{"id":26,"date":"2010-06-15T04:51:34","date_gmt":"2010-06-15T04:51:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jfmac.local\/~jf\/wordpress\/?p=26"},"modified":"2010-06-15T04:51:34","modified_gmt":"2010-06-15T04:51:34","slug":"sisters-or","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpwhu\/?p=26","title":{"rendered":"Heading to Lake Oswego … Again …"},"content":{"rendered":"

Monday (Jun 14)<\/a><\/h3>\n

The six months I’ve owned the van have been winter and this unusual cold, wet spring, so it has mostly been parked by the river outside my condo, and I have mostly been not<\/strong> using it.\u00a0 But today, I have embarked on a road trip to Oregon, to the shop that built it, and I will finally be using it for what I bought it for, hanging out in a sweet little deserted campground.\u00a0 Really, I’m just doing what I used to do with my truck, but at a much, much higher level of the game!<\/p>\n

This is my first night out of Reno, and I decided to stop at one of the modest campgrounds which I have zoomed past so many times before on the Reno-to-Klamath run.\u00a0 Modoc NF, Howard’s Gulch CG<\/strong>, about 8 miles east of Canby on SR399 — $6 per night!\u00a0\u00a0 It turns out that this campground got a major facelift over the winter — they can’t do this for every campground every winter can they?<\/p>\n

<\/a>
Howard's Gulch CG<\/div><\/div>\n

A huge old pine tree had fallen, plus the rangers had thinned small trees all around, so there was a four foot stack of firewood at every site!\u00a0 Extremely green, sappy, smokey, hard-to-burn Ponderosa Pine firewood, but it sure looks good and imparts a feeling of plenitude, and helps me inaugurate that road trip feeling by getting my hoodie to smell like campfire smoke, first night out!.<\/p>\n

The sweet little 1.5 mile loop trail had been cleared and re-marked over the winter.\u00a0 Everything was in perfect condition and not a single other human in the whole campground!\u00a0 I was able to open all the doors, crank my music, just me and the mosquitoes, partying down. If it wasn’t for the semis letting out their airbrakes right over the hill on 299 I coulda pretended to be away from it all.<\/p>\n

Tuesday<\/a><\/h3>\n

This really is a new style of living for me.\u00a0 Heck, let’s call it a lifestyle! So far I like it very much.<\/p>\n

The plan was to look for a spot in the National Forest on the other side of Sisters OR, but as I entered Sisters I saw this sweet little city-run campground in the pines right on the river, right on the outskirts of town.\u00a0 $13, for a no-hookups site, senior discount.\u00a0 Why, that even works for me!<\/p>\n

<\/a>
pretty cold for August<\/div><\/div>\n

In the mythology I had built up about the van, I would mostly be outside the campground system, just setting up “anywhere”.\u00a0 But as it turns out, I’m pretty happy paying $15-ish for that sense of belonging, of not worrying about being told to move.\u00a0 Oh, and having a proper pooper is pretty nice …\u00a0 that particular piece of equipment being the most notable thing I chose not to have.\u00a0 And this one has a nice shower!<\/p>\n

So, park it, cruise the town, watch the sunset, look for a plausible bar and not find one (all bars in town seemed to be in the back of Mexican restaurants), return to the campground, get the combo to the shower door lock from the host, and all is good in Sisters.<\/p>\n

Wednesday<\/a><\/h3>\n

There really is not much to Sisters other than faux-Western store fronts and high-end shopping opportunities – kinda like downtown Truckee, except even more useless.\u00a0 The designer footwear store has a little counter for coffee drinks and muffins in the front of the store … so that’s breakfast.<\/p>\n

I am supposed to get my ass to Speciality Vans by this early afternoon, so I am starting the day with a very un-vacation-like feeling of needing to be somewhere at a particular time.\u00a0 The weather helps by being crappy, so I can speed through the presumably beautiful mountain scenery without feeling like I’m missing anything.<\/p>\n

I actually do pretty well on the timing – I’d forgotten that the shop is right at an I-5 interchange, so I was there before I knew it … so to speak.\u00a0 The shop brain trust listens to my story of not quite draining my water system before the hard freeze, the water seepage and such, and decide the best way to go would be to start tomorrow morning.\u00a0 They suggest sleeping right there in the parking lot.\u00a0 Works for me.<\/p>\n

So I kill the rest of the afternoon trying to go places, but mostly being defeated by the truly horrible evening rush traffic in these well-to-do suburbs of Portland.\u00a0\u00a0 I spend a couple of pleasant hours out of the hurly-burly in the Tualatin Library, then the rest of the evening in the Borders at the upscale shopping center reading WordPress and JQuery books, basically just killin’ time.<\/p>\n

I tuck myself in at the parking lot about 11pm – yes I can get the shop’s wifi!\u00a0 But sadly for me I drink too much crappy white wine so that I feel quite haggard all through my busy day tomorrow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The six months I’ve owned the van have been winter and this unusual cold, wet spring, so it has mostly been parked by the river outside my condo, and I have mostly been not using it.\u00a0 But today, I have … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[36,42],"class_list":["post-26","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-23","tag-camping","tag-oregon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpwhu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpwhu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpwhu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpwhu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpwhu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpwhu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpwhu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpwhu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpwhu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}