The night’s sleep in the Walmart parking lot was uneventful, though Jessie said she heard a horn honk shortly before we left.  Maybe the horn contributed to my waking, probably more I was just excited to get home.

The sun rose as we were in eastern Washington, west of Spokane.  The Palouse is so beautiful, especially when bathed in the light of dawn.

But later we drove through an area where a massive wildfire that has been burning for the last few days.  A thousand fire fighters are fighting the blaze that has so far consumed more than 19,000 acres.  The smell of smoke still hangs in the air and it looks like another planet, so desolate is the landscape.

At Coulee City Jessie got behind the wheel and I slept until Leavenworth.  Then we gassed up for the final push over Stevens Pass and home.

So here we are, home a day earlier than planned, but glad to be back to our familiar surroundings.  The trip was wonderful and we certainly have many great memories.

The woman who stopped us at the intersection told me they were from Iowa and were going to visit Hill City then were going to Mt. Rushmore.  There were 42 tractors, all driven by smiling waving grandpas, they were so cute!

We drove along the Wildfife Loop which goes down and around the southern end of the park.  For a while we didn’t see anything but the first animal we enjoyed was a white tailed deer.  He was curious for the length of his tail.

We were bummed we hadn’t seen any buffalo since last night we saw two of them beside the road, but then we noticed several cars stopped up ahead.  They were stopped to see a herd of buffalo grazing right next to the roadway.  A couple buffalo wandered into the street and walked right past us, which freaked out Sarah Michael, but they weren’t interested in us at all and didn’t bother us.

There were some young ones in the herd and they were very cute.

We continued on and enjoyed the scenery and more animals.  We saw lots more deer and also more donkeys.

Then we followed the same path out of the park that I’d driven the night before with the RV.  It was great to see the route in the daytime.  We also learned the tight winding bridges are called the Pigtail Bridges and it was cool to actually see them, since last night I had no visual context.

We were also able to see Mt. Rushmore from the mountain road, another thing I couldn’t know at night.

So we made our way down the mountain and onto proper-size roads and then made our way to Mt. Rushmore.

Mt. Rushmore is quite a sight.  It is exactly what I thought it would be, but it was still neat to see it in person.  We didn’t stay long at the monument, we took a few pictures and visited the gift shop.  In the gift shop I spoke to a woman who was sitting at a table signing books.  She was coauthor of a book about the mountain’s history, so I asked her a few questions then had her sign a copy for us.  I look forward to reading up.  For example did you know that there were nine major design changes to the mountain during construction?  Neither did I, but I don’t know the details yet.  I have to read the book.

But not before seeing wildlife.  As we drove through the park towards the campground we saw some deer near the road but even better we saw two buffalo.  The first one we saw freaked us out, it was walking just next to a curve in the road and we both only realized what it was just after we’d passed its dark shape.  Jessie was thrilled, she may just get to see some wildlife on this trip.

Shortly before we got to the park Jessie realized that we had not booked a campsite with full hookups, instead it was electricity only.  That’s just not the way we roll.  So we pulled up an email from my friend Mike that recommend a good KOA resort near Mt. Rushmore.  I ran around and confirmed that the entire campground was in fact only had electric hookups, but we had to decide, should we stay here tonight and move in the morning?  I was still plenty awake from all the energy drinks I’d consumed during the drive so I decided to drive to the KOA and figured we could park in their lot until they opened in the morning.

The road suggested by the GPS navigation device took us out of the park to the north, not the way we had just come in.  As we turned out of the park a sign warned that the road ahead was narrow and steep and came with one-lane bridges and tunnels, the shortest clearance only 12 foot 4 inches.  I asked Jessie, “How tall is this RV, didn’t the guy tell us it was 12 foot-something?”  She pulled out the RV information sheet from the rental place and it said “Most of our RVs are 12 feet high…”  Uh oh.

We pressed on.  I figured I’d stop at the tunnel entrance when we found it and climb the ladder to the roof to see if we’d make it in.  I was definitely nervous.

The road itself came through on the narrow and steep promise.  I traveled slowly up the mountain road and was thankful it was middle of the night and no other cars were there to compete for passage.  We saw scores more deer and even encountered two donkeys on the road at one point.  Jessie was tired and decided to go to sleep, and I assured her I’d wake her up if I needed her help to turn around should this gamble go the wrong way.

After what seemed like forever I finally found the first tunnel.  This was the shortest, the 12 foot 4 inch one.  I maneuvered to get a straight shot into the hole and stopped just as the nose was about to enter.  I climbed the ladder and peered over the air conditioning unit, trying to gauge its relative height and see if I could safely proceed.  Even though I felt like I didn’t have any definitive evidence of any kind, I decided to chance it and go on.

Very slowly I drove into the tunnel and I listened for the possibility of anything on the roof hitting rock.  No sound.  I continued.  No sound.  Then I was safely out.

I continued, confident that I’d passed through the lowest of the tunnels and that I’d be fine the rest of the way.  The road got even windier, the switchback turns very tight indeed, but eventually I stopped climbing and began to descend on the other side of whatever mountain this was.  I had to remain alert, though, because the going down was just as steep as the going up and I didn’t want to lose my brakes.  I got through it and just before 2am I was on real highways again, just miles from our new KOA destination.

One feature of this night was the moon was quite full and bright.  This provided me a nice reward for the last hour’s scary trip, because I actually drove past Mt. Rushmore on the way to the resort.  In the moonlight the faces of the presidents were visible and it was a pretty sight.  A nice way to see the monument for the first time.

I pulled into KOA at 2:00 and parked.  As expected the office was closed so I locked up and laid down and slept.  In the morning I’ll register and get us our site.

I-70 is impressive, as it moves into the mountains the east and west-bound lanes are for long stretches elevated on bridges, allowing them to be wider than they could be if the road had been build on the actual ground.  It looks cool, too.  Well done highway designers.

We made our way along, and it was fun to see the landscape change.  The rocky cliffs remained for a while, but green trees started to appear and the hillsides grew greener and greener.

We got hungry and asked the Garmin which restaurants were nearby, and lucky for Sarah Michael her favorite kind of food was just few miles ahead.  Sato Sushi was the place in Edwards, CO.  The food was good and town is cute.  It should be, it is quite near Vail and affluence clearly infects this place too.  If I could afford it it seemed like a nice place to live.

As we climbed the mountain pass higher, it began to rain.  This was a nice change.  We haven’t seen proper rain for quite a while and I missed it!  Then we climbed even higher and the rain started to change to snow!  The highest we got was just over 11,000 feet, there was more mountain still ahead of us but thankfully we were spared more climbing, the long Eisenhower-Johnson tunnel allowed us to start going back down.  This was good, the RV was really laboring to pull itself and the jeep up the steep grade and we were not able to maintain any speed at all.  By the time we reached the entrance to the tunnel we were down to 25 miles an hour.

As we neared the bottom of the mountain near Denver, we saw a couple of great freeway signs.  They came and went too quickly for us to get pictures, but RockyMountainRoads has pictures here and here.

We finally arrived our destination, St. Vrain State Park, after 10pm, though we would have been there sooner had the Garmin actually known where the place was.  I had preloaded the GPS system with our destinations based on addresses or other info we got when booking our stays, and we were sent about three miles off course.  Not a great distance, but when you’re driving a vehicle with a 100-yard turning radius that can’t back up because of its towed vehicle it makes correcting navagational mistakes more of a challenge.

Good night!

So a big Hooray!  Jessie saw a deer!

After going through Mexican Hat, UT which is named for a rock formation that looks sombrero-ish, the red rock whose dust we’ve been breathing for the last few hours is gone and the geology has been replaced by something entirely different.

Then you’ll go up a canyon and then down into another that looks different again.  The topology, geology, geography or whatever is constantly changing and is good fun to look at.  The rocks some in some pretty neat shapes too, and right next to the highway!

We passed a lot we wished we could have seen, Needles, Natural Bridges, Valley of the Gods.  Plus I see all kinds of roads with Jeeping potential.  We are definitely coming back.

We decided to bail on Four Corners, we’ll save that for a future visit when we can see southwest Colorado and a time when Sarah Michael finds all this stuff more interesting.

