9/28/08 Sunday Night and we have just finished an enjoyable homemade pizza dinner with our neighbors Jeanne Taylor and Rodger Lyman, and our friends Viv & Curt Rogers. Usually when we make pizza it is because we want crab pizza, using some of the crab we recently caught in Oregon. But Viv is allergic, so we had a smoked salmon and veggie pizza, and a BLT pizza. Of course, we used fresh lettuce on the BLT pizza - not baked, silly. Now tomorrow we will have to exercise twice as hard to get these extra calories off!!!
Not much has been happening here although we have been trying to tackle a few "to do" items. Last weekend we went to the Reel Pride Festival in Fresno, where we saw a few interesting Gay films, and also picked up a few bumper stickers for our car and a big poster for our lot telling people to vote "NO" on Prop 8, which is the proposition to ban Gay marriage. It hadn't been up very long when we had a visit from our new park manager telling us that it wasn't permitted for us to have a political sign up on our lot. Elaine asked him if we could have stuff on our car and he said vehicles were OK. So she positioned our golf cart (the one Viv & Curt have extra so they are loaning it to us) so it faces the street and she stuck the big poster right across the windshield of it. Now that sign is even more visible than it was before! (And we are legal). We know that this action was precipitated by an overly religious park member who walks by our lot every day; so we hope she enjoys her enhanced view of our sign!

We will be spending the rest of this month here at Park Sierra, getting ready for the wedding, doing jury duty, having a few more appointments, and also getting ready for the next cruise. Because we didn't have anything special planned for November, Elaine wanted to take another trans-Atlantic repositioning cruise. We knew that our friends, Carole and Dick Schneider, who have been in Europe since May, were returning on the Navigator of the Seas on Nov. 10 from Barcelona. The price had dropped to $399 for a 12 day cruise, so it seemed reasonable. So yesterday we booked the cruise and a flight to Barcelona, leaving Nov. 8. Of course, by the time extra government tax is added and a fuel surcharge, the cruise costs about $600 each, but that still seems like a bargain. If anyone reading this blog wants all the information, let us know because it is not too late for friends to join us on this - our Honeymoon cruise!!!

9/17/08 Still here at Park Sierra and taking care of business. Not very interesting for BLOG readers!! The report on the doctor's appointments is that we had a bad run-in with the dermatologist. I had to have spots on my neck, nose (3) and lip burned with liquid nitrogen. Then he spotted Elaine's lip, which he said was worse than mine, and he zapped hers too - three times!! So we went to our lunch date with Diana Bonas, the Methodist minister who will perform our ceremony, with big blisters on our lips! Since then we have developed scabs and we are telling people that before getting married we wanted to have a really BIG fight!
Diana seems like a sweetie and we had a great time with her. She gave us lots of good suggestions for our ceremony and now we just need to work on the wording. It is like a homework assignment! Then we went to get our marriage license at the county clerk's office. There were about 10 people waiting around ahead of us and I'm sure we were an item of curiosity, covert looks, etc., but all went well. the license cost $49 so now we really have to go through with this - too much money invested to abort now....
There is a need for some follow-up appointments so we are hanging around Park Sierra waiting for these to be scheduled. It has been fairly hot here - in the 90's every day, which has been OK with us and we have now thawed from being frozen up in Oregon. Today the weather is starting to cool into the 80's which is about perfect and we will bask in it. On our daily walks we have been seeing lots of animals: deer, coyotes, quail, bunnies, squirrels, woodpeckers, and last night there was a skunk right in our patio area. The other evening on our walk we saw a baby rattlesnake on one of the streets in the park. There have also been sightings of a cougar and her 2 cubs down in the number 500 lots by the creek. It is great to have so much "nature" right around us. In case you haven't seen any of the pictures we have posted in the past about this park, here are a few:

Front View of Our Lot at Park Sierra #414

The back and side view from our lot.

The clubhouse at Park Sierra where our wedding will be held.

