Trod Bogs Sadly – Oddstray's Blog

We drove into Solvang to see what was there.  It was, um, interesting.  Unique.  Nothing like Copenhagen.  Frankly, fake.  Pretty, though.  Pleasant to walk around.

The center of town is mostly shops and restaurants.  The museums are a few blocks farther out.  The one we reached wasn’t yet open.

They did have a statue of a young girl, reminiscent of the little mermaid statue in Copenhagen.

Just outside Solvang is Mission Santa Ynez.  Which B has at long last learned is Saint Agnes (to us English speakers).

Lunch at the Chumash casino turned out to be great value, because we have enough left over for supper.  Plus, they have free wifi, so we could update our phones. They do make the ‘self-parking’ visitors take the long way around, though!

Well, there we were, thinking that we’d got through the worst of LA traffic relatively unscathed, with only a few slow-downs on the 405.

On the 101, at a place called Seacliff, between Ventura and Santa Barbara, I (Simon) heard a ‘pop’. Not terribly loud, but it was there. The obvious WTF moment ensued, and then the trailer’s Tire Pressure Management System (TPMS) went berserk, and we pulled over to the shoulder, got out and had a look.

Flat on the curb (kerb) side. The alloy wheel looks OK, as the tire didn’t come off the rim.

And the big message is that the TPMS saved the wheel, as there was no difference in handling, and the ‘pop’ wasn’t terribly loud.

So, we called AAA, and after a while, ‘Peter’ the tow guy showed up. I dropped the spare, and he had it torqued up in no time and we were on our way. Basically, we lost an hour.

We could have changed it ourselves, we have a jack, but better we have AAA. (why buy a dog and bark oneself?)

But holy heck, turn that wheel over and what do you see:

Complete sidewall separation! Tire failure in a big way. We’ve kept these tires religiously at 50 psi, but the wear pattern on the tread looks like over-inflation, and there’s this inner edge wear which doesn’t look good.

I asked Peter what he thought, and he said it was probably the age of the tire (2013).

Guess where we are going next: to get 3 new tires.

We’ve had this domain ‘oddstray.com’ for lo these many years – and hosted it locally, then  on friends servers and later on commercial servers. It’s been mostly for the purposes of providing a constant email address, independent of whatever ISP one is currently using.

Until a couple of years ago. We had been using dyndns.com for email forwarding, but it started to get crazy expensive. So we moved to NOIP.com. Problem in a nutshell is that they are willing hosts to a bunch of email spammers, so they got blacklisted by our real email hosts, RoadRunner, and email was delayed or never got delivered. No criticism to RoadRunner on this one, as we tried many, many times to get it sorted out. NoIP.com was simply completely unresponsive, but continued to take our money.

But now, WordPress has picked up the challenge, and is our new domain host. All for not very many dollars. Try checking out oddstray.com or sending an email to simon@oddstray.com.

Progress is a relative term.

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Yes this is old, but I (S) recently came across this set of photos from our late 2014 trip to Northern Arizona, Utah and New Mexico. Enjoy.

Another long drive yesterday from Bishop to San Diego. It didn’t help that most of Cajon Pass was at a standstill, and the usual Adelanto start/stop/start/stop was made worse than usual by road works. Just the presence of big amounts of other vehicles on the highway was strange!

Got back by 4:30 pm. Both of us tired as all heck. Stopped for a few minutes to survey the wasteland that was the newly fumigated condo.

Back into harness. Connect the cooler to power, unload all the stuff from the trailer, shove it where it won’t matter for a day or so. Go get the refrigerator/freezer stuff and put it in the cooler/freezer.. Take the trailer back to storage. What’s for dinner? We decide on a shared take-out Shrimp dinner from Sombrero. Get that. Bring it home.

That’s it. We’re bushed. Nothing else gets done.

Stats:

Tow vehicle mileage: 7022

Trailer mileage: 4260

Gallons of fuel used: 421.4

Cost of that fuel: $1260.73

Average mpg: 16.7

Where to next?

Yesterday was fun with the Lance folks, with Serge and Kelly teaching us d.o. (dutch ovens), and then the eats and festivities later. The weather was amazingly good.

Sadly, we had to untether this morning (and miss the d.o. grand breakfast).

We decided to take hwy 395 down the East side of the Sierra Nevada range, rather than the more logical Interstate 5, but we just hate that through Los Angeles, even though it’s quicker and shorter.

Tonight we find ourselves in the ‘Tri-County Fairgrounds’ in Bishop, CA. A parking lot, but that’s OK.

Home tomorrow, if nothing breaks.

Pictures:

Upside down pineapple cake before the dutch oven

After….

Meat Loaf before Dutch Oven

After….

Party time

Friday morning, at Rocky Point RV Park, it was wet and cold. Decamping, I had to hose down all our hoses and electrical connections, as they were smothered in pine needles and mud. Shivering stuff.

But then we set off, turned the heater up, and all was well. Dry shoes are luxurious.

Turned left on SR-140 toward Klamath Falls,then on SR-39 for a while, and to County Route 91. This kind of driving is what it’s about, especially as the rain had cleared and the sun was beginning to break through. Nice even country 2 lane blacktop, no hurries, no worries (Sorry, Ranger Paul, we had to  borrow that). Eventually we hit SR-299 West (I had to write this – after we went through the little town, I said that we were just in Beiber….. Oh well, let’s move on).

