Chaos Leaves Town

The morning after I went to Hearst Castle, since I went to sleep early the previous evening, around 10pm, I woke up at 5am. Weather was still pretty dismal, but at least the rain had let up somewhat. Got on the road by 5:30am, after a light breakfast and brewing a big pot of coffee to take along the trip. Figured I could get out of California near the end of one long day of driving so that was my plan. I was still mad about paying so much for a dry camping spot in a state park so wasn’t about to give them any more money if I could help it.

Heading up the coast on Highway 1 was an eventful trip, there were several road wash outs that I had to traverse with at least one of them looking like I should reconsider and turn back. I didn’t, and it worked out. But the road crews had been working at it early I guess, and most washout traverses were uneventful, if a little worrisome. The whole morning was twist-y turn-y driving up and down ocean side steep hills. But the views were spectacular, and the cloudy weather added a certain suspense to the trip. There were some homes along the way that were interesting, several had been converted into art galleries. This was the Big Sur I’d heard about. Interesting but really nothing more then some rich peoples homes and a few scattered classy businesses.

Around 1pm I found a place south of  San Francisco to leave the coast and head east inland on nice roads without to many hills and soon found myself heading due north on the I-5 freeway. This portion of the drive is pretty boring, nothing but farmland and a few small to large towns to pass through. Since I have a 90 gallon diesel tank, I can go up to 900 miles without fueling and sometimes that really helps the fuel budget, since I can put off purchasing fuel in small towns with high prices. And on this stretch of freeway I was able to find a minor price war and got the 55 gallons I needed for a full tank at a decent price. Enough fuel to get me into Oregon. The prices here were nearly  $0.80 per gallon cheaper then along the coast.

Late in the day I crossed the border into Oregon and maybe 15 miles later stopped at a little town in the Coast Mountains where the signs extolled the virtues of two different RV parks. Remember the storm I told you about? It had roared though here that morning and dumped inches of rain on the area. I had to cross a foot deep creek to get into the park. I was a little worried and just parked there looking at the creek, over it’s banks, spilling across the access road, for at least 5 minutes before I decided it was unlikely for that little flood to sweep a 22,000 pound RV off the road.

The next morning I still have the entire width of Oregon to cross so I get an early start. But not 5am, more like 8am.

Back on the road.

Wow, still stormy. And check out the snow.

And a little more snow in the mountains...this is mid-April.

Some bump in Oregon, I think.

Tried to get a shot of a valley off in the distance.

There was a huge lake, hard to get good pictures when you're driving.

More clouds! More rain! Getting sick of this weather.

Last of the mountains, just flat valley from here on.

I was lucky enough to have gotten to several Shakespearean plays here in Ashland a few years ago. A friend had her son going to college here and we were able to score free tickets to several plays. Extraordinary.

Finally arrive at Jackie and Jeff's place. That's the new baby.

What a cutie!

Jackie looks healthy and happy...

A natural at being a mom.

Swinging Matty.

See, they trust me to not drop her.

Took me another long day to get to Portland so I was worn out. Went to bed early and slept in late. Then the next day headed to Troutdale to see Theresa.

I’m going to back track here since I was able to recover many of the lost pictures. This section is about the trip my brother and I took to Hearst Castle on the coast of California. Enjoy!

Since my brother and I were in the area, we headed over to the coast to visit the Hearst Castle.  I’ve never been, Dan has been 2-3 times, but he didn’t have a problem with going again. The weather was threatening with big black clouds hovering over the area coming in from the sea. On the trip up to the castle, I’d seen a campground just a few miles from there so I figured I could stay there that night.

The castle was interesting but my feeling was that it wouldn’t have been to much fun living there, except for the pool in the basement, because it was so dark with far too many religious icons all over the place. The library was cool, with thousands of 1st edition books. I did try to take pictures but they have a strict ‘no flash’ policy and then with the weather being so bad, it was pretty dark in nearly all the rooms. But, I’ll put some of them up to at least give you an idea of what the place looks like. About the weather, we hung around the interpretive center while we waited for our bus. Dark but calm. A couple hours later, when our tour was to begin, it had started to rain and the wind had picked up. During the tour, we had to run for it a couple three times as we left one area of the castle for another. When we got up to the 3rd floor, the wind was howling, and looked, based on the trees, that it was 50-60 MPH. Kind of happy we were inside that day. The rain came down in buckets for the whole tour, over two hours.