We were about to drop down a steep grade on the highway when we were stopped by the Highway Patrol.  They were closing north-bound traffic while they let south-bound traffic use our lane on the grade to get past a slow-moving wide load.  We only had to wait about ten minutes but we were sure curious what the fuss was about.  I don’t know what that truck was hauling, but it was enormous.

About 30 minutes south of Moab we drove up on Wilson Arch and stopped to have a closer look.  How can stuff this amazing be so accessible?

You can climb right up into the hole in the rock, which we did. It is so beautiful!

We finally arrived into Moab at 7:30 and got into our RV park.  This is a beauitful area, I’m sad we can’t spend more time here this trip, but knowing we’ll come back and we have so much to look forward to is quite a comfort.

The plan today was to drive to Four Corners, then go north to Moab, UT where we’re going to stay the night.  As we headed east we entered the town of Kayenta, AZ to gas up and from there saw this huge dark monolith in the distance.

We checked the map and saw that north of Kayenta was Monument Valley, a name that think I’ve heard before.  Monument Valley is actually several miles north, but the rocks we could see from Kayenta told us we needed to detour north and check out this action.

Monument Valley is amazing.  I loved it.  To visit costs a whopping $5 per adult (hear that Skywalk people?).  Then you can park and go to the Visitor Center (they’re in the middle of building a new one) or travel the 17-mile dirt road loop through the valley.  Oh yes, that’s what the Jeep is for.

Everywhere you look there are incredible rock formations.  A bummer is that you’re quite limited in where you can go, secondary roads that might lead from the main loop are forbidden, but that’s ok, the views from the main road are great.

Many of the formations have names.  There’s the Elephant, the Camel, Three Sisters, Totem Poles and lots more.  There are huge boulders that have fallen off the cliffs, and some of them sit atop much smaller rocks, making for fun and precarious photo opportunites.

I took a lot of pictures, way more than are necessary to make the point, but it is hard not to.  Everywhere you look you’re like, “Whoa!” and “Check that out!” and on and on.

Monument Valley is a must-do.  I recommend it highly.  It is cheap and you don’t actually need a 4×4 vehicle to make the loop.  Most people were driving their rental minivans and sedans and they all did fine.  We did see three rented RVs on the loop, but I wouldn’t recommend doing that.

Today we left Arizona, the Grand Canyon is now just a memory.

One thing that really struck me about the area surrounding the Grand Canyon was how green it was.  The area is hot but it must get a lot of precipitation because the hills and valleys are just covered with greenery.  There are some times when driving on the park roads where if I didn’t know I was at the Grand Canyon I could easily believe I was somewhere along the Oregon Coast.

The night we arrived into the park we did see lightning as we drove in, and yesterday we saw clouds dropping rain somewhere, but we never got wet ourselves.

We left early-ish, at 7:20 and started making our way towards a one-night stay in Moab, Utah on our way eventually to Mt. Rushmore.

Much of the drive once we left the National Park was through the Navajo Indian Reservation, and there were some interesting geological features that we didn’t think to photograph. There are these huge mounds, for example, that look like gravel piles, but there’s nothing to suggest they are actually piles of gravel moved from somewhere else. They stand in stark contrast to the pervasive red rock that is just about everywhere else.

Just before Tuba City, AZ we came across signs advertising Dinosaur Tracks. We couldn’t pass it by without stopping.

We were guided by a local Navajo girl who explained the tracks were made by Raptors, Allosaurus, Pteradactyls and a fourth one I can’t remember.

There were also fossilized bones, a claw and lots of dino droppings.

In addition to offering tours of the footprints there were also women selling locally-made jewelry and other trinkets.  The place had the kind of grim sadness of a lot of the roadside Indian merchants.  The stands are rickety and quite spare, you can sense the desperation of the people.  We gave the tourguide a “donation” and also bought some bracelets.

It was a worthwhile stop, very fun to see dinosaur artifacts out in the wild.

I plead with the people who put up the signs that say, watch for deer/Elk, watch for mt. goats or the signs that were all through Yosemite ” speeding kills bears”.  Today we saw a sign we had never seen before, cougar next ten miles.  Do we ever see any of these animals…NO….so please take these signs down.  The are only teasing us and making people like me sad that there are never any animals to see.  And who’s to say that they will be in those specified miles?  They might actually be roaming outside their boundaries.  They are after all wild animals.

Thanks to the movie Cars, even little Sarah Michael is familiar with Route 66.  If you remember the song, one of the stops along the highway was Kingman, Arizona.  Good thing our path to the Grand Canyon went through Kingman, it meant a photo opportunity.  Another good thing, it was dinner time which meant a visit to a roadside diner.

The place was 1950s through and through, and I had to smile at the family from England who walked in with wide eyes and wider smiles.  They sat in the booth beside us and they all took pictures of each other using their phones.

The food was great!  Jessie and I both had burgers, Sarah Michael enjoyed a hot dog and afterward a root beer float.

After a nice dinner we hit the road to continue to the Grand Canyon.  We still had many miles to go, but it was a good day and we were all happy.

Today we left Las Vegas for the Grand Canyon, which means a built-in trip to the Hoover Dam.

The dam is amazing, but right now the new bridge for Hwy 93 is being built over the gorge and it is something to see as well.  The old highway winds up and down the canyon to cross over the top of the dam, and this is a real problem for large vehicles such as trucks.  The new highway and bridge will make this trip much faster, easier and safer.

I hope someone is going to make a documentary about the construction of the bridge, it would be fascinating to see.

Security has really tightened since the last time I visited the dam in April of 2001.  All vehicles that cross over the bridge and stopped and inspected.  We had two security guys look us over, one checked the RV’s storage compartments and the other checked inside the RV.

Other than that it was uneventful.

So now we’re in Arizona!

I took the soft top of the Jeep down and took the doors off to try to cool things down, but driving provides no relief, it simply moves the hot air all around us.

I remember when I was a boy taking long trips in the car and my parents taking turns to drive all night.  This way us kids would awake to find ourselves already at the destination.  While taxing, I’m sure it saved my parents from hours of “When are we going to be there?!”

So in an effort to pay homage to my parents’ sacrifice, as well as to take my turn continuing the proud tradition, I drove into the night.

In another homage to olden times, Jessie and I consulted our atlas and debated the various possible routes to Vegas.  No matter which way we went it was too late to stop into a town for dinner, Sarah Michael was about to go to bed anyway, so we agreed to just follow the instructions from the GPS navigation system:  US 395 south to Hwy 168 to Hwy 266 to US 95.

This was going fine, but I was a little bit concerned when Hwy 168 turned off from US 395 and was only two lanes, I worried it might be an old route, perhaps windy and slow.  But the GPS said this was the fastest route, and the GPS knows, right?

Check this out:

1. You have Google Earth installed, right?  If you don’t, download it from here.
2. Next, download this GPS track, it is essentially the trip from San Francisco to Las Vegas.  Open this file in Google Earth.
3. Now that the track is visible, download and open this file, it will orient the camera to look into the ancient winding narrow mountain pass I was about to enjoy.
4. Explore the route with Google Earth, you can even click to see photos other people have taken on the road to give you more of the experience.

Can’t be bothered?  Here’s a boring static view.

I crawled over slowly up the pass and watched as my Henderson ETA went from 2am towards 2:30 and finally past 3am.  Why is this so slow I kept asking?  Why is the GPS so wrong?

“Oh well” was all I could say to myself in reply.

At one point I needed to stop for a scherdling when I was on a very straight, very flat, very dark section.  I got out of the car, didn’t turn off the engine just in case it wouldn’t restart (not that it wouldn’t start, but this was one of those places on earth where you wouldn’t want to take the chance) but did turn off the lights.  The valley was slightly illuminated by the moon and it was beautiful.  There were so many stars in the sky.  It was neat.  View the approximate spot by opening this file in Google Earth, rotate around so you can see all sides of the valley.  Then pee.  That’s the experience.

As I approached the right turn onto Hwy 266 I saw emergency lights traveling south on 266.  A few miles later, around midnight, I caught up with the emergency vehicles.  The highway was essentially closed by a serious accident.  Apparently the driver of a south-bound car fell asleep and crossed the center line running into the trailer wheels of a north-bound semi truck.

