Monday, July 6, 2009

I hope everyone had a great holiday. I wish I had a picture, (I didn't think of it until after we were on the road), but you would have gotten a great laugh at seeing how we put a 38' motorhome in between two lake cottages and a bunch of trees. It was the highlight of the day for most of the neighbors who watched Karl manuver the beast in it's spot. We spent the holiday weekend up at Donner Lake with some friends, eating and drinking like it was a holiday! On the night of the 4th we went down to the lakefront and watched a fantastic fireworks show! They were so close it was like being in the middle of them. In fact, a few cinders actually fell down very close to us. But that's what made it so special I guess.

Now we have started out on our summer travel up to Ferndale, Washinton for two months. Karl's grandson has joined us for a few weeks and we will be spending the time up there working on Karl's family farm and taking his 96-year-old aunt out on day car trips. She was moved to an assisted living facility last September (which she now loves), but still has the farm. Eventually it will be sold, but right now the time isn't great for selling. Until then, we go up and keep the creek mowed and the house somewhat cleaned up. We are still moving out some of Aunt Myrne's clothes that will be donated to the Goodwill since she doesn't want them and relocating the upstairs furniture to the downstairs. Plus Karl has his school reunion in July and a planned motorcycle trip with the grandson up to Canada for the day.

But no motorhome trip is done without some kind of kinks in the system. Ours started out with our steps not working at all. It seems the motor may have decided to commit suicide. We were planning on stopping at our dealer in McMinnville, Oregon where we bought it to see if they would take "walk-ins" and fix it. As we were leaving Citrus Heights and not more than 10 miles from home on I-80, a van in front of us hit a cat on the freeway, but didn't kill it. So it was flopping around in front of us, but Karl did a good job of driving over it and not hitting it. Unfortuately the cat had other plans and as it was trying to stand up it got caught in our fog light wiring and pulled a fog light completely out of the frame. Of course we didn't know this until after driving for a few minutes we heard a bumping noise coming from the coach. I first thought was that part of the cat was caught under the coach and I was not about to go check it out! Karl comes back in holding the fog light in his hands (but no cat, thank God). So now I really had to call our dealer to see if they could fix our steps AND replace the fog light. (What did we do before cell phones?) So I call the dealer only to find out that they closed up in November of last year! Then after calling the Fleetwood custome service number and getting a dealer close to where we were heading we call them only to find out that they are about two days out in service. So Camping World here we come. We should be in Washington by tomottow night barring any other problems.