Neighborhood pics

 <----- Oh, look at that tiny neighborhood library! It's adorable.  

Lots of animal buildings here

Old car rally today at Ray's grocery store

Black Bird (local sports/hardware store)

Pre-work nesting frenzy....

.....except Judd is already at work daily.  And I start on Monday, Aug 21, the most auspicious day of the total eclipse...... Hope I'm on a potty break to go out and see it.

Our U-haul box, packed in Maine, is no where on site.  The tracking website lists it simply as      "SHIPPED."       All I have from the car camping, now in the spacious closet, is summer/camping clothes. I could pull off about 2 days of work with my existing wardrobe. So in addition to getting my Oregon driver's license, shopping estate sales so we have a desk/dining room table, doing laundry at the laundromat, I'm hitting all 6 thrift stores for furniture, kitchenware and interim wardrobe.  And when I get really sad at the selection, I go to TJ MAX or Macy's bargain basement.

I found a Garden Shoppe and the owner let me know it was near the "end of the season" for most flowers and they'd be starting their pansies soon.  I said, "HUH?  In Maine, we start pansies in April."  Here they plant them in the fall when the zinnias and marigolds go by, and they almost winter over. We're in a Mediterranean climate and we haven't figured it out yet. It's been about 50 degrees each morning, chilly! but by noon is 80 to 95+degrees.  Getting in and out of cars is painfully hot, but every building I've been in is over- air-conditioned (i.e. so cold I want my sweater back-- so I carry it everywhere with me.) The only way the grass is green is that it's on an automatic timer to water it 2-3 times/week.  

The 1890 house must have been renovated in the 70s.  It rocks the shag carpet in the living room and bedrooms and is "modernized" with a garbage disposal and trash compacter--all those things I gave up when I left my San Diegan childhood.  The crick out in the back yard is called Daisy Creek which is also the name of a local winery.  The former renter left her dog pen so I've planted some basil, kale and zinnias, safely away from the every-evening deer. We have some tub tomatoes and nasturtium on the deck for fresh additions to our salads.
There's an organic farm on the way home from our work towns so we can get 

Still dining on camp furniture

fresh peaches, melons, veggies, eggs. We don't even know all the seasons in order yet. It appears to be cherry/ peach season.

The other night we walked down to main street to check out the J'ville Tavern  (where the husband day care can be located.)  We accidentally bumped into live music.  The sign also says free billiards on Sunday afternoon.  I heard from a local (so it must be true) that one of our Jacksonville neighbors is Johnny Depp. We'll be looking for him to be cruising the Main St. taverns too. I'll try to be calm and collected.

Joys of renting

Last classical concert at Britt Festival for the season

Bozo lived here and his largest known still  (1 block from our house--COME! we'll show you.)

For our first breakfast in town, we walked 6 minutes to The Good Bean: free refills.  (“Jude” ate someone’s scrambled eggs because the chef said his name wrong.   Five minutes later Chef called Jude again and someone else ate Judd’s over easy eggs.) People in line seemed to be locals, bikers or musicians who work in Jacksonville for the summer at the Britt Festival.

We felt we needed to “shop for essentials” all day yesterday and managed to avoid cleaning out all the cupboards/cabinets/baseboards and rafters. Today we got to it about 3pm and found more dog hair and dust and spiders and cobwebs than we imagined a new rental should have.

We washed new towels and sheets only to find sopping wet towels at the bottom of the broken washer (no spin cycle.) Found a laundromat 9 minutes away so we could finish the 3 loads of dirty clothes /cleaning stuff. Since the washer wasn’t technically part of the rental agreement but “thrown in to use while it’s here,” the landlord will not be replacing/repairing it.  So we need to decide if it’s worth buying a new one, calling a repair man or just paying the $6 of quarters for a triple load at the laundromat once a week…. We’re still deciding.

A sign for an “estate sale” caught our attention at an intersection going home to Jacksonville. The address was just minutes from our new home so we dropped in on the lady. She said that everything had to go so she could move back to Alaska--we were to walk around and make her an offer on things. We did but the formal estate sale is next weekend so we’re to “check in” with her later in the week.  I’m afraid she’ll get a better offer.  We told her we were on a restricted budget.  Although if things don’t sell for her next weekend, maybe she’ll be desperate to part with things and we’ll get a bargain.  For now, we take our camp chairs and camp “coffee table” on the deck for dinner and in the house at night for the next day’s breakfast, anxiously awaiting our U-haul box with some China amenities.  We heard today, it’s “been shipped.”

After dinner, when strangers started parking in our front and side yard, we realized the Britt festival was about to start.  Tonight we walked the two blocks to see what the concert was about.  We passed two landmarks:  one—the first place gold was discovered in Jacksonville and two- the home of the original Bozo the Clown, which also happened to have a giant still in the yard. We talked to 4-5 Britt volunteers who were running crowd control at the concert.  They were very welcoming, let us get as close as one could come to the concert without a ticket.  If this video doesn't work for you, try Instagram:

Presently, a deer with two fawns graze in the back yard and strains of Gershwin’s American in Paris are oozing in the front yard from the finale of the Britt Classics this summer.  There will be other famous bands through September. Judd is madly trying to get us tickets on his phone since we still have no internet for the computers yet. It’s my mission for tomorrow to procure internet service (or to spend another hour at the coffee shop using theirs.)

Travel/Tourist catch phrases:

TRAVEL MOTTOS we encountered along the way:

Discovering your Maine thing

Destination Canada

Pure Michigan

Escape to Wisconsin

Explore Minnesota

South Dakota: great faces, great places

That’s WY!

Explore Epic Idaho

Travel Oregon

We did them all......

Judd finally gets to "do" the Oregon Trail

hazy Grand Tetons

8/10/17 

Thursday After seeing great sights in Yellowstone we drove south to the Grand Tetons. Unfortunately the spectacular mountains were shrouded in a thick haze.  We learned later that there have been many fires this summer, mostly from lightening strikes and it takes a while for the smoke to clear.  We still pulled off at nearly every vantage point to gawk at the immensity of the snow-capped peaks. We drove about 160 miles that afternoon to spend the night in Pocatello, ID. Miles and miles of fields either yellow-white with dry foliage or emerald green because of the intense irrigation of some crop we couldn't identify. Three startling discoveries: No Gideon Bible at the Red Lion hotel; after 9 days of living out of the car, laundry seems irrelevant despite access to a laundromat; and the hotel horrible pillows the size of a VW, unsurpassed discomfiture for sleep, and then the gaul to offer to sell the pillows to us after our stay. Inconceivable!

Judd's view of scenery

Judd examining wagon construction

8/11/17
599 miles
3 Island Crossing Oregon Trail in Idaho-- nice exhibit; movie starts with what the Native Americans were thinking when they saw thousands of strangers and stage carts coming at them. We followed the Snake River for many miles and continually remarked out loud, "Look at this terrain!  Where would a wagon cross?  How would they know to go over a mountain or look for a way around it?"  We highly recommend the book: The Oregon Trail by Rinker Buck

Free coffee and maps in the welcome to Oregon center
Mapquest routes you through Bend, OR to get to southern OR, but we did Bend on our last trip so decided to go diagonally through the desert.  We took hard left at the town of Riley and took the 395 to cross the Oregon Outback
We came by huge Lake Albert  traversing the Albert rim and couldn't figure out why there were  no people/houses/boats when a lake appeared amidst the rocky/sandy/barren landscape. ....It looked like the Rift Valley. We looked up that it was an alkali lake and hazardous to humans.  The only thing around were the brine shrimp and some birds.

During our drive, I received a phone call of my "firm job offer" from HR VA and start date (2 weeks sooner than anticipated--on the auspicious eclipse day) (yes, it takes that long (since April interview) for the VA credentialing and pre-employment /drug screen process.) Judd is very relieved that I have a job.

When I drive, Judd looks up rest stops or hotels. When Judd was driving I booked us at Base Camp RV park for our last travel night (first real camping night.) It was famed for being within sight of the perpetual geyser  (I keep mispronouncing it as geezer.) The
campground keeper seemed highly suspicious that we were traveling with just a tent (no RV) and no pets.... We had the entire lawn  under a giant willow tree to ourselves, only the cows across the fence bellyaching.  It even looked like half the RVs were empty overnight.
P.S. we never saw the geyser erupt.