9/10/08 We have been back at Park Sierra for a few days now and until today, it has been HOT. Of course, we are enjoying having warmer weather. It has been good to be back here, helping with minor things at the park and seeing lots of old friends. Viv & Curt Rogers had us over for a delicious steak dinner on Monday and Mary & Dave Fountain were at our place for dinner last night. Sunday there will be a brunch at the Kimptons. When it is not too hot to be outside, we are tackling a few projects on the rig and in our shed.
Today we had some check-ups at Kaiser in Fresno, and tomorrow there will be more. We will also be meeting the minister who will be performing our ceremony on October 25. Reports on these events will be in the next blog.

9/5/08 I am writing this as Elaine is driving south towards the California border. This morning we left Days Creek, where we stayed several days with our friends Pat & Tom Bryant on their beautiful little farm. Not only are they always welcoming, when we visit, they are interesting and always busy with a myriad of projects. We were able to help with a few of them, but when it came to dealing with their critters, we left that up to them! Because we had just arrived from Winchester Bay, we had some fresh crab to share with them, and here is a picture of our first dinner together, enjoying the fruits of the sea.

The first day we were there, we went with Tom to the nearby river to collect some flat river rocks for his fireplace project in his big storage shed/shop/art room complex. Here is a picture of Mary & Tom at the site:

On the north side of the hill we could still find some good blackberries, so we wanted to pick some for a cobbler. Elaine was whining about how hard it was to get to them so Tom developed a new method of picking. He used a large leather glove to protect his hand and he cut off the stalks of berries and handed them to us in a dishpan and then we just plucked off the berries into another pan and threw the stalks away. We had a large amount of berries in about 10 minutes! The cobbler that night was delicious.
The next day we helped Pat out in their very large and productive garden. She had some small plants that had been developing in their greenhouse which she needed to plant. She also had a row of beets that were ready to harvest and she wanted to pickle them and can them. So we went out and helped with that. Here are some pictures of all the fun we had:

Pat Rototils the Garden

Elaine and Pat Planting

Elaine & Pat With Finished Rows

Pat's Pumpkins
As they were planting, my job was to harvet the beets. When the green leafy tops are cut off, then they get thrown over the fence to the waiting goats:

Because Pat &Tom have sheep and goats, they had to get a guardian dog to patrol the fenced areas to protect the livestock from predators such as cougars, coyotes, etc. Here is a picture of Dutch, the guardian dog:

The two newest critters on the farm are Fudge and Pudge. After all the great food we had here, we fall into the same category as these animals!

Before arriving at Tom & Pat's, we stopped at the Escapee park in Sutherlin to visit our friends Pam & Sid Bowen. We not only go to see their new park model, new truck, and new (old) small travel trailer, they took us out to lunch as an early wedding celebration/present. It was great to see them and here is a picture of them in front of their new trailer, which they will use to go over to the Crabfest on the coast, of course.

It has been nice to be off the coast and experiencing some warm weather! Now that we are heading towards Redding, it is even getting HOT. We will be back at Park Sierra within a day or two and have a few doctor's appointments next week. It will be good to see all our Park Sierra friends again, and also start getting arrangements made for the wedding on Oct. 25.

8/30/08 Another windy day here at Winchester Bay. Crabbing off the dock, we got 7 more crabs which we shared tonight with Jeanne Taylor and Rodger Lyman, Park Sierra friends. They arrived yesterday while we were spending the day driving to Eugene and Florence for an excursion. It is great to have them here and we hope they are enjoying the fresh crab!
Do you remember the lines from a Beatles song in the '60's that said, "Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm 64?" Well, those lines ran through my mind yesterday when I achieved that age. I'm glad to report that Elaine still needs me and occasionally feeds me, as she did yesterday when we had my birthday lunch at a Chinese restaurant in Eugene. We had driven over there to pick up our wedding rings at Kohl's. We had bought them in Albany about a month ago and had to have them resized. For those of you who don't know, we will be getting married in the Park Sierra clubhouse at 3 PM on October 25. Since we have been together for 29 years, it seems appropriate to take this step now that the California supreme court has made it legal. After we did some other shopping, we drove back to Winchester Bay through Florence, where we stopped at the casino for a short stay and won enough money to pay for some ice cream. Then we shared it with Jeanne and Rodger when we got back to the marina.

Thursday Ron Gibson came over in his boat and picked us up for a day of crabbing out on the Umpqua River. This is the river which is right outside the little harbor area where we are parked.

It was a beautiful sunny day when we got out there and we were even sorry that we had not worn tee shirts because it was so warm. That lasted only a short while because then the wind picked up, as usual, and we had to don sweatshirts and eventually jackets.

We worked our 3 crab traps and 3 of Ron's for about 5 hours and got 22 keepers.

This was so much better than last year! The bad part was that Ron ran over one of his traps and inadvertently cut the rope with the propeller and lost his trap. The good part was that Ron's boat is large and comfortable so it was much easier to be out in it in all that wind than if it was a smaller boat.

8/27/08 Just got back from Taco Night at the Eagles Club where we had dinner with Ron and Donna Gibson, RoVing Rod friends, and 3 other new friends we have met here on the crabbing dock. So we went out to check our traps and there were 3 keepers. That makes 6 today, which means things are picking up. Tomorrow we are going out in Ron's boat to see if we can get more crab by going out on the river near the mouth where it empties into the ocean. The theory is that since the crabs come from the ocean, we should get them first if our traps are out there!

Last weekend there was an event here in Winchester Bay called Kool Coastal Nights. Hundreds of older restored cars were on display here and they were so awesome! Of course, I was most partial to the 1956 Chevys because that was my first car. Had to get it in 1967 when I was a grad student and I needed a way to get to Palo Alto to the High School where I was student teaching.

This looks just like my first car!!!

Elaine's first car was a 1959 Ford Fairlane but we didn't see any of them here. After the cars had been on display all day Saturday, they "cruised" all around here and I took some pictures which I will post below for your viewing pleasure.
Yes, the weather has improved somewhat and yes, so has the crabbing, on some days. So that means we aren't so crabby!

8/21/08 Sure wish I was going to be reporting that we have been catching tons of crab but such is not the case. The weather here took a turn for the worst about 4 days ago and has been so bad that for several days we couldn't even get out on the dock to re-bait our traps. The rain was pouring down and there was so much wind that we had to pull in our slide-outs. Since we are always working on staying fit and we try to walk at least 3 miles a day, that was the most frustrating part - that we couldn't get out to walk.
Now for the good part. This morning things were much better because we re-baited our traps and within 3 hours had 3 keeper crabs and patchy sunshine. So we are about to go out for our second walk of the day and checking our traps once again.

8/12/08 Greetings Blog Readers, from Winchester Bay, OR. We have now moved south and are established in a spot at Salmon Harbor Marina and have paid for a month. Unfortunately, I started getting sick the day before we moved here and for the last 5 days I have been the most ill I have ever been with a gastro-intestinal disorder. We used some medicine we picked up in Egypt and Thailand and finally today I am starting to feel much better. Of course, I am still weak.
Our friends from the RoVing Rods, Donna and Ron Gibson have been staying in Reedsport at an RV park and they came over to welcome us when we got here. Then, a few days later, Ron caught 2 silver salmon and they brought over several packages of fillets for us. We fixed some for dinner and it was so delicious. We just love having seafood on the coast!!
Elaine has been crabbing off the dock and doing her own thing while waiting for me to get stronger so we can put our boat together. That might happen in a day or two. Here she is, cutting up tuna carcasses for bait.


Then she checks her traps and baits them again:

But today, when she checked her traps, she not only got a big crab but it had a tag on it which means she is in contention for the $1000 prize in a month long contest here. There are other prizes too. Won't know until the 31st!!

When she went over to the Sportmen's Cannery to register her tag, they took a picture of her with her big crab and gave her a red baseball cap that says "Crab Bounty Hunt".

There were 3 other keepers in our traps today too, so tonight we will be having a delicious crab dinner. Yum!
The weather over the weekend was absolutely gorgeous, of course, since I wasn't well enough to go outside. Just look at our beautiful view which seems even better when the sun shines.
Since then, it has been overcast and cold. Luckily, for me, there has been good TV, with the Olympics going on. Elaine has been doing a little beading and soon she will have a lovely new bracelet. No doubt there will be a picture of it in the next blog entry.