The weather turns ugly on the way to Hearst Castle.

Storm warnings were sent out around this time...

We arrive at Hearst Castle.

Some of the statuary.

The outdoor pool. Hearst had it rebuilt a couple times over the years, trying to get it perfect.

Another view of the pool and the statuary.

Would love to live here for a time...

A little wet here.

The wind is picking up, was around 35MPH at this point.

The first room we visited was on the ground floor.

One of the living rooms.

Another set of priceless antiques.

The pottery and the painting were all very valuable we were told.

Each room had a fireplace or two...

Check out the wind blown tree tops...it was really raging for a while there.

Another of the many finely furnished guest rooms. Hearst really liked to entertain his Hollywood friends. Usually invited 20-30 people at a time to stay over for a long weekend or even a week at a time. Often flying them to San Simeon in his private plane.

One of the outdoor walkways.

A few first edition books.

Some of those lamps are worth 10's of thousands.

Another fireplace with fancy lamps!

There were several small balcony on the upper floors.

The 'Grand' room. Place for everyone to gather and talk at the end of the day.

And the dining hall.

It is quite the room, woundn't mind watching a good football game here.

Some of the rare 'gold' objects at the castle.

Still a pretty big storm out there. Happy I was inside.

We brave the weather to walk over to the pool house.

And here is the spectacular mosaic installed by Italian artisans at the pool.

A little light on the statuary.

A little more of that incredible floor.

What an amazing place to just take a swim.

And finally, the pool itself.

How'd you like to hang out here?

Amazing place. I mean, really, who wouldn't want to hang out here?

A little natural light at the shallow end.

The diving platform.

I'm thinking here of ditching the tour group, sneaking back and taking a quick dip.

And a last look at the window wall.

Well, that’s our tour of the Hearst Castle. I did get more pictures of the giant visitors center and our drive up and then down the hill to/from the castle but those didn’t survive the great ‘dead motherboard’ & ‘dead harddrive’ debacle of 2010.

Dan left me at this point and drove back to Rosamond to go to work the next day. He did inform me that he’d decided to keep working for another two years for some reason. He’s 66 now and could have retired this March. Thinks he’ll live forever I suspect.

Anyway, after the tour, I hung out in the visitor center, guess it was around 4pm, for the weather to calm a bit. It really didn’t. Finally around 4:30pm, I just braved the 200 yard walk to my RV with just a light windbreaker. Wasn’t even waterproof. Then I drove my RV back south 4-5 miles to a state park. The low cost section was blocked off. So I had to park in the expensive part of the park, $35 per night for just a spot. No electric or water, just a spot with a fire ring (it was raining buckets), a picnic table and a near by washroom. WHAT A HUGE RIP OFF. If you are thinking about going to California for camping, forget it. They are trying to fix their budget problems by ripping off campers. DON’T GO TO CALIFORNIA.

It was late, near 5pm, raining with no let up in the forecast, and miles from any other campground. So, pissed as I was at the 71% increase in camping rates in one year at that state park, I went ahead and paid and stayed. I will not camp anywhere in California again. I did try to start my genset but it always has trouble starting in wet weather so after a couple tries, I gave up and just did without AC for the evening. I had myself a MRE for dinner, even used the chemical heater that comes with it, found it to be ‘not bad’.

My MRE dinner. Comes with lots of goodies too, like Skittles, PB&J, pound cake, crackers, etc.

(The burn spot on my stove top was there when I bought the rig. I tried to sand it down and paint it once but the paint only lasted a few weeks. And yes, it was high temp paint).

Crawled into bed to read by 9:30. Totally dark and dreary by then, with sheets of rain coming down intermittently throughout the evening. Wind gently rocked me to sleep.

I have finally arrived in Alaska. I’m now at my old haunt in Fairbanks volunteering at the Ice Park Campground. I manage the place, check people in, make sure everything works, etc. Got here last Thursday evening after a long 12 hour drive.

The last couple days, I’ve been getting the computer at my desk up and running (they pretty much tear down the office in the off season). Now I have all the software I’ll need to work on the blog installed so in a few days I’ll begin uploading pictures and words here.

Stay tuned!

As far as the trip went, I left Walla Walla in early May, made my way up to Oroville, Washington, then waited 12 days for a storm to pass and the weather to get a little better. I didn’t want to see any snow on the roads up in the north. I shouldn’t have worried about that though since they had record highs earlier in April and nearly all the snow was melted. I did see some snow but not enough to worry about. And none on the roads.