The driver was alive, though I don’t know how injured she was.  They used the jaws of life to open the vehicle up and they brought her out on a rigid board then put her in an ambulance.

Turns out this section of road had a very side shoulder so we were able to get by the accident and proceed.  Though I didn’t go on much further.  Perhaps partly because of seeing such dramatic evidence of what driving tired can lead to, but also I know because I was getting bored, I found a good spot beside the highway to pull over and go to sleep.

I awoke about the same time as the sun and took the picture to the right.  The desert is beautiful in the morning.  The sky has pretty colors, it is quiet, the sun has not yet heated to air to become lethal.

Speaking of lethal, one of the things we passed was Creech Air Force Base, one of the places where pilots command drone aircraft that fly over Iraq and Afghanistan.  I had the thought to stop and ask the guard at the gate if we could come have a tour, but I imagined he would not have taken kindly to the offer.

I wanted to give the Garmin GPS device a chance to redeem itself, so I when we arrived in Las Vegas asked it if there were any attractions in the area and it suggested the Neon Museum.

Turns out the Neon Museum doesn’t actually exist yet, but the boneyard is there.  I peered through the fencing surrounding the old signs and snapped a few pictures.

Then we finished the drive to our friends Eric and Chrissy’s house in Henderson where we will spend the next two nights.

The drive from out to Yosemite wasn’t very interesting, so I was glad to see a sign saying “Come and See how Cheese is Made” at the Oakdale Cheese company.  Unfortunately they only make cheese on Monday and Tuesday so we were only able to look through the window into the aging room.

Most of the cheese Oakdale makes is Gouda, and they had a lot of flavors.  Smoked, Jalepeno, Cumin, Garlic, Mustand, and lots more.

Eventually we arrived at Yosemite.

The roads through the park is narrow, windy and hilly.  I tried really hard to not abuse the brakes, because not only was I driving a large heavy vehicle, I was also towing the Jeep.  But nonetheless, after several miles the brakes became very soft, smelly and just a little smoky.  At a stop sign I had to say a tiny prayer (and clench my cheeks) in order to stop and not rear-end the vehicle ahead of us.

So I pulled us over at the first opportunity and while we let the brakes cool down we did the same for our feet as we waded into the river.

Yosemite is pretty, and there are many great views from the road, however it seems that Yosemite is really a hiker’s paradise.  There are trails all over and lots of people park their vehicles to take off on foot.  We’re not really the hiking type, so we kept mostly to the roads.  There was a neat spot, however, with a great view of Half Dome and a short trail to an overlook, so we did get some exercise and walked out to take some family pictures.

This place is also custom-made for rock climbers.  One of the last domes we drove past had a couple of people at the top I could see from the road.  Look closely, they’re way up there.

We left ourselves unbooked from any RV parks or resorts, we knew we wanted to get close to Las Vegas, but we didn’t know how close we’d be able to get.  Upon leaving Yosemite, the GPS predicted a 2am arrival into Henderson, LV (where we were going to next stay), I decided to make a go for it and drive as long as I could.

Jessie drove some yesterday, and though she was apprehensive when she started out I thought she did great.

Jessie received another Elk wish on the road, a herd was actually crossing the highway in front of us and we had to stop for a moment.  I didn’t have the camera out, but it was more exciting the two we saw yesterday.

As you’ll learn in a later post, we had a plan for this afternoon, so I plugged the destination into our Garmin Nuvi and its estimated time of arrival meant we had some time to kill.  That’s always good news when you’d like to find something interesting.  So a little ways north of Eureka I asked Mr. Garmin if there were any landmark attractions nearby and we were directed to the Carson Mansion. This place is amazing!  You can’t go in, but looking at it was really something.

Then we moved on and Mr. Garmin next suggested the Avenue of the Giants, a scenic alternative to Hwy 101 that drives between more of the stunningly large trees.  It was beautiful.

During the drive through the forest we saw a river not too far away so I got it in my head to check it out.  We navigated a road that seemed to head toward the river and then we came upon a one-lane bridge.

