9/3/10 One thing about doing a blog, sometimes life is so routine and boring that you have nothing to write about, and other times you are so busy that you don’t have time to update your blog!! The past week or so we have been too busy to update this, and we apologize. But now - Hugs from Winchester Bay! Yes, we have arrived at the coast and although today started out with the water calm and the sun out, (see picture below) now the fog is rolling in and the wind is coming up. That is one thing about the weather here – it changes rapidly! Yesterday when we arrived it was sunny and warm and we had a delightful afternoon and calm evening – somewhat of a rarity here.

We arrived here yesterday, along with Carole & Dick Schneider, shortly after noon and were delighted to find several friends here from the RoVing Rods: Chuck & Betty Goehring with their daughter Pam and her partner, Charlie, and also Ted Sudtell. Mike and Marilyn Harrison were also parked out on the point. Elaine and I quickly purchased crabbing licenses, got some tuna carcasses for bait, Elaine assembled 3 of our crab traps, and we threw them in off the dock by about 5 PM. Chuck & Charlie had been getting lots of crabs so Chuck brought over some cooked crabs which Mike & Marilyn, Dick & Carole, Elaine and I all enjoyed at Happy Hour. Chuck agreed to move our traps from the crabbing dock across the channel for us, and when Mike and I went down to the dock to get them, we already had caught 2 keeper size males! In a few minutes Chuck will take me over to the traps to check them again and see if we got anything overnight. Later today Mike is going to help me set up our inflatable boat so we can get over there to deal with our own traps without bothering Chuck.
Before coming here we stayed for 2 nights at the Sutherlin SKP park with Dick and Carole parked right beside us. Other RoVing Rods friends, Pam & Sid Bowen, have a lot there and we enjoyed Happy Hour on Tuesday with them, and also met their two new little doggies.



Tuesday Dick was the designated driver while Carole, Elaine and I did some wine tasting in the Upqua Valley. There are quite a few small wine making operations here and they make some surprisingly good wines. Although they all seem to have an emphasis on pinot noir, and we usually enjoy reds more than whites, at this batch of wineries we liked the whites better, especially pinot gris. They have a “passport” and if you get yours stamped at 5 wineries, you are entered into a drawing for lots of wine from all of the wineries. So, of course, we had to visit 5 wineries in one afternoon, which was about 2 too many! Also, we all believe in supporting these small boutique wine makers so we not only tasted a lot, we bought a lot. By the time we got back to Sutherlin and met Pam & Sid for Happy Hour, we all switched to water….
9/4/10 Ran out of time yesterday to finish this. When we went to check our traps in the late morning yesterday, we had 4 BIG keepers, and in the late afternoon, 4 more less large ones, so once again we had hot crab for Happy Hour with the 4 friends. We also bought some fresh tuna from one of the commercial boats so we had seared fillets for dinner with some of Carole’s delicious nicoise sauce. And Elaine canned the rest of it. Mike helped me set up our inflatable boat but when Chuck came over to help me get the motor started, we were not successful. He knows a lot about engines like this but he says ours is too new and has too many electronic components for him to fix it. We will try to get a guy in Reedsport to look at it later today. This morning we put the traps out on the crabbing dock and several hours later had caught 4 more big males. So things are looking good for crabbing this year.
Before coming here, as you know from my previous post, we were working on our rental in Woodland. The kitchen cabinets looked bad so we cleaned them, primed them and painted them with white semi-gloss. I would have taken a picture in order to show you the marvelous transformation, but somehow we lost our camera, which I thought I had loaded into the car. There was a lot of stuff in there for the rental work, and also our inflatable boat and motor. So when my niece Kathy, and her daughter Camille, visited us at our RV for dinner one night, I could only take their picture with our cell phone camera.

On our way here we stopped at Costco in Roseburg and bought a new digital camera which was my birthday present. Then, yesterday, when we unloaded the boat and motor, there was the “lost” camera! Now I have to decide if I am going to keep the new camera. It has a lot better zoom on it – 12x which is really great for a small camera. But I don’t like the fact that it has a specialized battery. When we take our camera on foreign trips, it is much easier to get AA batteries (which our old camera uses) if we can’t get our batteries recharged.
For my birthday, which was last Sunday, I asked my daughter, Laura to meet me for lunch at a restaurant in Roseville. She lives in Sparks, NV so she had about a 2 hour drive and I drove up from Sacramento. I hadn’t seen her for almost 2 years because of all our travels and it was a wonderful reunion. Here is a picture of us at the restaurant,

and also a picture of Laura by herself.
After lunch and a nice walk in the park, Laura went with me back to our RV and she had a nice reunion with Elaine too.
Laura has recently divorced her husband, so her daughter Michaela (15) was spending the weekend with Scott, otherwise we would have been able to see her too.
The reason we were able to leave Woodland and head up here to Oregon a few days before our tenant turnover at the rental was because we were done with the cabinet painting and we convinced our new tenant to take over the other chores. She seems like a responsible person and since she would be the one having to live with any inadequacies left by the old tenant, she didn’t mind taking over. It will be interesting to see the place the next time we are there.
Lee and Susie Blattner have just arrived and managed to get the parking spot right next to us. We haven’t seen them for a while either, so this was another happy reunion. Isn’t this RV life great because of all the friends we can hook up with in various places??!!