West on 299, it was more of the same rolling countryside, pines, farms, rural California, lovely.

The alternative would have been to head for I-5. I think that we won that debate.

After a brief stop in Fall River Mills for gas and a sandwich we continued to hwy 89 south, which runs North of Lassen, to our destination – the KOA Kampground at Lassen/Shingletown, where there is to be a rally of Lance owners, this weekend.

By now it was sunny and warm (relatively). Our campsite is good and the natives welcoming.

This morning, we were welcomed to Gary’s space where he cooked Portuguese sausage for us with Hawaiian Danish (Hawaii is an interesting place, it has a Union Jack as part of its state flag). Despite this, Gary is a fantastic fella.

After that we went to Redding for supplies. Then we set off for the volcano, Lassen. Recent snow made it stand out. So pretty.

Later, we joined the Lance peeps for a bit of a barbecue and socializing . Fun 🙂

Pictures:

It rained. It was/is cold. What shall we do? Slightly forlornly, we set out to do a circuit of Lake Klamath (allegedly, the biggest freshwater lake west of the Rockies).

Well, it soon turned into a different mission, as the “Check Engine’ light came on.

As an aside, we’d had a couple of times when we got a message about the fuel cap not being on tight (darn OR rules about not being able to self-service fuel!), but that was a plain text message, which was easy to clear.

We have an OBD-II reader at home, which is not much help here, of course.

So we decided to go to Klamath Falls, see if we could find a dealer that would tell us what the magic code was. (I suspected a clogged air filter, as we’d been through a lot of dust).

At Klamath Falls, we discovered that there wasn’t a Nissan dealer, so we tried the next best, a Toyota dealer – Lithia. We asked about hooking up their reader to get the diagnostic code, and the quote was $89.95, and could we leave the car with them, they might be able to fit it in today. I thought the title of this post, went across the street to Napa, and bought an OBD-II reader for $82.39, plugged it in, read the code, looked that up on the internet, and hey, guess what, loose gas cap! We hit the red button to clear the error, made sure the gas gap was tight. No more ‘Check Engine’ light.

We were looking for Starbucks, and saw one in a Haggens Grocery. Haggens Grocery has just gone bust and everything was on sale (and the Starbucks was closed). However, I did use the men’s room, and noticed that someone had written in felt-tip pen, on the toilet paper dispenser: ‘Haggen Business Plans’. I laughed out loud.

The rain eased off later, so we swabbed down the trailer and the Xterra, B did laundry, and I made bolognese to go with some spaghetti that I’m just about to prepare.

So I tells B, when we get onto 199 going North East, that back in 1999 or so (last millennium, anyhow), I rode the motorcycle up from Happy Camp through the Siskiyou Forest onto this road. Holy Heck, I hadn’t realized just how far I had had to ride on 199 to get to Crescent City.

Stopped off in Medford at Harbor Freight to replace a broken, 8 week old air compressor. They wouldn’t. This is the last time we’ll buy anything that’s not really simple from Harbor Freight, and something that you need to rely on. Worse than the mark of the devil.

Arrived at our camping ground – Rocky Point resort, right next to the lake. It’s a bit quirky, but at the same time absolutely charming. A Lance 1985 and another Lance 1575 were already here (and it’s a very small campground). Will give them a the Lance Owners card in the morning.

It was coming up to 4 pm, so we thought, and said, yes, we will visit Crater Lake today. And we did. Awesome doesn’t describe it. Cold does, though.

Pictures:

Klamath Lake from Rocky Point Resort

14th September 2015

On Hwy 101 from Florence to Crescent City

We had previously driven the 101 from Tillamook to Florence, and a PITA it was, resorts every couple of miles, couldn’t make any progress and there wasn’t very much to gawp at.

Some Oregonians insisted that it was different from Florence south.

And so it was. Big rocks in the ocean, like a couple of giants had a rock throwing fight, surf crashing, dramatic and dark cliffs. Not as twisty as in Northern CA, but that’s not such a bad thing.

Crescent City – back in CA for the first time since Big Bear. Grey and misty, with the sound of seals barking and a lonely fog horn on the bay.

Up at 3:45 am. Shuttle call at 4:30 am. Arrive San Diego Airport at 5-ish. Disgusting and expensive ‘Yuppie Wrap’ for breakfast. Inconsequential flight. Good book: ‘This changes everything’ by Naomi Klein, about global warming (sitting in a plane; wait, let me think about this….). Fun texts with B when I arrive in Portland, she’s in the cell phone lot and sees the plane land (reminds me: holy heck, the last time I flew was about ten years ago. Now they want to charge you for each breath. Like, yeah, you can watch a limited range of video, but you have to bring your own tablet/phone/laptop, and then pay to watch content. Are they crazy? Why not bring your own content? How hard is that?)

We head out. South. Traffic begins to calm, we’re out of the city. Now where? Florence? OK, via Eugene. Now we need gas, wait, Costco is right there, can we get in, yeah sure. Wait for B to get hot dogs, some guy and gal come up to check out the Lance. Open the door, let them in. Cool.

Onwards to Dixie Cafe for lunch. OK.

Then  OR route 126 all the way down, following the railroad and the creek, so pretty and so green. To Florence. Is that all? Is Florence so small? South on 101 (like an old friend) to the Jessie Honeyman Memorial Memorial State Park.

Bliss.

And, can you say, exhausted.