By Jim.
Sorry, we’ve been out of touch in the past few days, so this will be a long one.
We had a quiet weekend in Eugene. One highlight was getting together with my old Sig-Ep bro, Channon Payne, for a beer Sunday night.
Monday, we had successful elective surgery. We replaced the couch, captain’s chairs and dinette seats in the Iz with stuff that’s way more comfortable than the original equipment. We had the job done in Junction City, Oregon (near Eugene), because the lead-time for ordering the stuff coincided with the timing of our trip from Bend to the Oregon Coast (and allowing us to save 10% on the cost – no sales tax in Oregon!). When The Stair Caper started last week, the company was nice enough to push back our install appointment for a few days.
Countryside Interiors in Junction City is the sort of place where you like to do business. It’s a small-town family business, and the owner, Steve, doesn’t just own…he gets his hands dirty. The install took all day Monday, so we spent another night in Eugene. Sting approves of the finished product.
Tuesday was our much-anticipated appointment with Quality Coach Services in Eugene to get the stairs fixed and do a couple of other tweaks.
It’s the same sort of place as Countryside, a good old-fashioned family business. Amber runs the office and infuses the place with warmth and enthusiasm. Her husband, Robert, runs the show. Our tech was Jeremiah, a buttoned-up pro. We left the Iz with them at 8:00am, along with the replacement parts for the stairs that we’d ordered from Fleetwood. They thought they’d have everything wrapped up by Noon.
We all piled in the Jeep and went for a nice vegan breakfast (hey, it’s Eugene), then I dropped Ginny at a hairdresser. My chore after that was to take the dogs to a Pet Smart about a mile or so away (remember that metric) to get their nails trimmed and buy some food.
One running joke we’ve had during the trip is that Ginny keeps misplacing her keys. When you can’t find a set of RV keys, it means nine keys (the engine has its own key, the cargo bays have their own key…) are MIA. It’s been a source of sparkling commentary along the way.
Now we had a new key-related twist. I got to PetSmart, turned off the car motor, tried to lock the doors …and realized I didn’t have a key to the Jeep, which has keyless fobs. My fob was attached to my rig keys, which were at the service place and Ginny’s was with her at the salon. Sting, Roxy and I turned my bad self-esteem moment into a nice hour-long urban hike. We walked downtown, grabbed Ginny’s key from the salon, then walked back, fetched the car, and got back to the salon right as Ginny was done. 
The Stair Caper persisted, however. When we got to Quality Coach mid-day, they still were wrestling with the wiring problem that caused the stairs to go haywire. It wasn’t until 5:00 that we bid a fond farewell to everyone at Quality…
…and finally left Eugene with working stairs (hopefully, this is the last time you have to read the word “stairs” on this blog).
We drove to the Coast and spent the night in the little town of Winchester, where the only pizza place closed at 8:00pm (which I discovered at 8:15).
We had a lazy Wednesday morning and hit the road at 11:00. We drove down the southern Oregon Coast (it was painful to drive past Bandon Dunes without stopping and teeing it up!). We had a new issue to deal with on the drive – SUN! As in, where are the sunglasses?! We paused along the way for our first beach walk of the trip.
Late afternoon, we drove through the northernmost redwood forest. It’s a magnificent experience.
If Scott Pruitt and Ryan Zinke ever try to allow these trees (most are in national forests) to be logged, it might be the Fort Sumter moment for California to secede from the union. Many of them are 1,000 years old. Their size (both height and girth) is imposing.
We spent Wednesday night at the Ancient Redwoods RV Park, which is exactly what you’d expect – a meadow full of RVs amidst a grove of redwoods. In some ways, it felt like the first real day of the trip – discovering new places and admiring new-found scenery (and getting into and out of the rig without jeopardizing anyone’s ACLs).
And it wouldn’t be a road trip without some tourist kitsch!
We didn’t arrive until almost dark, so we couldn’t fully enjoy the park. It had been a long day’s drive, but it left us only 200 miles from Bodega Bay, our Thursday destination, so we thought the extra driving on Wednesday was worthwhile, to give us an easy drive Thursday.
Not. Quite.
Most of our route Thursday was on California Route 1, which tracks the coastline. According to the map, it didn’t look like a tough drive.
We should have done some more research.
The numbers don’t lie – it took us over nine hours to drive 200 miles. Neither Google nor Rand McNally showed the hairpin curves or the steep uphill and downhill grades. We won’t dwell on the sharp turns on the edges of cliffs with, uh, minimal guardrails.
The coastline scenery was spectacular. However, we didn’t take pics of many vistas because we had our hands full with driving. At one point, the Iz had to downshift itself into first gear to make it up a grade after an ess curve. After a while, it started seeming like good news when we got to a curve with a warning sign that we only had to slow down to 25 mph.
We had a mid-afternoon respite in the historic little town of Mendocino, which we nicknamed Litchfield-By-The-Sea.
We finally arrived at our campsite on the beach at Doran Park in Bodega Bay (if you’re a Hitchcock fan, that will ring a bell – it’s where The Birds was filmed) just before sunset. The dinnertime bottle of wine never tasted better!
Friday should be an easy drive. Really. It’s only 100 miles to San Jose to visit with our dear friends, Jim and Eileen Beckley. No hairpin turns will be involved. And the day has already started with a long walk on a sunny beach!
Our descent wasn’t as dramatic as the trip up, but we were rewarded with some amazing granite striations…
Then we decided this would be the night to fulfill our promise to our loyal readers to check out the Iron Door Saloon in Groveland (population of somewhere between 601 and 3,100, depending on whether you believe the Census Bureau or the roadside sign at the city limits), a couple of miles from our RV park.
