RV Trip Day 4: Sand Dunes

We got up early with the intention of getting out and seeing lots of beaches on the way to our next destination, but then the RV wouldn’t start. After a lot of fiddling with it, we got it to start enough to limp along to the auto parts store, where Michael spent a lot of time troubleshooting it and finally decided the problem was a corroded battery connector, so he bought a tool to scrape it clean, and then it started. A bit after that it had trouble starting again, and it was still making this terrible rattling noise that had started a bit before the brakes gave out the night before last, so we decided we should probably get it to a mechanic before we left one of the bigger towns on the Oregon coast. On the plus side, the brakes worked great after Michael replaced the brake cylinder last night. We had meant to get the RV checked out by a mechanic before leaving Seattle, but the mobile mechanic I had found flaked out on us, and I didn’t have time to find another with all the last minute prep for leaving early. So we found a mechanic in Tillamook who could look at it right away. They found a loose connection to the battery and tightened it, and the RV has had no trouble starting ever since, so that was great, but they insisted there was nothing else wrong with it and it was perfectly safe, in spite of the weird rattling noise. We finally left Tillamook well into the afternoon, and it continued to rattle. We stopped a a brake place in Newport and they confirmed Michael’s guess that it was probably a loose brake pad. The good news is that it is annoying but not dangerous. The bad news was they couldn’t even look at it for at least a week, and laughed at him when he asked if this was a repair we could do ourselves. We’ll try to find another mechanic somewhere along the way.

We skipped most of the stops we had meant to make, but we stopped at the Devil’s Punchbowl:

Sonya went swimming in the freezing water nearby:

And then we stopped at the tide pools at Yaquina Head Lighthouse and touched sea anemones and got very wet in the tide:

After a big day that mostly involved a tour of the Oregon coast’s auto parts stores and auto repair shops, we grabbed delicious takeout in Florence and pulled into our campsite at Jessie M. Honeyman Memorial State Park Campground, where the sand dunes are, around 8pm. Will explore the dunes tomorrow!

Today's route:

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:

RV Trip Day 2: Nehalem Bay State Park

We slept on the southern tip of Washington, with plans to cross the long Astoria bridge across the Columbia River to Oregon in the morning. My dad told us we should cross the bridge last night, because it might be icy in the morning, but I couldn't find anywhere good to stay on the other side, and knew we were out of the snow, so I figured it would be fine. There was a huge storm all night, with the RV shaking, the wind howling, and trees falling all around us, and I wondered if I had made the wrong decision. But by morning the storm had died down and everything was calm, and we woke up to this:

Everything was coated in icicles, including our bicycles, but the ground was coated in slush, rather than snow. Meanwhile, Seattle had woken up to a ton of snow, and the kids were disappointed to miss it, but I was glad we had made it out in time. Meanwhile, Kristin sent me this picture of our house back in Seattle:

There are also lots of pictures of us making and eating breakfast because it is still novel to cook and eat in the RV:

When we woke up, both the road we had come in on and the bridge we needed to cross were closed due to fallen trees and falling ice, but by the time we had finished a leisurely breakfast, both were open, and we drove across a clear bridge to Oregon. We had lunch in Astoria on a walkway where we had a gorgeous view of Washington over the river:

Then we went to Fort Stevens State Park. It took us forever because two of the roads there were closed, presumably due to fallen trees, but we finally found a third route in, where we got to see this shipwreck:

Then we had a short drive to Nehalem Bay State Park, where we had planned to drive today all the way from Seattle. We got there too late to see the beach, but Lucy and I walked to it in the dark, and we will all enjoy it tomorrow.

Today's route:

RV Trip Day 1: Dismal Nitch Rest Area

I bought an RV in January because it seemed the safest and only reasonable way to travel during covid, where we could take our own self-contained home with our own bathroom and private space on adventures. We are turning our annual trip to visit my dad in New Mexico into a 3-week road trip around the western US:

We intended to leave Seattle on Saturday, February 13, but a giant snowstorm was supposed to bury Seattle in a foot of snow Friday night, so we decided to leave early, on Friday afternoon, in the hopes that we could sneak out in between the big snow that hit Olympia on Thursday and the much bigger snow that was supposed to start Friday night. We had a lot of projects and packing to do, so getting out early was not easy, but we managed to leave Seattle around 4:30 pm.

The Oregon coast, where we were heading, was not supposed to get snow, so I figured if we could get past the snow in Olympia, the center of the snowstorm, and off to the other side before it hit, we would be OK. It was comforting to know that if the snow was bad enough that we couldn't make it, we could always pull over to the side of the road, and we would be in a self-contained little house filled with heat, water, food, and plumbing. However, it was also clear that if we didn't make it before the big snow started, we'd probably be in the same place for a few days, so I was pretty motivated to make it through the snow. I obsessively checked the traffic cams all over to determine the best route, and it was pretty snowy everywhere, but we decided to start heading west after Olympia, passing through Aberdeen and Raymond towards the coast. There was a lot of snow between Olympia and Raymond, and the roads were a little scary, but we made it through to the other side where it was raining instead of snowing just as the snow was supposed to start coming down. I cooked challah in the RV oven while Michael drove, and we had Shabbat dinner while he was still driving. We stopped for the night at Dismal Nitch Rest Area, just north of the Astoria bridge, a perfect little spot with a beautiful view of Oregon across the Columbia River.

Today's route: