Our Way Too Quick Trip to Cape Blanco

It’s always a balancing act when you have a destination and arrival date, and a lot of friends along the way to visit.  Our arrival date for orientation for our Lighthouse Duties at Cape Blanco was quickly approaching, and we only had 3 nights left. And we had 3 sets of friends we wanted to see between Portland and the coast.

In an ideal world, we’d be able to spread out each stop to be weeks on end, but sometimes that’s just not a possibility. Even spending a week in Portland, we ended up not seeing even half the folks who had asked for meet ups.

So, we divided up our remaining evenings – one for each friend.

Lebanon, OR

Our first stop would be our friend Martha’s ranch in Lebanon, OR – the place where Kiki was born and placed us into servitude nearly 5 years ago. We did manage a stop in to see Martha and her family during our bus hunt 2 years ago, but it had been way too long.

Interestingly enough, Martha’s ranch is one of only a handful of places we’ve stopped at with all of our various modalities of travel over the past 7 years – the T@b, the Oliver, the Amtrak rail pass and now the bus.  Sure hope she has space to part our future boat and space ship!

Aside from a cat family reunion of Kiki and her siblings and chickens, we arrived just at the peak of harvest for the new gardens Martha had planted. She was literally overflowing with vegetable and blackberries, and she excitedly took us on a tour with buckets in hand – begging us to pick and take produce with us.

We became overwhelmed with the options, and had to pace our selves to not overflow our available storage space and capacity for enjoyment before spoilage. And then she added on fresh eggs (umm.. from the same chickens that hatched Kiki? Is that weird, or something?) and homemade preserves.

We picked veggies for dinner that night as well, and I whipped up a sautÁ©ed melange’ to share with our generous hosts. Which is kinda odd to be treating our hosts to dinner made out of their own harvest. But that’s ok… I’ll just go with it.

We also helped with some ranch work, namely feeding the pigs and surveying the fence line (ie. great excuse for a walk in a beautiful area).

We wish we could have stayed longer, our visits are always way too short.

Eugene, OR

We’ve been in touch with the folks at AM Solar since they were the supplier for our panels on the Oliver back in 2008. But we really bonded when we both were trying out Lithium Ion batteries for RVs, and navigating the various suppliers.

We had become online buds with Greg and Deb, and when we announced we were heading to Oregon they wrote offering their shop near Eugene to be a basecamp.

If you’re not familiar with AM Solar, they are a major, if not THE, resource for solar technology for RVers.

Our jaws where literally on the floor when we arrived to AM Solar – their shop is the pinnacle of modern industry, built out to accommodate RVers and in a stunning location along a slough.  The attention to detail, from their customer waiting area, electrical hook-ups, to private shower facilities – can only come from fellow RVers. We were blown away. Everything is top notch here.

Now some of you know, this summer we were intending to be deep in doing our own solar install on the bus – and yes, the engine rebuild has delayed that in both time and budget. It might seem logical that we were coming to AM Solar to pick up that project.

But we weren’t. You see, AM Solar specializes in providing tried and true solar technologies for RVers. And we totally recommend them for the vast majority of solar craving RVing folks – without a doubt.

But Greg and Chris? They like playing on the cutting edge – the stuff AM Solar doesn’t yet sell or install. And we are exploring some options that will better accommodate our vintage curved roof with minimal of visual distraction.  We’ll of course report on this as things progress.

And that’s where the geeking out began.

And man, did the four of us click – we arrived late morning and by 6pm it felt like no time had passed at all. And then they mentioned they had *4* bikes and offered to spend Saturday taking us on a tour of the Eugene area bike trails and the Saturday market.  Heck yeah!!

We did have to cut our evening short, as we had a pre-existing dinner date with our dear friend and featured Rambling, Brice – who had recently relocated to Eugene. We thoroughly enjoyed the catch up with him and how his life evolved from RVer, house sitter to dweller in Oregon.. and his intentions for future RVing adventures.

On Saturday, we spent the day with Greg & Deb exploring Eugene’s amazing trail system. We seriously need to get bikes of our own again (by the way, we’ve gone through 3 sets in our years on the road – one set was stolen, another corroded and another we gifted on when we downsized from the Oliver to an Amtrak rail pass).

We so enjoyed the 14 mile bike ride, and roaming around the Saturday market. After our ride, Deb joined us for a Trader Joe’s run so that we could provision for our month out in the boonies of Cape Blanco.

That evening, we invited Greg & Deb back to our place (ok, technically, their place) for dinner.. as well as the fellow RVers camped at the industrial shop next door to us. We had a wonderful evening sharing food, laughter and wine.  And as it was Burn Night – I treated everyone to a fire dance performance while we live streamed Burning Man.

A truly fabulous evening with friends!

Next up…

Sunday morning we packed up and hit the road in the wee early morning (that would be by 9am for us non-morning people) and headed out to Cape Blanco.

Our buddies over at Wheeling It messaged us when they got in and reported we’d have the host spot right next to them.  We arrived by 1pm, in plenty of time for our 3pm orientation.

We’ve spent the past couple of days nesting, getting caught up on a back log of e-mails & blog posts and getting to know our new neighborhood.

We look forward to sharing with you our experience here – so far, it’s just beyond belief. I’m not sure words and pictures will ever fully explain the magical location this is. And wow. It’s our home for the remainder of the month.

Now that the travelogue is caught up…  let the lighthouse stories begin!