A day at the river

Today I went kayaking down the Chetco River. It took me about 3 and a half hours to make the trip from the South Fork bridge down to the Loeb campground. I paddled almost constantly in order to keep Becky from waiting too long at each of the checkpoints that we had set up along the route. It was overcast and drizzling as I started out my journey, but as the trip continued the sky cleared up and turned into a really nice day.

By the second hour I wasn't sure if I could make the entire run. It was really windy and my hands were pretty blistered up from holding the paddle, but I was determined to make it. As the afternoon wore on the wind died down a bit and there were a few minutes here and there where I would just drift and listen to the sounds of the forest and river around me. This place is so peaceful.

I did manage to finish the entire trip. There were quite a few spots where I had to get out of the kayak and guide it across shallow or tricky spots in the river. I didn't find any real surprises. There were no spots in the river where you couldn't see far enough ahead to avoid any problems.

We decided to go ahead and spend the night at the campground, so we set up a couple of tents and went about making a campfire. The "fire gnome" kept watch on the fire and made sure that the smoke went his direction instead of toward all of us.

I am pretty surprised at the lack of mosquitoes this close to the water. So far I have only seen a couple of them. That's a big change from our stay in the Minnesota lakes area where as soon as the sun goes down you have to head indoors or be prepared to be eaten alive...

River scouting

Yesterday I bought a Tarpon 100 kayak. I found one used at a local sporting goods store for about $220 off retail. Today I make a 8-10 mile journey down the Chetco river here in Brookings. I plan to start at South Fork and paddle my way down the roughly 4 hour stretch of river and scout for anything that might make the river too dangerous for a bunch of canoes loaded with kids.

I'm a bit nervous. I don't like making runs alone when I don't already know what to expect, but all of my attempts to find someone to make the first run with me didn't pan out. I am torn between my fear of the unknown and my desire to do what I set out to do despite any obstacles. The fact that it's currently drizzling outside doesn't make the decision to go today any easier...

I've done what I can talking to locals and checking on-line for information about the river. I've also driven the entire length and looked at any spots that I could see from the road (which is a small portion). I've been told that it's not a dangerous river from the South Fork to the coast and that it's about a 4 hour trip between the put in and take out points that I am scouting. I worry most about missing the campground and ending up going too far down river. I'm going to see if I can set up a flag of some kind along the shore near the campground to warn me in case Becky isn't around.

More delivery woes

Well, today we received our 3rd washer/dryer... It arrived in relatively good shape unlike the first 2 that showed up here and I refused to accept. This one had only been dropped on the front of the box - pulling the back of the washer in about 1.5 inches. The driver made a note of the damage while I inspected the inside for any damage. It looked like nothing on the inside was out of place and a few minutes pulling on the back panel had it looking good enough, so I decided to accept it... After all, this is the 3rd delivery in the past month and I can't stand not having a washer/dryer for yet another week and a half waiting for another one to ship. You have to understand that part of me wanted to refuse the thing since it should arrive in perfect condition - not mostly OK with some minor denting - but paying $3.00 per load (not including gas and some of the clothes that have been ruined at the laundromat) has driven my standards down a bit...

Becky and I spent the last 45 minutes working the washer/dryer up the stairs, through the RV and into the space that I had built for it. Everything hooked up like a dream. The water lines don't leak, the dryer vent is absolutely perfectly aligned and I ran a temporary power cord to it from the RV park hookup (which tested good). Becky read from the manual and we set out to run a test load - big smiles on our faces...

The washer/dryer doesn't work. We followed the instructions perfectly and it skips all of the cycles except the dry cycle and then goes into some kind of diagnostic mode (lock button flashes - sometimes with the dryer light). We've tried the troubleshooting tips in the back of the manual that recommended that we unplug the unit for 1 minute and then restart the entire cycle from the beginning. When we hit start, all of the lights flash once, then it just goes into dryer mode. If I set the dryer to off (0 minutes) and start the unit again, the door locks, all of the lights flash, the dryer light flashes for a split second, the door unlocks and then the lock button flashes and the unit stops. Same story no matter what cycle we choose. I'm trying letting it finish a 20 minute dry cycle on the lowest heat setting to see what it will do when it gets to the end - hoping that by some miracle it will "reset" itself and go into wash mode...