8/5/08 Today we are in Florence, OR and it has been overcast all day. At first we were staying at the Elks Club, but now we have moved to the free RV camping area at the Three Rivers Casino. They let rigs stay here 3 nights and the area is quiet and nice. They even have a big patch of grass for pets to use with a poop bag dispenser right in front of it, and a garbage can for the filled bags! Elaine is in the casino because she says we have to "pay our camping fees", but so far in 2 sessions she has only been winning. Sure hope it continues!
The last time we posted was from Newport where our last days there were enriched by a visit from Lou Stoetzer and Judy Farrow, friends from Park Sierra. They had dinner with us at the Eagles Club the night before we moved down to Waldport. Prior to their arrival, we did more exploring of the Newport area, visiting the Yaquina Bay Lighthouse and looking over the Yaquina Bay Bridge.

In Waldport we set up at the Moose Lodge where they even provided electricity for a donation of $5/night and once again we had a very friendly welcome. Our crab traps were collapsed under our rig, so we put together three of them and did some crabbing ASAP. I wish I could say that our time in Waldport was wildly successful in the crab-catching department, but it wasn't. We only put our traps in off the docks, because we didn't want to go through the hassle of setting up our inflatable boat until we get to Winchester Bay where we will stay a long while. Mostly we were catching a lot of seaweed, but we did manage to get 6 keepers in 2 days so we had a nice crab dinner one evening. Saturday we put our traps in and then went with Lou to Yachats to look around some art galleries and have a fish and chips lunch. The day was sunny but the wind came up and by the time we went to get our traps, the waves were crashing over the dock, soaking our shoes and pants, and we didn't get a single crab - not even any small ones were in our traps. It was too rough for even the crabs to be out!
Because we have been working hard to get in better shape, we did a nice hike at Cape Perpetua on our drive down here from Waldport, and another one yesterday at Sutton Campground in the nearby Suislaw National Forest. Here is the view from the top of the Cape Perpetua Hike:

The visitor's parking area at Cape Perpetua is located near a rocky area with a lot of tidepools and a big chasm in it called the Devil's Churn. Here it is:

On our drive here we stopped at a lookout to take this picture of the Heceta Head Lighthouse:

The day we drove down the coast was sunny and beautiful so we had great sea and coast views. Yesterday, on our hike, we stopped at an area where they are preserving habitat for an unusual plant called Darlingtonia. Here is a picture of lots of them in a bog - their favorite habitat.

These plants entice insects to enter their hoods and then they eventually end up falling into an acidic secretion at the bottom where they die and provide food for the plant.
In a few days we will settle in at the marina in Winchester Bay and then the serious crabbing will begin!

7/28/08 Hello from Newport, on the Oregon coast. We have been here for a few days and have been having nice weather, albeit quite a bit cooler than we were experiencing while we were inland. Today was a wonderfully sunny day so we drove out to Yaquina Head. This is a point of land about a mile long that sticks out into the ocean, just a mile or so north of Newport. It used to have two distinctive hills on it but one of them was quarried to get the material to build the original Pacific Coast highway many years ago. In 1996 artificial tidepools were made out of the old quarry and now there is lots of marine life there.
The views of the seafront were impressive all along the drive along the head.
There is also an impressive interpretive center with displays on the history of the lighthouse and some information on the marine life here. The actual lighthouse and a small building attached to it are still there, but the keepers houses and other buildings that used to be there have been removed. Right outside the lighthouse there was a huge colony of seabirds on a huge rock in the ocean, with a bald eagle sitting in a tree on the cliff overlooking it.
About a dozen gulls were constantly harassing the eagle because he was so close to their territory. Finally, he flew off. We didn't want to wait in line to climb up to the top of the lighthouse, so we took the hike up to the top of the hill overlooking it instead. There were great views from the top and we felt so self-righteous about climbing up there!

Cape Foulweather was our next destination, about 6 miles up coast. It was named by Captain James Cook, the English explorer, when he first spent a horrific day there in 1778.
Luckily for us, today the weather was fabulous, and we even saw a humpback whale in the water below the viewpoint. More wildlife was on offer at our next stop, Otter Rock and Devil's Punchbowl. Here an over-friendly squirrel came running along the fence right at Elaine, thinking that we were there to feed it, like all the other dumb tourists. She quickly departed, and after my incident in Africa with the monkey, so did I, but I did take a picture first.

On our way here, we stayed at the Elks Lodge in Corvallis, so that we could get up the next morning and go blueberry picking again. There are no RV sites at this lodge but they graciously allowed us to park in their parking lot, which isn't all that big. We even had an electric outlet to use nearby. There are LOTS of berry farms in the Corvallis area, and had our choice of about 8 kinds of blueberries to pick at Anderson's Farm, at $1.25 a pound. Later that day we set up our RV at the Newport Elks Lodge, where they have 8 RV sites with water and electricity for $12/night. We saved some berries for eating and made jam with the rest. Yum.
Yesterday we poked around Newport, down by the waterfront, and also attended a delightful movie at the Center for the Performing Arts. It was a documentary called Young@Heart about a chorus of senior citizens who became famous for singing rock and roll songs. The youngest person in the group was about 76 and the oldest was 92. They were delightful! We think this should be shown at Park Sierra at Friday Night at the Movies....
Today we moved from the Elks Lodge to the Eagles Club, which is only about 1/2 mile from the Elks but which costs only $5/night. Of course, we are again parked in a parking lot and only have an electric hookup. The people at these lodges and clubs are always so friendly and welcoming, and here on the Oregon coast where all the RV parks cost a fortune, they provide a great service! In a few days we will probably move south to Waldport where there is a Moose Club with RV sites, and where there is usually good crabbing.

7/22/08 Hello Blog Readers. My apologies for being so lax with postings lately. We have been busy visiting friends and having adventures. Also, we did not have internet access for four days. Today we are camped at the Elks Lodge in Salem, OR. Tonight we will be having dinner at Elaine's niece's home near the downtown. Suzanne and Tom have 2 little ones who have probably grown a lot since we saw them last year. Yesterday we visited Mike & Marilyn Harrison in Vancouver, WA to check on Marilyn's recovery from her July 8th surgery. She is looking fabulous and was doing well enough that we went to Appleby's for lunch and did a little shopping. Some of the shopping was at Trader Joe's, of course. Elaine and I also hit the IKEA store on our own on the way home and were blown away by the sheer size and volume of it. We hadn't been in one since 1989 when we went to Europe and were setting up our camper van, so we shopped in the one in Amsterdam. The best thing we bought was a serving of Swedish meatballs and a cup of coffee in their snackbar.
Prior to coming here, we had a great visit with our friends Ken & Janice Ryder, who have a lot near Cascadia State Park. It is full of trees so we had no satellite TV, no internet, and a great feeling of being out in the woods.

The first 2 days we were there, they took us to U-pick places where we picked delicious blueberries, cherries, raspberries and marionberries.

Of course, we probably ate nearly as many as we picked! Then we had to process all the berries when we got back to the rig.

Most of the blueberries ended up in the freezer, we canned some of the cherries and also made cherry chutney. The raspberries and marionberries are now all delicious jams.

Ken and Janice fixed a delicious dinner one night using three of their dutch ovens.

We tried to reciprocate in kind several other nights, so there was a lot of good eating and no dieting! We did manage to do the waterfall hike in Cascadia State Park just down the road from their lot and it was beautiful.
Our last blog was sent from Ed and Jolene Northup's in Central Oregon, and after we wrote that, we still had many happy days with them. The annual Quilt show in Sisters was one event that Ed opted out of, but which we three women greatly enjoyed. Sisters is a cute, small, touristy town with great shops and restaurants - also 15,000 people the day we were there!!


There were beautiful quilts hanging everywhere all over the town and we enjoyed them even though we are not quilters (Jolene is).


On the way back from Sisters, we stopped at an alpaca farm to see the new baby alpacas and look at the goods in their boutique. Jolene uses alpaca hair in some of the things that she weaves. The alpacas are such gentle animals and we saw them up much closer than when we were seeing them in South America.


Another day, Ed and Jolene drove us on a very scenic loop showing us all the sights in their area. We drove to Lake Billy Chinook, up into the Cascades, had lunch by the Metolius River at Camp Sherman, did a short hike along the river to see the springs coming out of the banks, and enjoyed walking around the fish hatchery.

On our last day with Ed and Jolene, we helped them clear some of the dead sage bushes and dried weeds and wood from the land around their buildings. Luckily, it was the coolest of the days we were there because it was a LOT of physical work. Good thing they do this fairly often because it is for fire protection.