Along the route, I saw 5 black bears, 2 moose, 2 deer that ran out in front of me causing an emergency braking procedure, and an elk. All the animals were pretty healthy looking. I was only able to get a picture of one animal though…a bear. But then I did find a beaver lodge and dam so I got some shots of that. Not quite as good looking as a beaver pond as I saw a couple years ago on my way up, but good enough.

It took me five days to get up to Fairbanks from Oroville and that was with one 10 hour day driving and one 12 hour day. The border crossings were easy again, the Canadians didn’t even bother to put ‘Do not use in Canada’ wrappings on the extra wine I brought into the country. The US border at Alaska was easy too, they didn’t even come into the rig, just asked to see my passport and asked a few questions. Easy breezy. I could have smuggled in 10-12 illegals in the back bedroom and made a bundle.

The roads in Canada had been trouble for 2 days with the frost heaves and road work so when I got into the US I was really happy about finding good roads for miles and miles. The roads started to get better around 20 miles north of the US border. By the time I got to Tok, around 3:30pm, I’d decided to push on to Fairbanks though I’d initially planned on spending the night. I was looking forward to getting to Fairbanks and waiting until the next day didn’t appeal to me.

Around 30 miles out of town there was a guy holding up a $5 bill as I passed so I stopped and picked him up. He’d been in Chicken, Alaska, working at a mine helping a gold miner. They butted heads and didn’t get along so he’d left the job site at midnight and had been hitchhiking for a couple days since. We figured out how far he’d walked on foot and it came out to be around 48 miles. The other one hundred and fifty miles he’d been able to get a ride. Then I stopped for him saving him another 240 miles of walking. Dropped him off in North Pole and ended up visiting my favorite bar in Fairbanks by 7:30pm. After hanging out there and visiting with my friends, I headed off to the RV park, plugged in and off to bed. Nice trip all in all. Not a single thing went wrong with my RV on this leg of the adventure.

I was able to restore many of the missing pictures, some are totally lost, but many others are back none the worse for wear. Only problem is that now I am on the road up to Fairbanks, Alaska and really don’t have the time to work on this blog like I’d like to. In just a few more days, I’ll be settled in at the Ice Park campground and will be able to devote several hours in a row to get the blog back in shape.

Thanks for hanging around! Soon there will be a bunch of pictures from the AlCan highway! Mountains, lakes, bears, moose! Oh, my!

Since I lost those 218 pictures, I guess I’ll just give you a quick run down of where I went and what I did. I left my brothers house in Rosamond California while he followed in his Prius. We headed due West to wine country, taking highway 46 to Paso Robles. It didn’t take long to get there so we were sipping Calif wines by early afternoon. After visiting 2 wine tasting rooms, we headed into a several mile long wine tasting loop and stopped at a nice little winery that happened to have two nice women to talk to. I enjoyed myself talking to them until Dan got bored and decided to take off and visit some more wineries before it was too late…most wineries close their tasting rooms by 5pm. The plan was for me to follow and stop at each wine tasting room I found on the loop. A half hour later I left and headed down the road to what I thought was the next winery. Up a steep hill. I didn’t notice that the sign said, “Vineyard”, not “Winery”.  When I got to the top of the steep hill, I discovered that the gate was closed, with no place for my 37′ RV to turn around safely. So I backed down the 1/2 mile or so only to jamb my rear rails into the blacktop, stopping my progress. Couldn’t move forward either. Not enough power. Just about then the two women I’d met at the last winery stopped to offer help. I used their phone to call my tow company and they kept me on the phone for over a half hour while they tried to find someone that could tow my 22,000 lb rig out of it’s predicament.

A cop showed up and since the rear end of the rig was poking out into the road, he set up with his lights flashing so traffic would be warned. Finally, one of the tow companies in the area dispatched a tow truck, stating that I’d have to sign a no fault agreement if they damaged my RV.

Around that time, two locals pulled in and volunteer to give me a tug. The tugger had a four wheel drive pickup truck. Not even a dually. Just four wheels. I said sure, we hooked up a chain to the front of my RV, I climbed in and started it up, put it in gear, gave them the high sign and seconds later, I was free. Unhooked and backed up at an angle so I wouldn’t get stuck again and headed up the road trying to find my brother.