Unfortunately, I think we have yet another return on our hands. I can't call the manufacturer or technical support until tomorrow, so we get to spend the next 14 hours or so in the same room as our $1000.00 dead washer/dryer.

I'm really discouraged and beginning to wonder if we'll ever manage to get a non-dented, perfectly working unit delivered to us. I hate to get pessimistic, but 3 strikes has put me in one of those moods...

Tomorrow I'll be on the phone with the seller, technical support and probably yet another delivery company scheduling a pickup... Wish us luck - we're in some need of it at this point...

A sad day

One of the few people in the entertainment business that I actually respect died yesterday. George Carlin was somewhat of a hero to me. He said the things that I have always wanted to say. He made fun of the things that so many people take way too seriously.

I am reminded once again how short our lives really are and I am glad that I was alive to share some of the same time with him. I will miss his presence in this world.

Canoeing the Eel

My parents host a couple of annual canoe trip on the Eel river in Northern California and we try to make it whenever we can. This year was no exception and we made it for the first one in mid June. Despite the fact that the river was the lowest I had seen (in the 20+ year span that I know of) everyone seemed to have a good time. The girls started out in an inflatable canoe, which turned out to be more work than expected. We started out too late in the day and ended up fighting the afternoon wind. We ended up tying the girls inflatable to our canoe and pulling them down the river. That made the rapids a bit tricky since the girls were so light that they basically passed us whenever we scraped bottom.

We started down the river on the 14th and camped out on one of the river bars for two nights before finishing out the trip. Becky and I flipped our canoe twice during the trip and managed to get quite a bit of our stuff wet as well as losing our pirate flag... I broke my fishing pole on our 2nd spill which put a bit of a damper on my spirits. I ended up getting a loaner pole that belonged to one of the kids and managed to still catch 2-3 fish (sadly pike minnow - an aggresive species that has all but wiped out the trout/salmon/steelhead population in many NW rivers). Still I find it very relaxing to spend time alongside the river and practice my fishing skills despite the lack of good eating fish.

We were treated to live music and excellent food in the evenings. The girls had a whole group of kids to play with and they spent the entire 2nd day running and playing in the sand. On day 3 we packed up and hit the river again. We deflated the kids canoe and they jumped in one of the regular canoes for the rest of the trip. My sister Maria basically ended up paddling solo for most of the trip with all the girls (and sometimes her dog) in the canoe - I was really impressed - it was a lot of work even with 2 paddlers in our canoe fighting the wind.

Everyone was a bit tired and ready for a hot shower by the time we made it home to Brookings.

I really want to start a tradition of kayaking/canoing the Chetco river in Oregon as well. The setup for the trip is near perfect. There are several campgrounds and river bars along the way that make for a variety of possible trips. The Chetco River Inn is located right near the put in point and you can potentially run the roughly 18 miles of river all the way to Brookings Harbor if we want to make a multi-day trip out of it. The weather up the Chetco is almost always nicer than on the coast, so even when it's foggy at the Harbor it's sunny and warm up the river.

I really enjoy being on the water and could see starting a river guide service here someday. That all depends on what happens over the next few years of course, but I can still daydream...

