My Trails

Cave

After four months of touring the northwest, I will return to the Phoenix area in a few days. I have seen a lot of beautiful country and enjoyed the rambling lifestyle that has become the trails of my retirement. People ask me what part of the country is my favorite and I have to say it is the next place down the road. Sometimes it is hard for me to remember all the places I’ve been. In fact, I have to go back and read my blog to remember what I did.

San Luis Reservoir

Central California is dry as a bone and flat as a pancake. If they don’t get rain soon, It wouldn’t take much to turn it into another dust bowl. Below Sacramento on Interstate 5, I felt like I was driving through Kansas. On my map I noticed a National Park that I haven’t been to before and decided to make it the last attraction on my journey.

Situated below San Jose in the foothills of the Coastal Range is Pinnacles National Park. Pinnacles sit right on the San Andreas fault line. It was formed by molten rocks and lava that spewed out between the plates in the Earth millions of years ago and eroded to form towering spires of rock.

I asked Carrie Esau to go see the park with me and we had fun hiking, biking, scrambling through two caves, and enjoying the Ranger led campfire talk at night. I say campfire but there is actually no fires allowed in this park or just about any park in the northwest.

I am at Quartzsite tonight. It is still pretty hot in Arizona but I’m hoping for some nice temperatures soon.

Oregon Coast

Highway 101 along the southern coast of Oregon is spectacular. The road is cut high in the cliffs and open to expansive views of ocean meeting land in violent beauty. There are many pull-out places scattered along the highway and it is hard to pass by even one.

Last Sunday I rode down 101 from Three Rivers Casino to the Umpqua Lighthouse and took the tour. Richard told me the tour was good and worth a visit. I’m really glad I stopped because it was one of the least expensive and most enjoyable attractions I’ve done in a long time. I can see Richard and Dianna hosting a historical feature like a lighthouse; Richard would be good at giving lighthouse tours.

Inside the lens.

I have been using obsolete Internet information to find free places to stay as I travel down the coast. It happened last night that the Mill Casino near Coos Bay now has no free parking. I didn’t have another plan and didn’t feel like going on further so I coughed up the cash to stay the night. I did get free showers, dump, and use of the laundry room, so it kind of evened out.

I have noticed that there are many people who bike and backpack along the narrow shoulder of Highway 101. There is a lot of fast traffic on that road and in many places only about two feet separates my right mirror from the head of the cyclist. I try to pull over if I can but sometimes there is oncoming traffic. You couldn’t pay me to bike or hike along that busy road. On the whole AT there are only a very few miles that are along a road, and when I had to walk on one it was always a relief to get back into the woods.

Tonight I’m in California parked on a forest road along the Smith River. I’m only a few miles from Redwood National Park and will enjoy the big trees for a couple of days. No matter how many times I visit this area it always amazes me how big these trees grow. It is almost as if they should be called something different than a tree. It’s like comparing a lizard to a dinosaur.

Laundry Ripoff

What a ripoff this place is. I will steer clear of a laundromat like this in the future if I can help it.

All the machines use something called an “easy card”, a credit card type of plastic that all washers and dryers require to operate. The card itself costs $.49 and is only good at the store where it is purchased. You must add money to the card through an ATM type kiosk and it appears that no combination will come out even after you wash and dry.

To top it all off there are no single washers in the place. I wish I would have known about this before I rode down here.

Flown by two famous aviators

One thing I’ve noticed about the back roads in Oregon is the lack of any shoulders. Only inches from the edge of the blacktop and lane marker the ground falls almost vertical to a deep ditch or dropoff. There is hardly any place to safely pull off the highway. In the event you are startled by a deer, or nudged over by a large truck in your lane, or suddenly had a flat tire, you would surly suffer a calamity of great proportions down some unearthly embankment. Even when the road is on the level the builders decided to raise the grade six feet to make sure there were dropoff on either side. If you showed any normal, highway superintendent a section of this road, they would ponder only a second and say, “We should put a guardrail along here.”

All this got me to thinking today as I drove back to the coast from the Aviation and Space Museum in McMinnville, OR. The road over the coastal mountains was smooth but curvy and narrow. I was going the speed limit but several cars would pile up behind me anyway. If I’m going the speed limit I usually don’t worry to much about holding up traffic, but after a while I want to pull over and let them go by before someone gets too impatient and tries to pass on a curve. It sometimes was many miles before I could find a good place to pull over.

More airplanes

The museum in McMinnville is where the Spruce Goose, Howard Hughes gigantic wooden airplane is kept on display. It was a little expensive to get into the museum but worth it. Not only is the Spruce Goose on display but hundreds of other aircraft and rockets. I spent four hours wandering through the place. You can see inside Hughes plane but it cost an extra $25 to go up to the flight deck and sit where Howard flew the plane.

STOL airplane

I’m back over on the coast near Florence. It has been raining today so I have been hiding, but maybe tomorrow I will check out the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area. I have come half way down through Oregon. My plan is to continue slowly down the coast and then gradually ease up on the pace.

Making cheese.

I drove back towards the coast and found a free campsite in the Tillamook State Forest. From there it was only 15 miles to the town of Tillamook and only 8 miles further to the Oregon Seashore. From my campsite here it is an easy ride on Honda to explore the coast.

Tillamook has a cheese factory that is somewhat famous in this area. They brag about there cheese and ice cream being the best around. The factory where they make everything has a visitors center where you can watch people make cheese and, of course, purchase some to take with you when you go. They have a line you can move through and sample the different kinds of cheese they make. I thought the cheese wasn’t nearly as good as Cuba Cheese but I did buy some curd to take home.

Curd

From there I rode over to the coast to look at a lighthouse. As I got closer to the ocean a thick, cold fog enveloped me and all views of the Pacific were lost in the mist. The lighthouse was cute, definitely smaller than many I have seen. It is called Cape Meares Lighthouse, and is one of many in a row that are either abandoned or automated. Modern navigation doesn’t need them much anymore.

Cute Lighthouse

On my way back I stopped at a state park that has camping. I thought that maybe prices would be better as we get into October and I could stay one night and use the hookups. No one is ever in the booth at the entrance to state and federal campgrounds anymore. The usually have an honor system self registration board to collect your money and a ranger to drive by once in a while to catch the cheater.

It would add up in a month.

I’ll be here through the weekend and head down the coast next week. I may stay at a casino for my next sightseeing romp. I read where they are used quite often by rvers looking to see the area on a cheep budget.

One thing that seems strange is the way they sell gas in this state. It is against the law to pump your own so you must wait for the attendant to come out and pump it. I thought gas prices would be higher here because of the extra help but they are the same or cheaper than they were in Washington. When I pulled in on Honda the attendant set the pump and then handed me the nozzle.