Trip To Tillamook

Apparently, something I ate Wednesday evening had onions in it, which I am very allergic to, and by the time we got home from the restaurant, I was sick. I had an absolutely miserable night, one of those nights where you wonder if surviving until daylight is really worth it. 🙁 I think I got a total of about two hours sleep, so all I really wanted to do was stay in bed all day yesterday. But our holding tanks were full, and we really needed to go to the RV dump station at the Chamber of Commerce office in Newport. And as long as we had to to get the motorhome ready to drive to the dump station, we might as well go on to Tillamook, our next stop. So that’s what we did.

We finished dumping, and were on the road at 11:15 a.m., for the 65 mile run north to the Elks lodge campground, which is actually six miles south of Tillamook. The section of U.S. Highway 101 between Newport and Lincoln City is really rough, with several places that caved in and were repaired, which left dips that really bounced us around. It’s not an easy stretch of road to travel in an RV, and between the rough spots, heavy traffic, and lots of curves, it’s not a fast road either.

We passed some beautiful beaches, which are so common here along the Oregon coast, that we’ve almost stopped saying “ooh” and “ahh” around every bend in the road. Almost.

Further north, the highway turned inland, and we drove through some pretty farm country.

It took us almost two hours to get to the campground, which is located in a nice grassy meadow, with level gravel full hookup RV sites with 30/50 amp electric, for $20/night.

Once we were parked, we unhooked the Explorer and drove a few miles to Netarts, where our friends Orv and Nancy Hazelton were staying at a Passport America RV park. We spent an hour or two visiting with our friends, and I got my puppy fix tossing a ball for their little blue eyed mutt, Duffy. Duffy is a Sheltie, too little to be a real dog, but several steps up the food chain from a poodle.

We have reservations for two weeks at the Pacific City Thousand Trails, starting next week, and we wanted to drive over and check it out. The campground is a lot more open than the overgrown South Jetty, down in Florence was, but we drove all over the place and couldn’t get a good cell phone signal anywhere, which means that our Verizon air card probably wouldn’t work either. So we may have to go to Plan B. As soon as I decide what Plan B is.

We can handle being in a place for a week or two where our rooftop TV dish won’t lock on, but we must have internet access at our rig so we can take care of our business and I can post my blogs. Lugging a laptop up to a clubhouse to pick up a WiFi signal doesn’t work for us. Somebody wrote to suggest we just forget the blogs for a couple of weeks, but he doesn’t understand that this isn’t a hobby to us, it’s part of how we earn our living. The commissions we earn when somebody clicks on those little Google ads help contribute to our overall bottom  line. We’re working RVers, and this is our business. If we had a retail store, we couldn’t just close up for two weeks and expect our customers to be there waiting when we come back.

Terry and I were talking about the fact that we joined Thousand Trails primarily because of the campgrounds they have on the Oregon coast, and we’re finding that they don’t meet our needs. Fortunately, the Elks lodges have filled the bill. And we still don’t regret having the Thousand Trails membership, because there are a lot of preserves in other parts of the country that we really enjoy visiting. 

It’s been gray and chilly here on the coast, and we are really looking forward to it warming up so we can get our Sea Eagle kayaks wet. We don’t have the skills that make us comfortable taking them out into the ocean, even though the boats are more than capable of handling that kind of water, but there are plenty of rivers and lakes in this part of the country that are just inviting us to dip in our paddles.

Bad Nick’s been kind of quiet lately, but he’s back with a new Bad Nick Blog titled Has The Whole World Gone Nuts? Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – Bad decisions make good stories.

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