Day 3: Baker City, OR

Things looked pretty hopeful first thing in the morning.  The overnight cloud cover had kept things warmer than we had seen in a long time (temp somewhere in the 40s).  And by the time it climbed into the 50s,we were starting to see some patches of blue.

Another "Why?"  Rotting carcasses strung up on a fence.
I suspect some rancher is sending a message to wildlife,
but I doubt the wildlife gets the symbolism...

Alea rode first, covering 13 miles, including a pretty good climb out of Richland.  But the last few miles were a bit brutal: a long, cold descent; it clouded up; the rain started and the wind became a fairly strong headwind.

Then it was my turn.  The brief rain ended, never to return the remainder of the day.  And with the partial sun, the headwinds didn't seem that bad.  At first.  It wasn't long before it clouded up and the winds became sustained at 15 mph, with gusts reaching 30 mph.  And the bulk of our route was uphill.  So my 29 miles was a lot like a steep 29 mile hill climb, and it took tights, gloves and a light jacket to stay warm.  All I can say is that all of my cycling muscles have now gotten the wake up call that there will be more of the same in the days and months to come.  That should help motivate my body to rebuild some of the fitness that I lost over the frigid winter and colder-than-normal spring.

I have one thermal cycling jersey, that I don't think I wore more than three times in the past two years.  For the past month, I've probably worn it on 60% of the days that I've ridden, and I suspect I'll be wearing it a lot in May.

We are camped at Oregon Trails West RV Park ($31 + tax, power, water, showers, heated bathrooms and wi-fi).  There were some other, cheaper options in town, but after driving past them we decided this was the better option.  At least there is a large field in the back where we can let Lana off leash.

Day 2: Richland, OR

Alea and I teamed up for a total of 29 miles on our first full day back on the road: 10 for Alea and 19 for me.  Alea will limit her mileage until her knee seems to be fully recovered, trying to gauge at what point she is trying to do too much riding.  Of course the true feedback on that has a delay of several hours, making it possible that riding too far one day may preclude her from riding the next.

It was below freezing when we woke up, but by mid-morning it was sunny and starting to creep into the fifties.  By the time we reached our destination, it was 61 degrees!

Our route was mainly uphill, with the exception of a long climb and equally long descent between Halfway and Richland.  Fortunately, the majority of grades were probably between 2% and 4%, there was little traffic, and the scenery here is awesome.  It is one of our favorite places to come in late spring and early summer, and we have never seen things so green here (thanks to all the rain and snow earlier this year).

Now and then, we stumble upon stuff that just makes us wonder "Why?"

We are camped at Hewitt Campground, a campground near Richland, which is owned by Baker County ($15, primitive, flush toilets).  It is basically a huge parking lot, which normally overlooks the reservoir.  But that has been drawn way down, in order to accommodate the melting of a snow pack that is said to be six times normal (the boat dock is easily 30 feet above water level now).  So despite it being camping season, technically they are closed, since boating is this place's raison d'etre.  We are the only ones here, aside from the hosts.

How to "cow-proof" a barbed wire fence...

Since we are camped in a primitive site, it will be our first chance to see how well our solar setup works at keeping our Dometic refrigerator fed.  Supposedly a 12v reading on our voltmeter means that we have 25% battery capacity left.  But the Dometic is set to shut down if the voltage drops below 11.4v, and won't restart until the voltage rises back above 12.2v.  With the premature demise of our old battery, drawing the voltage down below 12v has us nervous.  But in the past, we had routinely been using a lower battery monitor setting, one which allowed voltage to drop to 10.1v before shutting down, and restarting again at 11.1v.  We are hoping that the current setting will work well for us, and will result in much longer battery life.

It was cold enough at night that we needed to fire up our generator, in order to warm up the cabin before going to bed.  That has certainly helped to prevent drawing the battery down too low, as early Sunday morning with cloud cover our battery monitor was reading 12.8v (a full battery)!

Day 1: Copperfield, OR

It is great to once again be on our way.  We wish we had warmer weather, but at least the campgrounds are not very far apart across much of Oregon.  Our plan will be to wait for the temperatures to at least get into the 50s (when we are that lucky), and then scurry over to the next campground.  Hopefully we can build up sufficient fitness and endurance that we can crank out longer days once we find some 70 and 80 degree days.

