RV Trip Day 5: Bandon

First thing in the morning, Michael called and found a mechanic in Florence who could look at our brakes, so we unpacked a bike and put on our warm clothes, and Michael drove to the mechanic while I took the kids to the sand dunes. After he dropped off the RV at the mechanic, he rode his bike back to meet us so he got to see a bit of the sand dunes too. The dunes were amazing. It is definitely not peak season, and the first hour we were out there, we didn’t see a single other person. It alternated between rain and wind and only slightly cloudy, which is not that big a deal when you’re from Seattle, but not the kind of weather that brings in tons of tourists. Eventually we saw a few ATVs out driving around the dunes, which is the big thing to do around here. The kids slid down the hills and made sand castles, and it was almost like warm snow, which made me feel a little better about making them miss the big snow in Seattle.

Meanwhile, the mechanic said our brake pads were indeed totally shot, as Michael had suspected, and it was very dangerous to keep driving on them, but he could fix it today. We told him to go ahead.

While we waited, we rode our bikes into Florence and got takeout and ate lunch in a park overlooking the river, and then got boba tea (which the kids had been begging for for days) and did a bit of shopping. It was nice to finally get some use out of the bikes and to see that they worked pretty well to ride around town. We brought two ebikes big enough to haul all the kids around on the back, and had discovered that the car couldn’t make it out of our steep driveway with the bike rack attached. Getting it on had been quite an ordeal, so I was glad that it was worth it!

The brake repair took a bit longer than they predicted, because they had to order a part from Eugene, but they were done by 4 and we were on our way in a vehicle that finally felt safe and didn’t make any weird noises! After a day of hiking up and down the sand dunes, and riding around and being outside in the cold all day, we were starting to feel like turtles without our shell, and we were all very happy to get back to the RV and start heading south again! And it was a huge relief that everything was running smoothly.

We had planned to go all the way to the southern end of Oregon tonight, but since we were getting out of Florence so late in the day, staying on schedule would have meant driving on a lot of windy roads at night, and missing all the beautiful beaches that were the whole reason we’re taking this windy route, so we stopped early near Bandon so we can see the southern Oregon coast tomorrow and then make up lost time with some long driving days in Northern California.

Today's route: