A Quick Trip to the Valley
Odometer- 39,923
TripMeter 322 mi
Monday June 16th, 2014
Joan and I had planned a trip to see our friends Jim and Sara McNeil at their home near Grants Pass, Oregon since last January. Faithful blog readers will recall that Jim and Sara visited us in Ajo, AZ last winter and that we took a trip into Mexico together. Jim and Sara have offered up their home and acreage for their son's wedding on the 28th of this month, and Joan and I wanted to help with the preparations. We made reservations at the Joe Creek Waterfall RV Park in Hugo, OR and loaded up the motorhome for a weeks stay over in the Rogue Valley. This excellent RV park is just a couple miles from Jim and Sara's place and made an perfect home base for us while we were helping out.
Job one, was to help errect the play station purchased at Costco, as a diversion for all the youngsters that would accompany the many out-of-town guests staying over for the wedding.
You can see there were several very large boxes of modular assemblies that needed to be sorted out and categorized so we could find what we needed without too much fuss.
Joan set about sorting and checking each piece while Jim and I leveled off the building pad and built a gravel base for the walls to sit on.
It only took us about 12 hours over a two day period to get it mostly finished. I took a hiatus on Thursday to go to the funeral for Allison Henson Northcutt, the wife of Clark Northcutt, a former co-worker and friend. Allison unexpectedly died at the tender age of 36- so sad.
We also tightened or replaced all the fasteners in the exterior decks and hand sanded them to a nice finish. Jim purchased a whole buch of 50 grit sanding belts and in a day and a half we had all three decks looking superb.
We did so well at our chores that Joan and I got time off to play. The Medford Cruise was on Saturday the 14th, and we had an invitation from our good fiends Doug and Kathy Mckee to ride in the back of their '68 classic Mustang.
We drove to Medford (about 40 miles south on I-5) in time to see the last hour of the car show in Hawthorne park, and make plans to catch up with Doug and Kathy for the Cruise in downtown Medford. (a closed course of streets that winds through the old downtown area)
Quite a few townsfolk turn out to line the streets and watch the parade of old classics roll through downtown on a circular route. The Cruise is limited to cars 1979 and older, and there were a lot of participants.
On Sunday we had a vist from Mark and Caroylin Salter. They drove up to the Joe Creek RV park with some pizzas and we had a great time catching up on the news and eating pizza and drinking beer.
The skies were partly to mostly sunny, but there was a cool breeze blowing, so we mostly stayed indoors and enjoyed the shelter from the wind.
Monday we packed up and headed back to Port Orford. We want to take highway 199 south and west into northern California and then head back up the coast, just for a change of pace. The weather today is sunny and cool again, and there is a fairly strong wind blowing out of the north. The trip was pleasant and un-eventful. We got our usual late start and stopped in the Illinois Valley at the Rough and Ready Sawmill parking lot for lunch at noon. With a fuel stop in Brookings, OR, we got into Port Orford at 4 PM.
We set to the task of uncoupling the car, parking the MH, and started unloading food and clothing, when we noticed something very strange in the garden box- red, ripe tomatoes. Hmm.. there were a few grape sized green toms when we left, but nothing short of a miracle would have produced these beautiful plump red tomatoes.
This "miracle" turned out to be our next door neighbors, playing a very funny joke on us with some store-bought tomatoes. We will have to make our garden's critter cage people proof too from now on! Well, the jokes on them, because we had the tomatoes for dinner, and they were delicious! Thanks Horst and Alice!Your Traveling Friends
Jeff and Joan
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