Our summer was filled with family, friends, planned and unplanned adventures. We had a ball, and are a little sad to be leaving. But, it’s time to head south before the weather turns to perpetual rain in Washington. We left Island Girl all secure in her slip at Chinook Landing, hopefully prepared for a winter much colder than she’s used to. We loaded out all of our clothes and food to Nitro, and spent Friday night, 9/23 in it at my brother’s house where it has been spending the summer. On Saturday, we left Spanaway for a whopping one hour drive to North Bend to visit with Kenny’s parents while they were visiting other family there. It was so nice to see them and to meet Wanda’s (Kenny’s step-mom) grandkids. Sunday we went to Spokane and spent a few nights with our triplets. What a handful of hams. We had fun, made Hah-ween cookies, and I played a lot with them, including the Hokey Pokey. They think Grama is silly. 🤷♀️ Go figure.
We’ve been watching Hurricane IAN as it makes it’s approach to the west coast of Florida. The projections are inconclusive on where it will make landfall. Oh boy! This reminds us of five years ago on September 9 – the day our daughter was married – when Hurricane IRMA was barreling down on Sarasota. Thankfully, our house and boat came through that one without a scratch from that storm. At least this year, we don’t have to worry about Island Girl!! THIS is why we don’t spend the summers in Florida!
This is how close the track is, and if this holds true, well probably fare OK. That seems odd, you think? I’ll explain.
The biggest danger and damage is actually from water storm surge and flooding. We have hurricane insurance, but not flood insurance. I’m not sure how that works when the flooding is caused by the hurricane? Anyway, as this wind graphic shows, the circulation of the storm is counter-clockwise. The wind on the north side of the storm will be pushing water away from shore. The wind on the south side of the storm will be pushing water into shore, and this is where the massive flooding will happen (storm surge). At this point, it looked like the storm would be coming in to the south of us, which is the better scenario for us.
Wow- this is a surprise. Wind is only forecasted to reach 82 mph at 6:00 on Wednesday, September 28? That’s good! This is a Category 4 storm, nearly a Cat 5, with winds expected of 150 mph. EEK! That is how much difference there can be in just 50 miles.
Well, we can’t just sit around and dillydally, watching Jim Cantorie on the Weather Chanel. There’s nothing we can do from here except pray for the safety of our home, neighbors, and all impacted by the storm. The memes are right…. you never want Jim Cantorie showing up in your town!
There’s been all kinds of memes on Facebook. Here’s another one:
We need to get moving. Here’s our proposed itinerary from the myscenicdrives website that I use for planning.
On Wednesday morning, 9/28, we said goodbye to our kids and grandkids and hit the road. Our first destination was near McCall Idaho to hopefully do some braaping with Kawi in the National Forest. Driving south from Spokane, we went through Whitman County which a sign claimed to be the highest wheat producing county in the country! There were miles and miles of rolling wheat fields.
It wasn’t long until we found Idaho.
This is overlooking Lewiston Idaho. There is a huge downhill grade that took us down 2000’ at 7% in five miles. It’s much better than the old grade, which used to snake down the hill with 64 turns!
At the bottom of the hill, we crossed the Clearwater River and headed east then south on Hwy 95… the more remote highway south.
It was a beautiful drive.
We made it to our turnoff to go to Last Chance Campground in the Payette National Forest. This road made me a bit nervous – what had I gotten us into?? We were really glad we didn’t meet anybody coming the other way!!
The campground had just under 30 spots, so we stopped on the road outside so that I could go walk it and see if we could get in, get turned around, and get back out again. There were only two or three sites occupied on this last Wednesday of September. I found us a nice easy access to a double site. With our American the Beautiful Pass, it was only $7.50/day. Sweet! We got Kawi unloaded and Nitro backed in, and just as Kenny unhitched the trailer and drove away, the trailer tire monitor gizmo went bazerk. BEEP BEEP BEEP! I thought maybe it was unhappy because the truck got too far from the trailer. Kenny checked the tire pressure in all of the trailer tires, and sure enough, one of them was losing air. DANG it!
Well, he decided to deal with it tomorrow, so we just settled in for the night. We had decent cellular service here, so we searched for whatever we could find on the Hurricane IAN. We found that it made landfall at Cayo Costa, which is only about 40 miles south of our house, as the crow flies. 😬💨 It looked like Fort Myers took a huge hit with big wind and major storm surge, but Sarasota wasn’t looking bad. Whew! I figured I would check in with a neighbor after things settle down a bit.
On Thursday 9/29, I texted our neighbor, who said he was going to stay home through the storm. He said the neighborhood didn’t look bad – just some branches down – but he hadn’t been outside yet, as it was still pretty windy and gusty. Of course, the power is out, along with literally 99% of Florida Power & Light customers. I’ll check back with him in another day or two. At least the initial status is that nothing major happened at home. YAY!!
