By Jim.
After an anxious Sunday evening listening to the stair motor continue to act up (despite the mechanism being disconnected), the first order of business Monday morning (after savoring the sunrise!)
was to figure out how to schedule a service appointment.
We called Indiana (HQ of Fleetwood, where the Iz was made). We called Eugene (Fleetwood’s regional service center). We called an RV service place in Bend (where we were heading that day, and were told they could fit us into their schedule in early May). And then we called Curt’s RV, a place eight miles up the road from us in La Grande.
I explained my problem to Curt. He said, “Bring it in.” That’s a long sentence for Curt, as I found out.
Curt crawled under the Iz and started poking around, although he was interrupted regularly by people coming into the shop or phoning him, asking for help. You know how you usually can’t be in a mechanic’s work space while he’s working? Curt has no such rules. I just hung out in the shop, watching him tinker (and listening to Rush Limbaugh, whose radio show Curt had blaring the whole time – I learned so much). An hour after he started, during which he said about nine words to me, he got the stairs working again. After watching him in action, I’m convinced Curt knows as much about RVs as Mr. Fleetwood does.
So instead of having to rearrange our itinerary to get the stairs fixed somewhere, we were on our way at noon. But not before one more little drama.
We decided a few months ago to tow a car. We got the semi-official “toad” car of RVers, a Jeep. We planned to do some advance practicing on hooking up the towing gear and driving the Iz with this thing hanging off the back of our already 34-foot-long rig. But moving week ended up being all-consuming, so we never got to that chore, nor did we do so during the Pullman leg of the trip because the weather was relentlessly lousy. We vowed that Monday would be the day to finally do this, instead of me driving the Iz and Ginny driving the Jeep (sporadic vehicle-to-vehicle cellphone convos weren’t the companionship we envisioned when we hatched this grand plan).
So we used the access road at Curt’s place to hook everything up, then drove the rig 50 feet and turned it onto a side street. This was our preparation to drive off down I-84 and then spend five hours on mountain roads.
Turns out, it was a piece of cake – not a single wobbly moment while driving (nor was there any tense dialogue as we tried to remember how the towing gear went together). It was a little weird to look at our rear-view camera all day long and see our Jeep hyper-tailgating us!
As we pulled out of Curt’s, the sun came out…and stayed out all day. Our drive was flat-out spectacular, mostly on Route 26 from Baker City to Bend. We went through two national forests – Wallowa-Whitman and Ochoco (which, sadly, was scarred by recent wildfires).
We got over 5,000 feet for the first time at the Dixie Summit, 5,279 feet. and crossed two other points that were 4,700 feet or higher.
We drove on a road that literally wound through a glacier-carved rock formation (near the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument).
At one point, coming out of the Wallowa-Whitman Forest, we saw a meadow, a foothill and a snowcapped mountain all at the same time.
Sheepishly, for all of my professed love of Oregon, I’d never explored the eastern part of the state until this drive. The variety of topography is remarkable. We saw rock formations that looked like the “Who are those guys?” scene out of Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid , cattle ranches with pastureland that would be the envy of any Texan and snowy mountains that looked like Colorado ski country.
We arrived in Bend at around 6:30, later than expected when we planned this leg of the trip, but grateful for having our mechanical issue solved, which allows us to explore Bend for two full days and tee it up Tuesday with Kim and Ralph Klinke. And we even got treated to the sight of an eagle landing at the top of a tree in our RV park in Bend. Magnificent (almost as much so as Curt)!