We crossed the first section of the bridge then parked on the rocks and disconnected the Jeep.  It was fun to drive on the beach and through the water, and Sarah Michael loved it.  In fact, Sarah Michael had been wathing videos on the iPod on the RV and decided she didn’t want to stop yet, so despite my counsel to the contrary she brought the iPod into the Jeep.

We were cruising down the rocks and sand and I decided it would be fun to splash into the shallow water.  As we hit the water it splashed high all around us and covered the windshield, I couldn’t see a thing!  But my hands couldn’t find the wiper controls quickly so I didn’t see the larger rocks coming.

The rocks we had been driving on ranged in size from sand to golf balls, like you can see in the picture above, but the rocks we found ourselves on after the soaking were probably more like melon or canteloupe-sized.  They didn’t break anything but they were a surprise!

We continued on a little ways down the river then turned back, we had places to be.

We’d packed up last night so all I had to do this morning was disconnect the hoses and electric, connect the Jeep and pull away.

This went well until after hitching up the Jeep I went back to check the tail lights that they were working, and they weren’t.  ARGH!  I spend 30 minutes testing connections with my voltmeter and basically decided I was not going to be able to fix it myself.  So we hit the road.

Two hours later we arrived in Coos Bay, Oregon and found Bayshore Auto RV Repair.  These guys were really friendly, got us in right away with a mechanic who quickly got us up and running and back on the road.

Apparently something went wrong with the wires in the connector for the magnetic lights that caused them to disconnect and then short, breaking the fuse for the trailer tail lights.

I was just so pleased that they were able to get us going so fast.

[See post to watch QuickTime movie]

We went to the beach and walked down to Haystack Rock.  The beach of Cannon Beach is always fun to walk on and since the tide was out we got to look at beautiful starfish in the tide pools.  I took several pictures of some of the life attached to the rocks, so be sure to see our pics up at Flickr.

[See post to watch QuickTime movie]

Unfortunately as we we were starting south down 101 out of Cannon Beach we had a bit of a mishap.  Sarah Michael was sitting behind the passenger seat in the chair beneath where I have the wireless internet router gear setup when I took one of the windy turns a little too fast and all the stuff fell down right onto SM’s head!  She started bawling and we quickly pulled over to fix her up and better-secure the equipment.  Later we got some velcro from Fred Meyer to hold things down and that worked well the rest of the day.

In Tillamook we stopped at the Tillamook Air Museum which is cool.  It is housed in an old Navy hangar that was built during WWII for K-class airships- blimps.  The building is enormous and is impressive to stand inside.  They have many different aircraft there including an F-14 Tomcat and a Mini Guppy.  This was really a fun place to visit.

Traveling even on the windy roads was fine, I really like driving.  Our jobs today were that I drove, Jessie passengered and Sarah Michael alternated between playing and singing along with her iPod.  She loves the songs she learned at Vacation Bible School a couple weeks ago and so we loaded the CD onto the iPod. Jessie and I got quite a laugh out of hearing her mis-sing the God of Wonders song, instead of singing “You are Holy” she would belt out “You are Hoe-y”.

When it was dinner time we were driving through Newport, so we decided to find a place to eat.  We parked the RV and drove the Jeep down to the historic bayfront area to find some seafood.  Parking was a bit of a problem, we saw lots and lots of restaurants, with lots and lots of cars filling every spot.  So we kept driving until we were nearly at the end of the strip when parking started coming available.  At that same time we spied a restaurant called Local Ocean Seafoods that had that level of busy-ness that suggested we were at the right place.  Jessie and SM shared some crab, I had fish tacos.  The food was great.

More driving after dinner and then we finally we ended up in our new location.  We’ll reveal all tomorrow.

I woke this morning at 6:30 filled with excitement.  We were up late last night packing the RV, pretty much all we had to do this morning was shower and pack our toiletries, most of our stuff was waiting for us in our 25-foot 2005 Ambient.  My excitement was mixed with a little bit of worry, because yesterday’s test connection of the Jeep to the RV for brake lights and turn signals revealed it didn’t work right.  This was totally not my fault, but still not good to learn at 6pm when the wiring place closed at 5:30.

The original plan was to try to leave between 8 and 9 so we could get to Portland to enjoy the Red Bull Flugtag Event, but now we had to detour to Advanced Trucks for Toys in South Everett to get the wiring sorted out.  We arrived there at about 9:15.  Doug, the only employee working Saturday morning, was super helpful and tested the connections many ways and basically determined the wiring inside the Jeep is messed up and for some reason their tech didn’t fix this when they had my Jeep weeks back and instead performed an unsuccessful workaround.  This wasn’t what I wanted to learn.  If we hurried we could still make the Flugtag!

10am When it became apparent that the Jeep’s wiring was just messed up, I suggested to Doug that we’d best call it off and go with one of them nice magnetic tail light things I’d seen before, like what tow truck drivers use.  We could solve the Jeep’s wiring when I got back from this trip.  Doug helped me locate a set of lights nearby and I went to sort it out.

Meanwhile Jessie and Sarah Michael were so great.  While I was playing auto shop with Doug they waited in the RV, and when I went to update them on my mess, I found them playing Go Fish.  I thanked them profusely for being so patient.

11am Nothing is easy.  The place that had the magnetic lights didn’t have in stock any wiring adapters or pieces that could get the lights’ connector to the wiring of the RV.  So I had to run to another store to buy the wiring connector and a tiny screwdriver to put everything together with.  But it was ok, I wasn’t stressed, I remained pleasantly calm.  But we did get going, somewhere around 11am.  This picture was taken at 11:47 in SeaTac as I was filling up.

Hey, this reminds me.  I’m trying to geotag our photos, so when you see them on Flickr you can further immerse yourself in the experience by clicking on the map link next to each picture to see where it was taken.  Also check out the link on the right side of this page, it goes to a nice map on Flickr where you can see all of the photos from our trip identified on a map.

Once we were on the road it was smooth.  The RV handles fine.  I can’t even see the Jeep when I’m towing it unless I’m taking a fairly sharp turn, enough to move the Jeep into the view of the side view mirrors.  You can hear plenty of rattling of our dishes and whatever else is packed into our home on wheels as we plow along, but it is comfortable.  Sarah Michael kept busy playing and listening to and singing along with music on an iPod.  Jessie relaxed, played with SM, tried to sleep, hung out.  I drove and drove and drank energy drinks.

It all went well, but it became clear we weren’t going to make it to the Flugtag.  So we decided to head straight toward Cannon Beach.

We stopped at a viewpoint-pullout-beside-the-road-thing just over the Oregon border to survey the Columbia River, that was nice.

We weren’t in Oregon long before we stopped again.  As we drove thought the community of Clatskanie OR Jessie noticed out her window a Bluegrass Festival.  That was all the motivation I needed.  We parked the RV and went to see what was going on.  You can imagine our delight to find that there wasn’t just music being played, there was a quilt show going on too!

[See post to watch QuickTime movie]

The music we heard was actually quite lovely.  We only stayed for a few songs from the band you see you see in the short video and this picture, but I did enjoy them.  They had about zero stage presence though, they looked nearly bored as they played, and their costumes made them look like regular heavy-set country folk.  Maybe they weren’t costumes?  A true mystery.

Anyway, it was a worthy stop.  SM had a hot dog and Jessie made friends with old men in the concessions line.  I just smiled, I was happy.

Just before Astoria we stopped by a roadside glass blowing studio that we’ve passed many times before and I’d always wanted to stop at.  Well, we’re in no hurry today!  We watched the artist work on a wine goblet.  Even SM enjoyed it.

We checked in to the RV Resort in Cannon Beach at around 5:30pm, and it was easy to get everything connected.  It is kinda fun to see all of the other RVs and how people had their gear set up.  The bigger RVs have fancy hydraulic leveling systems, there are ingenious sewer pipe supports and all kinds of other goodies.  I see a trip to the RV supply store in our future.

Dinner, SM and Jessie went swimming, then relaxing, me working for hours on this post, that’s how we spent the evening.

Tomorrow we’ll visit the beach, go shopping, maybe find something to explore in the Jeep.

Until tomorrow…