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)!