8/12/17
We had breakfast at the Black Bear Diner in Klamath Falls and pressed on only a couple hours, arriving in Jacksonville at noon.  The bowl of mountains surrounding us which had been so clear and close just last month, were also covered the the haze of smoke.  In a way I was happy to hear it was just smoke and not smog because it looked very similar to the "invisible" San Bernadino mountains we used to not-see from Pasadena.

Our landlord gave us a quick tour of appliances and handed us the keys and we re-surveyed our domicile.  I couldn't sit very long (in our camp chairs, the only furniture we have with us.  I was SUPER sad (read mad) that our check-in with U-Haul continues to say "guaranteed delivery of your box by 9/22."  I've called 3 times in the last 3 weeks to say someone typed that wrong-- it should be 8/22.  So, there is a slight chance my work clothes and shoes will not be here next Monday when I start work. That might require some emergency shopping much to Judd's chagrin.

We went on a shopping frenzy for household/kitchen gear--re-stocking an entire pantry/groceries :  Sears, Goodwilll, Albertson's, Target........

We didn't even have the energy to do Trader Joes's for real essentials... But then there's tomorrow....

our back yard -- needs watering, I mean the grass

resupplying the kitchen

longest shopping receipt evah!

BIson jam

Yellowstone via the eastern gate has wonderous views. It took about an hour drive through the park to LakeView cabins.  We saw many acres of trees decimated --leafless yet with their trunks  still standing --so it was hard to imagine how a fire could do that.  When I finally caught a ranger to ask, it was indeed a bark beetle blight a few years back.  The park policy is to do nothing about it although he admitted a big fire to re-boot the forest would probably be a good thing. We had no idea there would actually be a lake that big,so big, that high in the mountains.  Yellowstone Lake is billed as the largest alpine lake 20miles x 14 miles.

We had dinner at the lodge cafeteria although the mist and rain shrouded most of the lake, both for dinner and for breakfast views.  The sun did get warm enough to burn off some moisture for some scenery by eleven-sies. By then we had hiked around West Thumb, walking along the shore with the geysers and fumaroles, hot springs and mudpots burbling.  We really only thought of Old Faithful when we thought "Yellowstone." Well, and Yogi Bear.  But we were amazed at the number of smaller geyers. The ground was teeming with puddles of either boiling water, bubbling mud that looked like oatmeal, steam vents, pools of acidic hot water with various colors depending on which brave bacteria could live there or which minerals peroclated there. We drove  up to the Visitor Center and saw Old Faithful was predicted to blow at 11:04. Being about 30 minutes early, we were able to snag a front row bench seat.  It was almost like a Disney event--someone has gone into thinking through the traffic needs. Castle Geyser and Grand Geyser blew in the distance--first their steam getting aggressive and then spouts of water shooting out of the hole in the ground. Then the Ooos and Aahhs of the crowd as Old Faithful erupted.  We overheard that it's not the biggest but it is the most predictable.  With all that magma and hotspot activity below, why doesn't someone wonder why it just doesn't erupt volcanic style and blow us all to the Pacific coast?  (Can't get the video to load----go to Judd's Facebook for live action movie.)

On our way out of the park we did get a bison jam.  That's where a crowd of bison start to cross the road you're on and you're stuck in traffic for a while. First you wonder why some cars pulled off the road when there was a scenic turn out. Then YOU pull off the road to snap some pics because you finally see bison across the road in a field.  Then the bison start to leave the field and you run back to your car with the mostly Japanese tourists. Then when you start to proceed driving, one or two bison as big as a VW bug shuffle slowly toward you and you stop your car. It was my turn driving and my eyes locked across the road with a kid in his back seat facing the other direction.  When I silently pointed, he yelled at his dad that one was behind them. When the bison who seemed to be the ring leader slowly pursued the boys car, I gently accelerated away. No more than 10 minutes.  The young man who checked us out at dinner said he's been stuff in a bison jam for 2 hours.  He hates bison.

And this just in from Google:

Big Blue COCK pics finally

Spoonbridge and cherry in Minneapolis sculpture garden

 Miles and Judd and I wandered the sculpture garden and played "guess the name" of the piece before looking at the placard.  Then we would criticize the artist for their poor choice.  We even debated what made something art.  Pretty much consensus on least art-y:  the jungle gym with bent legs that the artist painted stripes on.