October 15 - 30, 2013 (Mehama & Salem, OR)

I'm playing catch up on our blog, so these were some of the highlights of our adventures during this timeframe while staying at my mom's house. 

I've lost track of the actual dates, so these may be in random order.....

One of my highlights during this time was that I spent one Saturday visiting two of my girlfriends I haven't seen for quite some time.  I started the morning out with a visit to Jan and a tour of her new bathroom renovation project.  She always has the most fun projects going on, whether inside her house or in her garden.  We spent the morning catching up, it had been several years since we had touched base - where does the time go?  

After my visit with Jan, I decided to drop in on another girlfriend, Lynn who I also hadn't seen in awhile.   This was a surprise visit as I hadn't called her ahead of time, lucky for me she was home and we had a great visit catching up with each other.  I'm  sure glad I stopped in. 

You know those articles they have in the paper for hikes or activities in the local area?  Well one Sunday the Statesman Journal ran an article on hiking to Shellburg Falls which is in my mom's back yard almost.  I hadn't been to Shellburg Falls since I was a teenager, so that Monday, Rich, Mom and I decided to go for a hike.  Mom and I jumped on the 4 wheeler and Rich and Gracie rode in the trailer - I know, we wouldn't win any safety awards for that stunt - but it worked.  We were able to ride the 4 wheeler to the back of my mom's property and park it and hike the trail to Shellburg Falls. 

It was a beautiful fall day with good company and beautiful scenery.  Here are some pictures from that hike.

Walking the road to Shellburg Falls

Shellburg Falls

Me, Mom & Gracie @ Shellburg Falls

Kelly, Rich & Gracie taking a break

Walking back through the crunchy and fragrant leaves - it was beautiful

We saw quite a few people taking advantage of the beautiful day and a nice hike so I guess those articles in the paper do get people out on these hikes.

We did quite a few more projects around mom's, here Rich was putting in a fence post to fix part of the fence that had fallen down.



Me and mom on the 4 wheeler



We spent a lot of time clearing and burning brush around mom's house.  We also made about 3 cords of wood from some downed trees.  We also got to help celebrate my niece Jennifer's 20th birthday.  We had dinner at the Wooden Nickel on all you can eat chicken night with my brother Jayme and his family and my brother Jeremy and his family and my mom. 

We finally got word that our 5er was ready to pick up on October 29th.  We really enjoyed our time with mom and helping her work around the place and spending time with some of my family members but we are ready to head south before the snow flies.

When we drove down to Guaranty RV in Junction City on the 29th, we stopped at the Cabella's store in Eugene and spent some time shopping.  We got to Guaranty around 11:30 a.m. and the service rep took us out to go over our repairs.  We open the door to go inside and the keyless entry that they were suppose to fix isn't working and once inside one of our cabinet doors above the refrigerator has come apart and is hanging there, wow what is this?!?  The service rep was very embarressed and said he'd get someone on it right away.  We proceeded to go through our list and found that our oven still didn't light correctly, even the service rep couldn't get it to light.  We also found some wood trim around the slide that they had to fix was not put back properly and was loose.  We were very frustrated and disappointed and wondering if we were ever going to get on the road.  Our service rep knew how frustrated we were and got things moving on these repairs right after the tech's got back from lunch.  We were thinking we should have stopped at Guaranty first before going to Cabella's so they would have had more time, but that is hind sight for you.  To make a long story short, they got the wood trim fixed, they repaired the cabinet door above the refrigerator (because there had been no heat in the 5er for the last 1.5 months, the wood had shrunk and pulled apart aparently)  but will be sending us a new one, they adjusted some contacts on the keyless entry and got that working and the service manager knew how to hold his fingers just the right way and was able to get the stove lit.  So we were able to hit the road around 3:00 p.m.  Needless to say, we were not overly impressed with our experience but were glad they were able to get us on the road.

We had made reservations at the Phoenix RV Park in Salem for the next two nights.  We got the 5er set up in the RV park and the refrigerator turned on and cooling and then headed back to mom's.  We were spending one last night at mom's.

We got up the next morning and packed up the rest of our stuff and all our freezer and refrigerator food and headed to Salem to finish up getting the 5er ready to hit the road tomorrow. 

Me and my beautiful mom - Love you mom!

 Wow, we had a lot of stuff to put away but we finally got it done.  Tomorrow we head for Bend for four days.