RV Trip Day 3: Tillamook

We finally made it out of the RV at 11:30 after sleeping late and making breakfast, and walked to the beach, which was beautiful like all Oregon beaches:

I scheduled us to not drive very far each day for the first part of the trip, since the kids are on break from school for the first week and I wanted to make sure we had time to enjoy the Oregon coast. This will mean a lot more driving later on, and I'm starting to get worried because it takes us so long to get up and going that I'm not sure how we will do longer days. On the other hand, maybe we're just ironing out all the problems and it will go smoother once we have some better systems in place. We forgot a lot of things because we had to leave earlier than expected, and never finished putting an organizational system in place, so we've spent a lot of the first couple days just figuring out where everything goes and how to get around each other in this tiny space. There is room for us all in here, but if someone is standing up anywhere, it's really hard for anyone else to get around them.

We're also having car troubles, which are slowing us down... as we pulled into the campsite last night, Michael noticed that the brakes felt squishy and he had to push pretty hard to get the RV to stop. He checked the brake fluid and it was low, which shouldn't happen unless there's something wrong. After searching the internet and chatting with a mechanic we ran into at the dump station this morning, he determined that we probably needed to replace the brake cylinder. We needed to get brake fluid in it right away, and then we could make it to Tillamook, our next stop, 25 miles away, but it needed to be fixed before we went any further on our 3-week road trip. We found an RV mechanic in Tillamook that opens tomorrow, and an auto parts store that was open today. After having an amazing late lunch of mac & cheese from the Tillamook Cheese Factory, and settling in for the night at the Blue Heron French Cheese Company, Michael biked to the auto parts store (he was a little worried the bike might not work after being encased in icicles, but it worked fine), bought the part we needed for the brakes, and installed it himself!

The big appeal of the Blue Heron French Cheese Company is their outdoor petting zoo, which Sonya loved on our last trip down the Oregon Coast, and which she has been looking forward to for weeks. Many of the animals were elsewhere due to the rain, but there was still a sad wet alpaca and a lot of amazing birds:

By the time we were done with those adventures, it was starting to get dark and very wet, so the rest of us settled into the RV for a night of board games while Michael replaced the brake cylinder:

He does not think of himself as a mechanical person, but thanks to Youtube and a lot of encouragement from the people at the auto parts store, he did it! So tomorrow we can continue our journey!

Today's route: