Bend, OR

We have left the coast. We had a ton of fun with Craig, Charlie, Booger and Jay Jay. We will miss them until we meet them next year.

 Booger after a day on the beach. She loves to chase the ball in the waves.

 Having fun on the beach.

We've moved to Bend, OR. We are at Crown Villa RV park. It's a high end park with nice, huge sites.

But the only bad thing is we didn't get our reservations in time to get one of these nice super sites.

We are in the cheap sites that have gravel. But it's not a bad thing. The park is nice.

The town of Bend is really nice. I think Bend is one of the nicest towns we've been to on this trip of a lifetime. We went to lunch at Cascade Lake Brewery. The food was good. Then the next day we had a really hard time finding the next place we wanted to go to GoodLife Brewery.

 It's a small brewery with a good tasting room and really good Pretzels with beer cheese dip.

The really cool thing they had was a still where they make some award winning Vodka.

This is how they got started. Their first brew setup.

 There are 29 breweries in Bend. We are not going to be here long enough to go to all of them. We may have to come back here to finish the brewery tour. 

Today I am thawing a turkey breast to smoke on the BGE. It's a 3 day prep, thaw it, brine it, then smoke it on the BGE for 8 hours.

 

Live Happy and Always Go Big.

 



Big Drive

We have moved again, to Charleston, OR. It was a 10 mile drive from our last park. The park here is real nice. We a nice back in site.

We are in the park with Craig, Charlie, Booger and Jay Jay.

The beach here is one of the nicest I have ever seen. The sand is just beautiful. One morning we went for a walk at low tide out on the rocky point. The water is out about 300 yards. So it was a nice walk.



  Check this group out.

 There were these small pools that looked like little aquariums.

Some of these pools had little fish and small crabs in them. These small sea anemones are really cool looking.



All kinds of wild life in the rocks. Here's a small red crab hiding in a crack in the rock.

Here is a star fish.

The weird thing are these rocks that look like bowling balls in the sandstone.

This is out on the point. This thin slice of rock just sticking out.

At high tide, most of it's under water.

A selfie just before I got splashed.

We had Booger over for a sleep over one night. The funny thing is, this is just how Cliff used to lay with Peggy. So Booger just fits in.

I cooked a big prime rib for dinner with baked potatoes and a salad one night on the BGE. Then the next day I smoked some Salmon and made some Jerky. Nice to get the BGE out and cook some good stuff. We didn't have room to get it out the last couple of places. We went to Chuck's seafood and got two kinds of canned tuna. One in water and one in olive oil. Then we did a blind taste test and everyone liked the olive oil one better. So we're going to buy a case before we leave here. It's the BEST canned tuna we've ever had!

 

 

Live Happy and Always Go Big.  



Boston Fun!

We have moved to North Bend, OR at The Mill Casino RV Park. It's a nice park right on Coos Bay. Our site is just big enough for us.

We are in the second row from the bay.

We have a good view of this ship that they are loading with logs.

 This is a giant crane on a barge. It's one of the biggest cranes I have ever seen.

But the only thing we have seen them unload is four big anchors. They're so big you don't have to worry about someone stealing them.

Oh and this flying boat.

A small tug boat going by.

We have hooked up with some friends we met in Yellowstone last year, Craig and Charlie and the best thing is they have TWO Boston's! They came over to our site for happy hour. Next week we are moving to the same park they are in to stay a week. It will be the shortest trip we have ever done going to a different park, 10 miles. We have some big plans for that BGE.

Jay Jay and Booger.

This is Jay Jay. He's a really good dog. Look how cute he is.



When it's time to eat Jay Jay starts to jump around and bark for his dinner at 4 o'clock. It's the funniest thing.

This is one of the coolest bars we have been in. They had 55 taps of different craft Beers.

 They had no food just BEER and big screen TVs with the Beer menu. They also had a nice patio to sit and have a Beer on. Oh and get your Growler filled up. I liked the concept.

 

 

Live Happy and Always Go Big.

 

 

 

 

Small Site

We have moved to Salem, OR at the Premier RV Park. It's a nice park, BUT it is NOT big rig friendly. Our site is short and narrow. The big truck is kind of parked in the road. When we pull out later this week I am going to have to ask the guy across from us to move his truck and the one next to us to move his car so we can get out or back out of our pull-thru site.

We have to step in a rock pile out our back door. We won't be coming back to this park. 

One cool thing here is they have some Yurts you can rent.

We took a short drive to a farmers market in Independence, OR. The town is very nice with some very cool old buildings. We had lunch at The Three Legged Dog. http://www.threeleggeddog.biz/ The food was good.

 We drove out to the Rogue Brewery's Hop yard. Hops as far as you can see. This area is known as the Hops capital of the world.

They had a small pub there. So we had to have a Beer and some Salmon spread to munch on. When we were in Newport the Rogue Brewery was in the RV Park. We loved that.

Peggy had a Beard Beer. See all the Hops growing in the background.

We had some time so I took the big truck in to get an oil change and a check up. It only cost $280 to get that done. They have to put 44 quarts of oil in it. The truck passed the check up with no problems to fix. That's a good thing. We love our truck!

 This truck from the transformer movies was at the dealership.

It's a show truck.

When you open the door the side opens up to a stairway to get in. That was really cool. It's a cab over Freightliner that was made in China and it had the steering wheel on the right side. That would be hard to drive.   

We meet some good pups here in the park. Bentley and Rocko.

 

Live Happy and Always Go Big.  









Kelso, WA

We are in Kelso, WA at Brookhollow RV Park. It's a nice park with good size sites, but we do park our truck across the street.

This is a shot of our site from the berm that runs around the park. Peggy has been walking the berm.

From the base of the berm.

Some unlucky campers. Their starter quit working and had to get towed away.

Peggy was reading someone else's blog and he was doing some maintenance on his water heater. So we went to the local RV dealer and got the tool and new plug so I could flush out our water heater. It was amazing how much white calcium came out of the tank. So that was a good idea! I will have to do that more often.   

We have been in town and had dinner at the Mill Town Tavern. The food was real good. There's also a really nice sporting goods store, Bob's and right next door is the Ashtown Brewery. So we had to try them out. We got a beer and across the street there was a food truck. So I walked over and ordered a Mac & Cheese to split with Peggy and it was killer good. We may have to go back before we leave here.

So happy 4th of July everyone!   

 

Live Happy and Always Go Big.