We bundled up and took a tootle up the road with Kawi. It didn’t appear that there were any ’trails’ here, but we could ride the forestry roads. It was pretty in the forest!
We found a couple of more remote roads, and were seeing signs of fall.
It was cold. I had all sorts of layers on! We were going uphill, and it got colder as we went.
And then it started to rain. We have a roof on Kawi, but only the short windshield, so rain was coming in on us. We parked under some trees to try to stay a little drier. And then…. it hailed!
We had chunks of ice bouncing everywhere!
Yea- this says a high of 64. That was DOWN in New Meadows, which is a lower elevation than the campground. We were nowhere near that warm!!
When we got back, I looked at our route track. Uh-huh! THAT’s why it got so cold. We went up in elevation over 2100’ to 6600’! Brr!
We found an active logging area, and a couple of blocked roads, so we came back to camp so that Kenny could tend to the flat tire. Why yes, we do carry a floor jack around in Henry. It’s the mechanic…it’s what he does. And an air compressor.
There it is. Dang nail. It’s too close to the sidewall to repair, so we have to buy a new tire. Kenny has been reading all kinds of Toy Hauler forums and about how the stock Chinese tires aren’t the best – especially for somebody like us who puts 10,000 miles on them per year. Most trailers get a few hundred miles a year, right? So he scoped out a tire joint near Boise that had 14 ply Hercules tires in stock, that can get us in tomorrow, so we can get Nitro four new tires. Sweet! He got the spare put on, which is REALLY a cheapo tire. It just needs to get us 120 miles. 🤞
Oh! Guess what else? Yesterday when we go here, Nitro’s waterpump was having difficulty, and only dribbling out a bit of water. Why? Because our water tank was EMPTY. OOPS! I thought we were pretty low, but figured that we’d be OK for a couple of nights because the campground has water. But no. The water faucets here were already bundled up for the winter. We can get by for a while with our bottled water, but my sink was getting full of dirty dishes. Kenny knows I hate that. We could hear a brook babbling nearby in the campground, so he offered to go get me some water. (I have a one gallon jug for just such occasions.) We waited until the rain stopped then took a stroll to the creek. (We should have just put a pot out and caught the rain that was running off of our awning!) The creek was pretty, and we got a couple of jugs of water so that I can boil some to wash dishes, and we’ll have some for flushing the toilet. Tomorrow we’ll be at an RV park where we can water up and poop out. 😉
Friday morning Sept 30 was misty/foggy and cool as we made our way down the mountain.
We stopped in Caldwell, Idaho and fueled up Henry. Kenny has a free app/membership with ”Mudflap” which offers discounts at select truck stops for fuel. It saved us $.20/gallon by going to a participating Maverick station! On top of the savings, the stations are truck-stop size, so getting in/out with a big giant 5th wheel is not a problem.
From there, we continued on to Nampa to get our new tires. (These towns are like suburbs to Boise Idaho.) American Tire and Auto Service got us in after only about a half hour wait. They had us pull Henry in as far as possible into the bay, then they brought out the equipment to get Nitro all fixed up.
Kenny thought this was interesting…. the back tires appear to be doing most of the braking action, since the forward one is still black. 🤷♀️ We got four new beefy tires, and had them put one of our old tires onto the spare rim, to get rid of the really cheapo tire. It was probably less than two hours, and we were back on the road. The guys even went out into the four lane road to block traffic so that we could just back out onto the road and get on our way. There really was no other way to get this beast out of their small busy parking lot!
This was just beautiful… The valley at Twin Falls, Idaho.
It was nearly 6:00pm when we crossed the border into Nevada, at a tiny town named Jackpot. (I missed the Welcome to Nevada sign.
Our destination was Mountain Shadows RV Park in Wells, Nevada, which was another 70 miles south of the border. It was a nice little park, and only $27/night with full utilities. That’s way better than a marina! 😉
We got our slip assignment in a nice pull through, full utilities site, right next to another F250/5th wheel.
We got all set up and plugged in, and shared a yummy 14% chocolate with marshmallows, peanuts, and ice cream stout beer that our son gave us. It was delicious! Here we are, sharing Kawi’s space. It’s not glamorous to be cooking, eating, and relaxing with an off-road vehicle in your living room, but it works! It’s really nice to NOT have to remove it from the trailer in order to use the kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom. And we still have room to sit in our recliners and watch TV. 😊
Since we were plugged in, I got out the Instant Pot and fixed a pork loin with mushrooms, taters, and salad. YUM! Not bad for “camping food”, huh?
This was just a quick stop over on our way south, to take care of some utilities, and it was a good fit for the desired daily mileage. I schedule our stops to keep us under 400 miles per day. Tomorrow we’ll be on our way to Utah to start playing in the sand and dirt