Eager Beavers vs Mother Nature (and other disasters)

When we need to hit the road I can feel it. And by feel it I mean that both Chris and I start to get antsy and vocalize how nice it would be to be travelling. In the warmer months we travel more frequently, so this longing doesn't typically happen until January. Luckily there are events that Chris goes to for work in January, and then in early Spring there are other events. Only... this year shit got shut down. A lot of stuff got shut down. SCALE in Southern California, an event at the Microsoft Campus that Chris was excited about, and LinuxFest Northwest was just recently called off.

The beauty of our lifestyle is that several times a year there are legitimate reasons to travel, and hour home is mobile. It gives us regular excuses to hit the road. When we go too long with out stretching our axles we get forelorn and restless. Add to this extra layers of stress, extra hours of work and the dreariness of a PNW winter... well. We were thirsty for some road time.

The last time I got to see Jessie, last Fall…

As luck would have it, just as that look crept into Chris's eyes, he was invited to Denver by a software developement team putting on a sprint. I also have been wanting to go to visit my friend Jessie, who moved to Boulder last year and had set up her physical therapy practice and had some cool stuff in the works I wanted to see. Long story short, we were sold.

Arrangements were made work wise for me, and kid wise all around thanks to the flexibility of their mom and our dear friends Bruce & Carole, we packed up the RV and hit the road - only we didn't even make it out of the junkyard before our plans changed.

Denver was cancelled due to COVID-19. It was a precautionary thing that we could have predicted, but really didn't want to. We were both thoroughly bummed.

In true wife fashion I coaxed him into going on a roadtrip anyway - we had all the arrangements made, just no destination and no reason exactly. Aside from the fact that we really really needed this trip.

People don't RV because it is simple. While it does remove the need to PACK before you travel, it adds a lot of other variables. By the end of this roller coaster ride of a trip we had handily dealt with more variables than we might across an entire season of travelling, and we did it all in under 72 hours.

Despite the cancellation of our original destination, we still hit the road, and without any delays. We didn't know where we were going, but we kept THINKING we knew where we were going. Which really means that we just kept talking about whether we were making the wrong choice for hours on end. It is a delightful way to spend time off.

I'm a pushy lady sometimes, especially if I think that in the pushing one way it will yield a bit of R&R for people I love. I'm not usually a fan of Machievellian thinking (the ends justify the means), but in as long as the means don't require death or dismemberment or shame, in small doses I will push us out of our comfort zone into a place of better moods. And so it came to be that I sold Chris on going to Reno, Nevada to find BLM land and balmy 60 degree weather. He, worn out and half despondent, agreed.

This was our solid plan for the first 3 hours of the trip, at least on the surface. We were both still questioning the idea, but it didn't matter we knew we'd have many moments where we could choose to go another direction. For now we knew we would go down I5, hit Seattle and take a sharp left onto I90 Eastbound. This would be true no matter where we were going, as we had agreed not to do a trip down the I5 Corridor or along the Oregon Coast, as we had just done that 2 months prior, and gotten the flu no less down there. Better to leave the Oregon Coast for Spring or Summer.

By the time we reached our stopping point for the day, we had received word that the elementary school the kids attended, in fact the entire school district was closing for 5-6 weeks. We suspected that was coming down the pipeline, but not that it would be closed for so long. We spent a nice bit of time at our rest stop making dinner and both privately and outwardly questioning whether we should go back home right then.

Worry not my friends, I held to my resolve that this trip was a necessary break for us, that Ang, the kids mom would be fine with our abbreviated road trip, we'd be home long before we originally planned. Chris, still tired from driving decided he could trust me.

View from Peter Skene Ogden Rest Area in Central Oregon.

The next morning we began heading south, but decided that maybe we wouldn't go all the way to Reno.. perhaps we would play that by ear, and just enjoy the eastern half of Washington and Oregon. It was beautiful out, the terrain was new and interesting (high desert rather than low dense forest, ferns, and the salty Salish Sea).

This time when we stopped for a break at the stunning Peter Skene Ogden rest area in Eastern Oregon. This is where we were when President Trump announced the state of national emergency. Twice now we sat at a rest stop and seriously considered turning around. And twice we decided to keep going. At this point we had passed just 24 hours on the road, by my account the trip was only just about to really start. We were just then in new territory, which is the creative balm that we crave on road trips; fresh territory refreshes us.

Watching President Trump address the nation, in a rest stop.

We continued on, and just like our last decision to continue on we also opted to change our travel plans to accomodate our sense that we ought to be going home. While we weren't going home we would opt to not go into Nevada at all, maybe not even into California. Maybe this was just an opportunity to spend a couple of days in a part of Oregon we had never explored, trying out our new boondocking capacity.

And so we set our sights on a destination for the night that would be closer to our currently location, a location that would be beautiful and off the beaten path. I found a spot just past Bend off NF-9720, our first true off grid boondocking spot in Lava Cast Forest. It was stunning.

It was situated right across from a quarry, that was quiet (it was Friday evening). Levi ran around off leash, we went for a walk into the woods, loving how easy it is to pick your way through the forest in higher elevations where brambles and ferns don't block your every move. We even saw a patch of snow and marveled at how cute it was that at this elevation the snow hadn't yet completely melted.

Levi enjoying the patch of snow while looking stoic AF.

Our ignorance was about as cute as the snow.

As I set into making dinner, enjoying the scenery out the windshield, Chris pulled up the weather and started making funny faces as he moved the map around on his phone. Turns out, while we avoided going to Colorado and the super high elevations along that route, we were sitting squarely along the path of a major winter storm.

