of that right of way would be important to a RV park owner if s/he wanted to expand.

Next day, I’m driving around over in Burns after visiting the VA clinic and hey, lookie here…

This is inside the towns city limits. Not out in the countryside. Kinda cool.  I do know many city folk see wildlife too but here in Burns, I’ve even seen a small herd of deer wandering around munching peoples grass for them.

After an uneventful rest stop in Hines, it was back on the road for the short jaunt to John Day. The Clark County RV park is one of my favorite stops these days. Very nice. Cute little town. It’s only a 1.5 hour drive so I left Hines at check out time, and dawdled as much as I could along the way. Very little traffic, very scenic, and comfortably cool. Much of it was uphill so going slow was acceptable to other drivers and there was only one occasion where I needed to pull over to let people pass.

This above area I showed pictures of several years ago the year after all those eastern Oregon wildfires. This was one area that was charred and denuded back then. It’s looking healthy green now. But of course, all the trees are babies. And around 2 I arrived at the RV park and was happy to see several empty spaces. But many of them had reservations for the upcoming weekend. So had to wander around reading all of them to find a space where I could stay from Tuesday up until Saturday morning. This is exactly why I try to travel during the week and be settled for a weeks stay by Thursday. With the Covid-19 thing going on, I thought it would be empty here, but no such luck.

It’s the Grant County Fair Grounds so it’s popular with farmers and their kids. This field is where many of the horse events occur.

I find a decent spot to park, plug in my 50 amp cord and wait a few seconds listening for the ‘clunk’ of the relay that indicates the power is good. But no clunk. Hmm. Well, whatever, I go inside, write a check for 4 nights ($120!), and then go back to the power post to check power. And there’s only one leg of the 50 amp working. So I get my dogleg and plug into 30 amp. Temps are so cool that even with just 30 amps, I am comfortable. Very nice shirtsleeve weather. With occasional sun breaks.

And I decided to eat out so I checked online and found a few restaurants that were at least doing the pick up thing. I wanted to find a curbside service but no one was doing it here. Anyway, settled on ordering from The Outpost because it had such good reviews. Boy did it deserve them! What great home cooked type meals. Flavor galore. I had the meatloaf to go and everything about the meal was just excellent. The meatloaf especially, nice and firm, not like the normal soupy slice you often get. And huge slices too. Must have been 2 full meals there so I only ate half the first night and half the next. Gravy was excellent. I wandered in and ordered, sat down at a booth and observed most of the guests came in with masks or dropped them as soon as they sat. All the staff except one or two in the kitchen were wearing them. The gal that prepared my goodies though, she had one on.

Here’s another shot of my spot and note that the John Day river is back there in among those trees and bushes. Not a huge river, but bigger than a creek for sure. And after I got back from picking up dinner, that’s when the grounds keeper came by and told me that it was only going to be 30 amp at least until they could get an electrician in to work on it because it was out from 3 spaces away to 1 space beyond where I was. And when the electrician arrived they’d likely have to shut of all the power in that row and didn’t know how long it would be out. And by now, there’s no more open places to move to. Dammit.

Well, after that bad news, I went ahead and enjoyed my delicious meal and then did some outside chores. One of which was removing the water pump, pulling it apart and cleaning it up really well as it had developed a tiny leak on a sealed edge. That took a couple hours and worked out well as the leak was no longer evident when I finished. Here’s a link to my article about it: Water Pump repair…

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The next day the electrician showed up. Yea! And they came by and said they would have to shut down all the shore power for a couple, maybe 3 hours. Okay, not a big deal. I shut everything down, and unplug the RV just before. So I’m sitting in the RV with nothing to do when I notice that the house batteries are really getting low fast. This is not good. It had only been and hour or so since power was turned off and they should stay up for several hours, shore power or no shore power. And that lead to a couple hours cleaning, servicing and re-orienting my house batteries. I may have ruined them due to neglect, I won’t know for a while. Here’s the article about that: Batteries…

That helped pass the time and late that afternoon, the electrician had a big water canon/vacuum machine come out and water drill and vacuum up all the dirt and water blasted out by the water canon around a shore tower a few spaces over from me. Gah, the tree roots in there! Terrible if you’d had to dig all that hard packed dirt out by hand with all those tree roots, even difficult with a mini-backhoe. The truck was labeled with the city logo. Wonder how much the county had to pay for it’s use? After the hole was like 4′ wide X 4′ deep they found the break in the wire, fixed it, and buried it all in one afternoon. And I had 50 amp power back about an hour after finishing the battery servicing. Good timing.

Since I’d had to do some work, decided I’d eat out again. The food had been so good at The Outpost, that this night I ordered their Fish & Chip and that meal was also very good. This time I waited in the bar and had a nice microbrew.

On the way to the Outpost, just a block or two from the fair grounds was a crowd of BLM protesters hanging out. Well, good for them here in this red section of the state in a farm and forestry town of only 1700 or so…I honked and gave them all a ‘thumbs up’ as I passed and got a bunch of waves back. When I waited for my meal right there on Main Street and expected to but didn’t see them anywhere on that major road right through the middle of town. I passed the same spot on the way home but they had marched off somewhere I knew not where. It’s possible they had just gotten back from marching when I passed that spot earlier. Well, anyway, good for them for doing that for BLM and exercising their 1st amendment rights to peaceful assembly.  Far more whites than blacks in that group that numbered around 25-35. I was thinking of joining them but didn’t know where they went.

And here’s how empty the park was late Thursday afternoon. But every space I checked was reserved for the weekend. Dammit I wanted to stay longer but no space available so no luck.

Well anyway, after dinner, I had the daylight so I washed the RV’s front windows and the car real well, but got bored so didn’t vacuum out those tiny leaves or seed pods I’d picked up in Hines. I’ll get to it. Eventually.

The next day headed over to Napa to pick up some antifreeze and a bottle of heater core stop leak as the mornings were pretty coolish and I thought maybe I would be able to plug up the heater core leak with it on my drive. Topped off the surge tank and did all the fluid checking. I’d checked the window washer tank in the car and RV and they both needed some. At Napa, that damn stuff is like $15/gallon. Booooo. It’s only a buck or two most places.

And that’s where we’ll pick things up again, when I leave for Milton-Freewater.

Thanks for reading!