Friday in Bend

On Friday, we drove in to Bend to pick up some orders and do some shopping. While we were driving around, we were able to find a recycling place and get lots of recycling out of the Jeep. We also passed by a place that I had noticed on our previous trip into Bend: Pilot Butte. We had noticed that the sky was a lot clearer on Friday, so decided to go up Pilot Butte and check out the view.

Pilot Butte is right in Bend, but gives a great 360 degree view.

We had passed the National Monument for Newberry Volcano on our way up to Bend.

 In the middle of the plaza on the top of Pilot Butte was a locator:

... telling names and distances to mountains that we could see from this vantage point.

 

There were beautiful sights in all directions,

particularly toward the west...

... we think these were Three Sisters and Broken Top.

A zoomed in picture

I think the one that is barely visible at the left of center might be Mt Hood...

We enjoyed our impromptu visit to Pilot Butte and the beautiful scenery we could see from there.

Kicking back at Bend-Sunriver Thousand Trails Campground

When we arrived at the Bend-Sunriver Thousand Trails Campground, another motorhome was also just arriving with the driver, Al. He was still unhooking his tow vehicle when we got to the parking lot where we were also going to unhook, so we got to greet him. It turned out that he parked just down the way from us, so we got to know him a little better.

When we joined him for a walk earlier in the week, he mentioned that he had been practicing his ukulele. Dwayne mentioned that he would like to hear it, so the next evening, Al joined us with his baritone ukulele.

 I am not very knowledgeable about music in general, or stringed instruments in particular, but if I understood correctly, Al had started with a guitar, but had difficulty making the chords. Someone recommended he try a ukulele, and specifically a baritone ukulele, because ukuleles have only 4 strings, and is therefore easier to hold the chords, and, the baritone ukulele is tuned to the same as the top 4 strings of the guitar. (I think I have that right - if there are errors in the information, they are due to my mistakes, not what Al told me!) He played us several songs and we thoroughly enjoyed our own private concert!

He came back Thursday evening with a banjo-ukulele. Again, it has 4 strings, and unlike a normal banjo, the strings are nylon instead of metal. But, it was a lot louder than the baritone ukulele that he had played on Wednesday night. I think he told us that the banjo is the only stringed instrument that has sufficient volume on its own (without amplification) to play with other instruments in a group. Guitars were not useful to be played with other instruments until they were able to be amplified. (Again, any mistakes are mine!)

He also shared with us a very early travel journal that his wife wrote: https://saltontheroad.com/toc.php
His wife had told their son back in 2001 that she wanted a tool that would allow her to share their travels via pictures and text on the internet. This was before blogging software was available, so he (their son) wrote the program that allowed her to share her travels. Pretty neat, huh?

Unfortunately, Tryna passed away in March, 2017. He went out in their rig solo for a shorter summer trip last year, and is trying a longer one this year. I can't imagine trying to do this by myself... Dwayne and I are such a team. Al confessed that he has not been keeping the blog up after Tryna's death.

Al headed out on Friday morning. We hope that we might be able to meet up with him at some point down the road!

A quick picture of Miss Doozie in her site here at Bend-Sunriver Thousand Trails. We've been catching up on some tasks while here - sorry for fewer posts than usual!

Monday's drive from Crater Lake to Bend-Sunriver Thousand Trails

On Monday, we left the Thousand Springs Sno-Park parking lot on our way to Sunriver to the Thousand Trails campground, just south of Bend, OR.

The forest was so beautiful - large trees ...

There was some smoke, but it wasn't too bad.

We could see a Mt Thielsen ahead of us through the haze as we traveled north and east on route 230.

Google Maps Link

When we turned east on 138, we started seeing warning signs indicating "Fire Activity Ahead". Route 138 goes right along the northern boundary of Crater Lake National Park and we had heard that there was a fire in the northeast corner of the park (https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/incident/5986/).

Just after we passed the northern entrance into Crater Lake National Park, we could see heavy smoke that looked like fog on the road...

You can barely see a couple of cars coming out of the smoke.

We passed a couple of areas where there were vehicles parked alongside the road...

Evidently the fire fighters go into the forest from this area to reach the fires.

We only experienced heavy smoke - no fires and no evidence of recent burning, though we did see patches along the road as we headed up US 97 where there had been fires in the last few years - but green was growing on top of the blackened ground, so we figured it must be a little while ago. The smoke is not bad where we are at Bend-Sunriver Thousand Trails.

Sunday...

First - an update on Patti's computer - she was able to restore the partition that contains the operating system and her laptop now boots up... but it isn't exactly working correctly, so she is using Dwayne's laptop to do this post and looking into a laptop purchase in the near future.

Going back to Sunday - I mentioned that on Sunday we had a battery issue...

So, we stopped at the Napa store in Grants Pass...

We were able to park on the street right in front of the store, and after Dwayne disconnected the batteries, he ran a load tester on them and they tested out ok. We decided to continue on and have not had any further issues with starting.

We wanted to go to Crater Lake National Park. We had thought we might have multiple days in that area, depending on when we got away from Henderson's, but since we didn't get away until Sunday, and our reservation at the Thousand Trails campground in Bend started on Monday, we decided to see as much as we could on Sunday afternoon. We found a place to stay at the Thousand Springs Sno-Park (not to be confused with Thousand Trails!). When we got there, another RV was just hooking up to leave - they had stayed 4 nights there, so we felt good about leaving Miss Doozie while we went into the park - just about 10 miles away. Though we had seen some smoke on the way up, there did not seem to be much at the Sno-Park nor on the road into the National Park.

We had been told that Crater Lake was indescribably beautiful - and it was!

A panorama shot...

Dwayne was able to get some good shots...

Wizard Island

Llao Rock beyond Wizard Island

The water is very clear!

On the far side of the lake it was obvious that there were fires producing smoke.

When we visited the "Art in the Park" exhibit, I asked a park ranger about the smoke we could see in the distance. She let us know that we might get pretty close to that fire when we drove to Bend on Monday.

View from the building where the art exhibit was being held.

Wizard Island is also a volcano, and there is another one just under the surface...

A diagram of Wizard Island and Merriam Cone

The water in Crater Lake is from precipitation. There are no water sources running into it.

Most of the precipitation comes in the form of snow.

Normal snowbank height in spring of 15'

I'm sure that we would have enjoyed the drive all the way around the lake, but we elected not to do it on Sunday afternoon. We headed back to Miss Doozie, and found that the Sno-Park parking lot was very smokey. By Monday morning, there was quite an accumulation of ash on the Jeep. We were glad to be moving on up the road.

Well.... again!

On Sunday, after attending our church service via live stream, the tire had held pressure, so we decided to leave, only to have an issue with the engine batteries when we tried to start Miss Doozie. We had had an issue once while the folks at Henderson's were working on the bus, but were able to join together the engine (start) batteries and the house batteries and get it started. But... we think the issue was that we didn't run the bus very long between starts, and multiple starts had drained them down. Nevertheless, we stopped at a Napa store in Grants Pass and they checked the engine batteries and they were all good. So, we decided to continue on up to Crater Lake on Sunday. It was only about an hour and a half drive to the Sno-Park where we had decided to stay, and we made it with no problem.

We got to see Crater Lake, and will post pictures from our visit... but Patti's laptop is now not booting (how can this be?!?!?!?) so... will try to get back to normal on Tuesday!

Well....

While our plan was to start heading toward Crater Lake on Saturday morning, it didn't happen that way. As we were heading out, we noticed that the TireMinder indicated that the duals on the passenger side were low on air, so we returned to Henderson's to park and try to put air into the tires from our on-board air systems. We were able to get some air in (from about 85# up to 97#) but we couldn't get them aired up to our goal (100#) and we were concerned about why the tires had lost air, so we decided to stay another night at Henderson's and watch to see if the tires maintained the 97# until Sunday morning. If we were still losing air, the plan was to stay over until Monday and get Henderson's to help us out; if we maintained the 97# until Sunday morning, we'd go ahead and head out on Sunday to Crater Lake area.

Writing this on Sunday morning -- it looks like the tires have held the pressure from Saturday, so we will once again start heading toward Crater Lake.

Finished up at Henderson's

One of the other rigs that joined us here at Henderson's was a Safari Trek:

It looks like someone stole all the wheels - but I guess they are working on the brakes or something associated with all the axles here at Henderson's.

A cute Dame mural on the back.

Signed original

We've spent the most of the week here at the side of the building - there is a plug that we could use for 30A power - enough for one air conditioner at a time  - which works out ok.

On Friday we moved into the "big house", or at least the building with the longer pit (work area) underneath.

They worked on the ride height adjustment to better balance weight between the drive and the tag axles.

Drive axle passenger side

Tag axle passenger side

Koty's notes.

The air lines for the tag axle were too well buried for us to be able to put an adjustable regulator on it, so the solution was instead to adjust the ride height on the drive axle. It accomplished what we needed, so we're happy!

The smoke from the fires produced an odd looking sunset on Friday evening!

We plan to leave Grants Pass on Saturday morning on our way up toward Crater Lake. We're hoping to find a Sno-Park that has good parking and decent internet service and reasonable driving distance from Crater Lake.