Our RV Adventures

I was up a little early this morning, 9:45 to be exact, so Jan and I could go down to Big Jim’s Coffee Wagon at the front of the park for their great coffee and breakfast sandwiches. I also wanted to double-check why I couldn’t log into one of the passworded Wi-Fi signals here. Turns out that they had given me the wrong password for the wrong site, but with the right one I was able to log in with no problem.

More and more it looks like my Kindle problem is with my Cradlepoint router.

While I dropped off some Gypsy Journals at the park lounge, our daughter Brandi called to check in about this weekend.

Then getting back to the rig, Nick Russell called to talk about our route tomorrow up to Long Beach, WA, and to see if I was having any luck with the Kindle.

After that, I went outside to work on some things around the rig, and lo and behold, our friends Bob Parker & Donna Huffer drove up to our site. We hadn’t seen them since Arizona, so it was good to catch up.

Around 3 pm I did an online chat with Cradlepoint Tech Support, and they solved my Kindle login problem in about 30 seconds.

I was told to turn off User Login off. Since I had never turned it on, I assume it was a factory default. It certainly didn’t keep my Blackberry or laptop from logging to it. But at least it’s fixed now.

Later, around 4 pm, Jan and I headed into Bend for our final meal here, and once again, we picked Baldy’s BBQ. Believe me, some great BBQ comes out of this unassuming restaurant.

While Jan had her usual rib dinner, I decided to go in a different direction, so I order the 16 oz. Ribeye.

WOW!

These people know how to cook a steak. It was done perfectly. It was charred and burnt around the edges, but medium rare inside.

It just doesn’t get any better than this.

After a great meal, we left Baldy’s and drove over the Wal-Mart to pick some things before we hit the road tomorrow.

We’ve got a 290 mile run to Long Beach, WA to the Thousand Trails park there. We’ll be meeting up with Nick and Terry for about two weeks or so.

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Thought for the Day:

"May we always be happy and our enemies know it."

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First off, Brandi sent us some new Landon photos of their Father’s Day outing to the Kemah Boardwalk in Kemah, TX.

Landon got his first pair of real shoes the other day, and it looks like he’s trying out his dance moves.

Here’s a photo of Landon and his daddy, Lowell.

Sabey, Lowell’s younger sister, is visiting, and getting in some Landon time.

I’m not sure what’s happening here, but it certainly has Landon enthralled.

Before we left, our son Chris called this morning to wish me a happy Father’s Day. We look forward to seeing Chris, Linda, and Piper when we get back to Houston in November.

Today was our last day to do ‘touristy’ stuff here in the Bend area, so we headed out about 11, first into Bend for a bagel breakfast sandwich at Big-O-Bagels. Then we headed north about 20 miles to Redmond, OR.

We wanted to look around the area, and check out the Expo Center where the big Good Sam’s Rally will be held next month.

The Expo RV Park has 106 full hookup sites and is very nicely laid out. While we were there, I had a nice chat with the lady at the office who’s a workcamper. She was happy to let me drop off a stack of Gypsy Journals to hand out to RV’ers.

Leaving the Redmond area, we drove back through Bend to The High Desert Museum, about 5 miles south of town.

They’ve got a number of inside and outside animal exhibits, including this Chuckwalla desert lizard,

a Gila Monster,

Bald Eagles,

a Grey Fox (OK, why are grey foxes red? What color are red foxes?),

a Prairie Falcon,

and a River Otter.

It turns out that this Bobcat

and this Lynx

are sitting like this, patiently staring at their access doors, waiting to be fed. They know when it’s feeding time.

Beautiful animals.

In another building, they had this highly-detailed 1920’s era sawmill, It took the builder 25 years to build it, and it even works.

Jan really enjoy the display of old quilts. This ‘Star’ quilt dates from 1875,

and this ‘Silk Fan’ quilt is from 1890.

While we were there, our daughter Brandi called to wish me a happy Father’s Day. Now I’m two for two.

We spent a couple of hours wandering through all the many exhibits, and really enjoyed it. The High Desert Museum is small, but very well done.

Leaving the Museum, we drove a couple of miles down the road to the Lava Lands National Forest. We’d been driving past here for the last week or so, and this was our chance to explore further.

We drove up to the entrance gate, and found out something the tourist brochure or the website hadn’t told us.

You have to have an appointment to drive to the top of the butte. There are only 10 parking spaces up there, so they ration access.

We got there about 3:10, and the time given us was 3:45. The gate guard gave us slip of paper with our time on it, and told us we could start up at 3:40. So we parked in the nearby lot and read. Jan always has a book at the ready, and I had my new Kindle with me.

At 3:40 we started our 8% grade climb up the narrow road. They don’t allow buses or RV’s up here, and meeting oncoming vehicles was very interesting.

Getting to the top, we found a nicely laid out parking area, and a Ranger checking our appointment slips. In fact, as we were getting out of our truck, the ranger was sending someone back down the road who had come up too early.

Since our slip said we had to leave at 4:15, we started our climb up to the top of the hill. It was a steep 100 foot trek.

It was interesting to see all the ground squirrels zipping around the lava fields, and although you weren’t supposed to feed them, it was obvious that they were expecting to be fed.

Getting to the top, and still a little breathless, we were able to look back at the parking lot,

and down into the crater itself.

You can get a better idea from this aerial view that shows the roadway spiraling up the butte. The visitor’s center is located about 1 o’clock in this photo, along the rim of the crater.

Looking around we could see other examples of other volcanoes in the area.

Coming back down the butte with 5 minutes to spare, we were able to look out over the lava fields that still surround the area from the eruption over 7000 years ago.

Reaching the bottom a little after 4 pm, we decided to head back into Bend to have dinner once more at Red Robin. This is one of the best places around to get a burger, and even better, the delicious steak fries that come with your burger are unlimited. Of course the burgers are so big, you really don’t have any room for more fries, or dessert, for that matter.

While I was there, I tried logging in to their free Wi-Fi signal with my Kindle, and it worked with no problems. More and more it looks like the problem may be with my Cradlepoint router. Of course, my Blackberry and HP laptop can log in to it just fine.

Nick Russell can log in to his Cradlepoint just fine, too, although he has a CTR-1000 and I have a 500. The tell may be when we getting together with Nick and Terry later this week, and I try to log in to his router, and he tries to log in to mine.

We’ll see what happens.

We finally got home about 6 pm, a great last tourist day here in central Oregon.

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Thought for the Day:

Never try to outsmart your common sense.

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