Of course we were. At 5200 feet above sea level, it doesn't matter that the start of Spring is just a week away. That snow that hadn't melted yet, may have just fallen last week. We were still most definitely in Oregon's Winter.

And so began another decision about what to do. Do we go? Do we stay? If we go, where do we go? How long could we with stand a snow storm? How much snow are they predicting? How long until our water freezes?

The real crux of it was two fold; we were nearly out of propane and nearly at generator cut off level for our fuel tank. This is precisely why we make such a point to fill up when we get to half a tank of gas. But we hadn't. We had been swimming in concerns about the effect of COVID-19 on our home state and family, oscillating between thinking the best plan was to go home and the best plan was to absorb what respite we could, while we could. No where in there were we using our typically strategic route planning skills.

When I had originally suggested Reno, Nevada, we had heard about a storm coming through, we knew temperatures were going to drop, that is why 60 degrees sounded so lovely. We saw a pocket of warmth with in a 3 day drive from us. We had already made the choice to stay out of the storm, but we hadn't run the calculation again when we opted to not go into Nevada.

We ate dinner. We cleaned up dinner. We chatted... we watched the sun starting to set, and we contemplated our options. In the end we chose to take the risk that more snow might fall than had been anticipated.

We watched an episode of Picard, snuggled the dog, and finally buried ourselves in bed.

The next morning, it had indeed snowed. It was breathtaking and anxiety inducing all in the same moment. We swaddled ourselves up, packed up, and discussed which way to head to get out of this mess. The real answer was that we needed to get to sea level, and to the I5 corridor where there was no storm to be seen. But how to get there?

The more direct routes took us back north along I97, and then West through mountain passes, and none of the mountain passes looked friendly. Going north and back home the way we came looked even sillier, as it required multiple passes. We chose instead to go south down I97, and while we had already said we would not continue into California, we changed our minds again. There seemed to be a slight chance that if we really made a go at it, we might be able to get south of the storm.

We inched out of the national forest road, got behind a sanding truck and long line of cars and went at a snails pace, fairly safely for 15 miles before our savior turned right and we had to continue straight on. The roads got substantially uglier, and we were gaining elevation, slightly, but still enough to mean the roads were covered with packed snow and shiny with frozen moisture. For a solid 20 minutes Chris white knuckled us down I97, and just before we broke free and the roads clear up we spent precious minutes basically sliding down the road praying no one in front of us would brake suddenly.

Checking on the storm we think we’ve just escaped.

In Chiloquin we stopped at the Kla-Mo-Ya Casino Travel Center where the skies were cheery and the roads clean and tidy. We ate a celebratory early lunch, let Levi out to pee, and got our propane filled up. As I went in to pay for the propane Chris got a push notification on his phone about a winter storm advisory due to hit our location. By the time I walked out of the store it was snowing these soft, perfectly round hail like snow balls in a snowy down pour. We high tailed it out of there and kept the storm at our backs for an hour.

The road started heading south west, rather than straight south, and we got a gorgeous view as we drove through the eastern aspect of the Siskyou Mountains, California showing off all her glory. I was hoping that maybe we had gotten out of the worst of it, and that maybe this trip, now just 48 hours old, could still be salvaged. I suggested that maybe we stay an RV park in Weed, California, right where I97 intersects with I5. I knew that once we headed north on I5 it was very hard not to follow that straight line all the way home to the junkyard.

I softly made my case, knowing that at this point I had pushed us through all of this trip, with very little R&R to show for it. It had been in some ways exactly what we needed. Theres nothing like feeling like you have to hyper focus on basic survival to set your priorities straight, but it wasn't what I had hoped the trip would be. I made my suggestion, but also started reminding myself not to lose out on the beauty of our current drive because other parts of the trip hadn't panned out the way I expected. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water if you know what I mean. I shook off my gloom and found that I really really enjoyed the rest of the drive through California.

We did pull over at one point to let Levi out, and as we were stretching our legs and eating a snack Chris got yet another winter storm warning. The storm was following us West. Half the sky was tumultous now, the other still bright and welcoming. We were still high in elevation so we jumped back on the road and just kept trucking. As we came into Weed, rounding our last opportunity to choose to spend some time on this trip stationary, Chris got one more new storm warning, which specified the pass we were about to go through on the I5 corridor between California and Oregon. We were being pushed north.

And so it went. We were lucky it was day time when we went through that pass into Oregon. We were lucky we were ahead of it, not in the middle of it. We made it safely into Southern Oregon and pulled into a swanky and deserted rest stop before the sun set.

This is what Chris looks like when he is super tired and silly, and totally done making decisions for the day.

The storm didn't bother us again. We did still have a couple of baby passes to go through the next day, and the wind yanked us around a bit, but mostly it was smooth sailing, with eerily little traffic in Tacoma and Seattle, as people had been clearly instructed to just stay home and isolate themselves as best as possible.

It was odd and fascinating for us, driving our home through our home state, on our way back to our homebase.

What was originally meant to be a 12 day trip to Denver and back became an intense 72 hour trip, fraught with new sights and mother nature's mood swings. It was lovely, it was chaotic, it showed off our resilience and our capacity to keep our cool. It was oddly romantic in its intensity, but I am glad to be situated and home again.

I suppose that if we get stuck here in Washington State for a bit we will at least have gotten some of our adrenaline out of our system. Maybe we'll be happy to visit BLM land in our own little corner of the PNW.

Finally home.