Delivery woes

Our new washer/dryer arrived today. The delivery company called at 10 AM to make sure that I would be home to sign for it. By 12:30 the truck arrived and I got my first look at our $1000.00 washer... Not good. Right off the bat I noticed that the bottom of the washer was smashed in about 6-8 inches. I took off the piece and looked inside to see if anything important was damaged. It looked mostly cosmetic and being on the bottom I figured that I'd just bang it out and ignore it. We unloaded the unit and I started taking it out of the box. All of the Styrofoam on the left side was broken into small pieces. There was a small dent in the back, but I didn't notice anything major. The driver made a note of the damage on the delivery bill and started around the loop of the RV park to head off. I found a couple of bigger dents on the left side that were dented out instead of in... The driver made a note of the dents and got back in the truck. I figured that someone had dropped the unit on it's side hard enough to dent out the sheet metal, so I decided to take a quick look inside before the driver took off. Sure enough, all of the shipping bolts that hold the internal drum solid during shipping were literally sheared off. Someone had dropped the dryer from quite a height to break all 4 of the 1/4 inch bolts. I ran down the driveway and stopped the driver just as he was heading out of the parking lot. I had him take a look at the broken internal parts and then said what I should have said from the beginning. I refused it. The delivery guy loaded it back up, wrote "Refused" on my copy of the deliver slip and then headed out... As he was closing up the back of the truck he commented that it might be several weeks with the unit sitting outside the delivery company as they are quite back logged...

I spent the past hour on the phone with the company that I ordered the unit from. They wanted me to wait until the unit was returned to them with a claim number and then credit me back. Then I could order another one at that time. Optionally I could pay for yet another unit then wait for my credit. I argued that I should not be paying twice for something that already took over a week to be delivered and then arrived in pieces. After 1/2 hour of back and forth "let me check with the operations manager" kind of stuff they agreed to ship another unit right away so I wouldn't be charged twice or have to wait weeks for another one.

So, another week or two of doing laundry at the laundromat instead of in our own cozy home. I have my fingers crossed that it won't get as messy as the bike trailer incident...

Two trailers are better than none

Got the trailer thing figured out. Apparently I have 2 trailers on the way... I can't do much of anything about it until they arrive and then I have to decide if I want to pay to ship one of them back to the company. I think I'll just sell the extra one and cut my losses.

Good news is that I went in to the bank with cash to cover the overdraft. When I explained what had happened and that I wouldn't get it worked out until the trailers were delivered and shipped back etc, the teller talked it over with the bank manager and they erased the $27.00 overdraft fee. Now I just have to figure out what to do with the extra trailer that I didn't want...

Becky and I have been riding our bikes into her work in the mornings and I go back and ride with her back home... Part of the reason I wanted to get a trailer is so I can haul the groceries and Post Office deliveries into town without having to carry them on my back. So far it feels really good to ride again. The only complaint I have so far is that my ass is sore and the back of my neck hurts badly from the riding position... I'm looking into a recumbent bike, but they are (so far) out of my price range.

on-line order troubles

I ordered a bicycle trailer on-line back at the beginning of the month. What a pain in the ass. All of the cheap on-line checkout systems now require your credit card billing address to match the delivery address or they won't ship to you...

I ordered the trailer and used their checkout system. I got a confirmation saying that I had placed an order and it was pending. About an hour later I got an email saying that the card was declined because they could not verify my address. They said I needed to update my credit card address verification to match my shipping address or provide another card... I grabbed another card that I had updated a few days earlier with my new address, verified that I had the necessary funds in the account and ran the transaction through. Same story - declined stating that the address didn't match. I called my bank and verified that the address was correct... No problem there.

I got another email later in the day stating that if I did not provide a new card or correct the verification problem that the order would be cancelled within 3 days... OK, so I called the company directly and said that I was trying to order on line but none of my cards would go through on their on-line check out system. They said no problem - that was a common issue for them and they would run it manually. So they did. I got a verification email saying that my card had been charged for the trailer. About an hour later I got an email saying that the trailer had shipped. Great!

Fast forward to today. I want to make another purchase (a solar oven) so I check my bank balance... I'm $165 negative! Turns out that I was charged twice for the trailer. The second charge was paid by my bank even though I didn't have the funds, so of course they whopped a $27.00 overdraft fee on top of the double charge... It's Sunday, so I can't get through to anyone. What a pain in the ass.

The price of laundry

It's getting more and more expensive for us to do our laundry at the laundromat. Just this past week the cheapest place in town raised their prices $.50 per load. We're currently spending around $80.00 per month just on laundry.