Our day started with shopping for groceries, and a quick trip to Performance Bicycle for some last minute needs: re-truing my rear wheel and getting Alea a new bicycle computer.  It was just my luck that the rear wheel had a stress fracture on one of the spoke nipples.  So it was toast.  A new wheel cost $145 with labor.  That is my third rear wheel of the trip.  The first two were Trek Bontrager wheels.  The new one is a Mavic.  I suspect I'll have better luck with it.

With that out of the way, we said goodbye to Jim and Patti, and tried to get a last picture of Max, Ralph and Lana.  We then drove to the Oregon border to begin our travels (we had already ridden the 140 miles from Boise to there in stages on our training rides over the past four weeks).

Ralphie, Maxie, Alea and Lana.

We didn't have far to go - just eleven miles, but into a brisk headwind - and our route was flat for most of the way.  We are camped at another Idaho Power Campground, Copperfield Park ($16 [$2 discount if over 60], power, water, showers, heated bathrooms, 15 minutes of free internet). 

Dinner at Enrique's in Kuna on our last night before hitting the road.
It has a well deserved reputation for the best Mexican food in the area.

Our gas mileage has improved with the new trailer axle.  I'm guessing the bent spindle was creating extra resistance, as our gas mileage had dropped to around 21 mpg after the wheel bearing mishap.  It is up over 22 mpg now.  And when we had our oil changed at Walmart in January, we asked them to replace the air filter, but they said it looked fine.  I took at look at it myself today, and it was full of dust, bugs and sand.  I banged it out pretty good on the pavement.  Hopefully that will further improve our gas mileage.  

If anyone is interest in reading about some of the things that we have been up to the past four months, I recently posted in the Unofficial Camp Inn Forum about various things:

• The ultimate cost of the catastrophic wheel bearing failure that we experienced in Todos Santos, Mexico (not cheap).
• A fix for a long-running, yet intermittent, leak issue that we have had with our Camp Inn camper.
• The details on the unique solar installation that we installed on our van.
• Our DIY wind wall for the end of our ARB Awning (using the same $3 tarp that we use for the side wind walls).

At the end of last year, we were having some issues as we headed north from the Baja Peninsula, so it is worth noting how they were resolved:

• One issue was that our generator had been leaking gasoline.  It took two trips to the Yamaha dealer in Meridian, ID, but the issue was eventually found to be a blown seal on the gas gauge (a $25 part).  In the future, if we regularly open the vent on the generator's gas cap, we shouldn't have a recurrence of this problem.
• Another issue was that we seemed to have had very limited battery power.  That was traced to a blown fuse on our charge line, which likely happened when the van's battery was replaced in Arizona.  That caused the premature demise of our camper battery, which we replaced yesterday.  Our present solar set up should minimize a recurrence, and I will periodically test the charge line to make sure it is producing voltage.  Our new solar setup would only partially offset such a loss - with a blown fuse and the ignition on, we would get no power to the trailer battery.  But with the ignition off, we would get a full charge from the solar panel (assuming it was only the fuse at the battery isolator that was blown).

It is worth noting that we left Boise with an odometer reading of 39,500 miles.  And we were out of our camper for three full months in Boise, spending one month at the Bond Hotel and the other two months with Jim and Patti.  Before tonight, we had camped 28 days this year, and more than a week of that was out in front of Jim and Patti's house.  It is mind boggling that we spent that much time together, and I can only say that their hospitality was phenomenal and we had a great time with them. 

Tomorrow will be our first full day on the road...

Our Boise Send-Off

On Sunday, Jim & Patti took the opportunity to publicly celebrate our impending departure (I think they wanted it on record that we have promised to finally be out of their hair by the end of the week).  If I were in their shoes, long ago I would have started having nightmares about our resemblance to Matthew McConaughey's role in the movie Failure to Launch...

But seriously, their help to us the past nearly five months has been phenomenal, and we can't thank them enough for everything that they have done for us while we have been back in town.  We have achieved far more during this prolonged layover than we had thought possible (especially in spite of the rapidly increasing severity of my TIAD [Trump Induced Anxiety Disorder]).  Once we do finally hit the road again, we will be well equipped for dealing with any further misadventures that may come our way (and hopefully this time we will finally be leaving the Curse of Corwin Ford behind us).

Party decorations, plus Max & Lana.

Ralphie.

Denise Heald and Annette Schmidt seek shelter from a sun shower.