I made the entire loop and didn’t see any open wine tasting rooms, since it was after five PM, I just expected him to head to our roundavous point…a nice RV park. Where they charge $58 per night! But it was getting dark, I couldn’t find him along the route we’d planned and I felt I could get online and use Skype to give him a call (I’d lost my phone in Guadalajara). So, I hook up and my computer fails. Wouldn’t boot. Totally dead. Eventually, I found that the mother board or the CPU had gone bad. Well, I couldn’t call him, my spare computer didn’t work either, it had died weeks before, but I’d already hooked up and used services, it was 10pm, so I just went ahead and spent the night without trying to call. I did leave a note on the office door that he could have found if he came back. He came by the next morning. He’d been to the RV park a couple hours before I got there, waited a while, but gave up and went to spend the night at a motel. The next day we went and visited a really old mission, now a museum. Those pictures are completely gone, but after the mission visit we went across the street to another museum that was a historically important home/cafe/bar/store. The following pictures are of that building and grounds.

Water storage tower.

The arbor, probably would be spectacular with flowers.

Some of the flowers all over the place.

Funny looking plant of some kind.

A little information about the original owners.

The building at last.

A couple hundred year old toilet. No plumbing though.

Nice big living room on the second floor.

The old school room where the kids suffered, but the teacher is a doll.

Back outside, a really interesting machine of some type.

This device had a wooden tub with a one lunger engine attached that pumped whatever it was in the tub. The wood was still in pretty good shape, though it could have been restored, and I thought the machine might be used in construction, like an ancient cement pumper, but that’s not likely.

I thought all the catii in the barrow was kind of interesting.

This is desert country...

Later that second day, we visited Morro Bay to look for some special kind of butterfly that is suppose to live there but the season was over and they had all gone to Mexico, or north, dunno. But I had fun looking at the area and hanging out on the beach.

Cyprus trees.

We walk to the beach. Weather wasn't all that nice. Chilly, cloudy. No butterflys.

This tree was hanging on for dear life.

This is all the closer we got to the ocean. Didn't want sand all over. The sand here is very fine.

And off we go up the coast.

That night we stayed at the same campground and next morning we headed over to the coast then north to San Simeon, and the home of the Hearst Castle. As we arrived at the castle, around 11am, the weather was threatening but not to bad. As the day progressed, it turned into a really nasty storm. I was happy to be inside the castle because the palm fronds outside were horizontal with the wind as the rain came down in copious sheets. Continue reading →

Three weeks ago my computer died. Since I was heading north from the California coast 100 miles above LA, I thought I would hold off buying a new computer at retail and get a new mother board from Fry’s outside of Portland and save some money. A new mother board and CPU would give me higher speed and less flakiness as well. My old mthrbd and CPU zipped along at 1.1GHz but I was looking forward to 3GHz – 3 times faster!

I stopped at Fry’s and as expected they were having a sale on an MSI mthrbd so I had my new parts for under $100. Off I went to Corbett Oregon and a nice campground north of Troutdale. After a couple hours the new board & CPU were installed but the older power supply wouldn’t run it. Next day I head off to find an appropriate power supply for $28. With the new power supply installed, it fired up and ran, but, since I have XP Pro, it wouldn’t run because XP detects your hardware and if there is a change it decides you are trying to steal a copy of XP and shuts down. Since I had no internet connection without a running OS, I couldn’t get online and read up on a solution to my kind of situation. Turned out there isn’t one. Nothing I’ve read online since has a method of reinstalling the OS that wouldn’t ruin my files.

Finally, I just reinstalled my copy of XP on one of my two harddrives, both have copies of all my files and pictures. With that done, I was able to get online and soon had a virus! Damn! But before I discovered that, I had downloaded all the 218 pictures I’d taken from the coast up to Corbett.

But the virus was now interfering with normal activities so without thinking of all those pictures, I reinstalled XP, reformatting the harddrive in the process. This time, I did everything right, like installing SP3 right off the bat followed by AVG antivirus and Zonealarm. With those protections installed, I’m not worried about viruses taking over again, at least not for a long while.

So, all those pictures are gone. I guess I’ll just just restart this blog from the day I left Troutdale to head east to Walla Walla. I’ll be here for a week visiting family and then on to Alaska. I’ve planned out the trip and it looks like it will take at least 7 days, more if I find a nice park I like and decide to stay a few days.

Sorry to keep you guys waiting for new stuff for so long.