Finding a home for the washer/dryer combo took a bit of compromise, but we found a spot for it where the refrigerator used to live. It was an inch or so too narrow, so I modified the opening so we could slide the new machine into place when it arrives.

For the washing machine I needed to install a drain & supply lines. For the dryer I needed to install a dryer vent.

The drain line was fairly easy. Right under the platform that will support the washer/dryer there the drain lines for the kitchen sink ran through. I just installed a "T" and added a trap.

The supply lines for the washer were a bit more difficult... I figured that I'd just tap into the hot and cold lines under the kitchen sink, but it turns out that the lines for the trailer were a bit more complicated to work with than normal house plumbing. After buying about $60.00 worth of fittings and water lines I managed to get the hot and cold lines run to a couple of washer valves.

There was already electricity to the cabinet for the refrigerator and since our new washer/dryer combo runs off of 110V and under 13 Amp we can run it of the existing circuit.

Last of all I needed to install a vent to the outside for the dryer. That should have been a piece of cake, but mid way through cutting the hole through the aluminum exterior of the trailer, the main breaker tripped. I reset it and moments later our 1000 Watt inverter tripped. I plugged the saw into the RV park electricity thinking maybe my saw was too heavy a load for the inverter or something. Turns out that I had hit not one but 2 110V wires. I didn't cut through them, but I stripped off some of the wire housing - hence the short. A few wraps of electrical tape and everything was back to normal. I didn't have the option to move the vent - The clearance is so tight that it needs to line up with the back of the dryer perfectly. The picture to the right shows the new dryer vent just above the old refrigerator access cover (which is off in the picture)

Expanding the garden

Becky and I put in a second row of pots, tied them into the drip system and planted half a dozen herbs that we picked up at the nursery. We also put some water curtains around the corn and tomatoes to try to extend the heat of the day into the evenings a bit. We've been told that it's hit an miss to grow hot weather plants here. Up on the hill we're a good 10 degrees hotter than in town and we seem to have sun even when it's foggy along the highway. Our fingers are crossed that we'll get something out of them...

Mobile Garden

One of the big problems with living full time in an RV is that it's a bit of a challenge to get a garden of any decent size going. It's not like I can just pull up a section of grass, mulch in some compost and get my seedlings in - which would be the least expensive way to go... Instead it's all about container gardening...

Over the past month or so Becky and I have been growing seedlings in mini-greenhouse containers. Unfortunately, we had a record breaking heat wave that came through and we hit temperatures of 107+ in the sun. Determined not to have the whole family suffering, I spent the day hooking up our portable air conditioner and tried to keep everyone cool. I forgot about the plants in the greenhouses sitting outside... Just about everything died as it cooked in the non-vented greenhouses. There was some corn, a few tomatoes and some chives that kind of made it through, but nothing else was recoverable.

This past week we had been collecting heirloom plants from local nurseries so we can get a first crop in while our next batch of seeds get sprouting. Yesterday we planted the purchased plants in their larger containers along with the few survivors of our accident. We bought organic soil from one of the nurseries and mixed it with some miracle grow and steer manure mixes we had picked up earlier at the local department store. The containers came both from the department store and some recycled ones from a nursery that I bought for $0.50 each.

For watering I decided to go with an inexpensive drip irrigation system. I drilled holes in top edge of the pots so I could lock the lines in place since we plan to move the pots around as the plants get too crowded. The plan is to keep the garden simple and easy to care for as well as easy to move around if necessary. I left some slack in the water lines to make moving them around easier. The whole system is hooked up to a manual timer so I can just dial in the number of minutes I want to water each day. I could replace that with a completely automated timer, but the weather is quite varied here and I don't want to be watering on a foggy or rainy morning.

If it works well, it should make it a lot easier for us to have fresh vegetables and herbs right outside the RV door during the growing season.

Today we're expanding our container garden to a second row of pots so we can plant more vegetables. We'll have a whole batch of seedlings to put into containers in a few more weeks. If I have the timing right, the harvest time for the various vegetables should be spread out enough so we won't be stuck with too many of one variety at once. We'll see...