Denise, Patti Stevenson, Alea and Fred Mulder (back to camera).

Having missed an opportunity for a similar get together when we left Boise in 2015 (thanks to Corwin Ford's unethical handling of our special order van), we appreciated the chance to celebrate our second departure from Boise with a few of our friends (I was remiss, and failed to get pictures of too many people!).  The forecast rain mostly held off, and it was great to have one last chance to get caught up with everyone.

We are leaving town a little later than we had originally planned.  It was only today (Thursday) that our new axle and battery were installed, and our amended 2015 returns put in the mail.  And we had some last minute online purchases arrive today as well, including a new dust seal for our galley hatch.

Over the last several weeks, we have ridden, in stages, the first 140 miles of our route (during the rare days when the weather has been decent), from Boise to the Oregon border (just north of Brownlee Dam).  So when we head out tomorrow, we will resume cycling from there.

We've finally had a chance to field test our new privy tent, and to experiment with various alternative for waste disposal.  This particular opportunity was because we had camped at the Poppell Field RV Park in Emmett ($25, power, water, coin-op showers [$1 for four minutes], wi-fi, heated bathrooms): the bathroom doors are auto-locked electronically at 5 pm and don't reopen them until 7 am!  Where do they find RVers that have 14 hour bladders????  At least there is an emergency exit button, in case you are taking a shower when the door locks.  The privy worked out very well.

It is Almost Time Again

We are now about a week away from heading out for our third year on the road.  At present we are waiting on the arrival of a new trailer axle from Ohio (we'll discuss that in a later post), and a new battery from North Carolina.  The former should arrive any day now, whereas the latter is scheduled to get here next Thursday.

Old Freeze Out Road, near Emmett, ID.

In the meantime, our plan is to spend most of our time at the Gem County Fairgrounds RV Park in Emmett, Idaho ($20, power, water, toilet - no showers).  It is the cheapest campground with power and water in close proximity to Boise.  We already know that we need to be back in Boise this Sunday (for a party), Wednesday (for Alea's final Dr. appointment) and Thursday (to install the new camper battery), so we figure it doesn't make any sense to go very far afield.  Besides, we will also need to return to Boise to get the new axle installed, once it finally shows up.

The one advantage to camping in Emmett is that we are on the old Idaho Hwy 16 alignment, which includes "Old Freeze Out Hill."  That provides a nice, 2.5 mile climb on a road with virtually no traffic.  So, weather permitting, I'll be riding up that as often as possible this week, in an attempt to quickly regain some lost fitness.

So you might be wondering what have we been up to since we've been back in Idaho?  Here are some highlights, some of which link to more detailed explanations:

1. Obviously the main thing has been the full replacement of Alea's right knee and her recovery from that surgery,
2. We have reconfigured the interior of the van (I'll likely discuss that in detail in a later post),
3. We've installed a solar panel on our van, 
4. We've done some sewing: in addition to some minor mending, we've made a cover for our fan (which we will leave in storage this year), a cover for our camp chairs (so we can leave them out overnight without having them covered in dew), and a galley sun shade,
5. I have been working on three separate book projects, including the latest draft of a book about my Davis ancestors of Jackson County, Illinois, 
6. We've been dealing with taxes - amending our 2014 & 2015 taxes, and filing our 2016 taxes, and
7. In general, we've spent a lot of time looking for tiny improvements to our gear and equipment, in an effort to further improve our awesome life on the road.

The new solar set up is working great.  It provides more than enough power to keep our Dometic refrigerator cold during the day.  And it has pointed out something that we had suspected since about midway into our trip to Mexico - that our present camper battery has seen better days (thus the wait for a new battery).

The main cause of the camper battery failure was due to a blown fuse on the charge line that comes from the van's alternator (which happened when the van's battery was replaced last fall).  That meant for about three months we unknowingly had no means of recharging the camper battery, except when we were connected to shore power.  So the battery voltage was repeatedly drawn down to a very low level, which significantly shortened the life of the battery.

Both the van and camper batteries should last far longer with the new solar setup, as it assures that both batteries are fully charged during the day, whether we are driving or not, and mostly regardless of what accessories are drawing power.  Of course it will work best in full sun, but it still produces a reasonable amount of power even on cloudy days or in partial shade.  If we had the new battery now, we would be camping for $8 per night near Montour, ID, since access to power would only be necessary on cold nights.