A little late here since I've been home five days now but my little dogs and I survived our 6,915 mile trip to pick up our 17B trailer!
The first leg of my whole trip was to get to Portland via Green Valley, AZ where I needed to tend to some business with my late husband's parents. Southern Arizona is on the way to Portland from Kansas City, right?? After six days I arrived in Portland for a week of visiting, food trucks, dog parks and waterfalls with my son and his wife, my aunt and uncle, two cousins, and old friends from KC.
And....I got to meet Donna D. and Dave and Kathie! So great to meet them and see their trailers and get some good tips from them. A preview of things to come!
After a week in Portland, my BFF and driving and cooking partner Darryl arrived by plane and went with me to Chilliwack. Well, first we spent the afternoon in Seattle visiting Pike Place Market and eating lunch at the Space Needle while the pups spent the afternoon with Andrew, an awesome downtown dogsitter from Rover.com.
We picked up first thing on Monday morning and got our orientation. So great to meet all the ETI people! We also took a peek at the other models in the lot. After crossing the border, I drove the first leg through Seattle rush hour traffic all the way to Portland which really wasn't all that bad.
The 17B and diesel Jeep Grand Cherokee are perfect partners.
We stopped in Portland to show my son and cousin the trailer, then loaded up the boxes of things that I had shipped to his house, and took off for the coast. We arrived in Lincoln City around 10 p.m. and decided to stay in a motel since we didn't have anything put away yet. The next day was a nice trip down Highway 101 enjoying the ocean views.
This worked out fine since that put our first cooked meal and first night in the trailer at the gorgeous Jedediah Smith Redwood State Park near Crescent City! They were working on the campground on many of the sites but we found an easy one to back into and built a fire and set up camp. Very beautiful there for the inaugural night. Very cool night too, around 39 degrees, but we actually never used the furnace the entire trip! I bought a cute little Pelonis heater too and only plugged it in the last morning to see how well it worked which was very well.
I had bought an RV Superbag and made flannel sheets for it from some organic cotton sheets I bought at 75% off from my favorite online organic sheet company and we were super comfortable all night.
We decided not to do as much coastline as we originally had planned since we did have a deadline to get Darryl back to work eventually so we stayed on Highway 101 and I will leave Highway 1 for a future trip.
Our next two nights were in Napa at the Napa Valley Expo RV Park which was within walking distance of downtown. We visited a couple of wineries including Mario Andretti's and the dogs were able to go with us. (So nice how dog-friendly the west coast is! My dogs visited many dog parks during the whole trip and were able to eat breakfast inside with me at The Tin Shed in Portland plus shop in jewelry stores in Santa Fe.)
We had dinner the second night at the easier-to-get-reservations Thomas Keller restaurant Ad Hoc and ran into some friends of my son's and daughter-in-law's from back home in Kansas City. Small world!
From Napa we drove to Twentynine Palms and spent the night at the RV park there so we could visit Joshua Tree National Park the next morning. We stopped in the park and Darryl cooked omelettes and I made French toast and we had a nice brunch in the trailer. We left Joshua Tree in the afternoon, drove through the Phoenix area, and spent the next night in Payson, AZ.
After ordering dinner at a restaurant in Payson, I went out to walk the dogs and a couple drove up who had seen us drive in from across the street. They had just sold their large motorhome and wanted a tour of the trailer! He had some good information about where to stay nearby and how it would not be good to drive the roads there at night due to elk and other critters roaming around. So we were able to easily find a campground nearby for the night. Beautiful there in the Tonto National Forest.
The next afternoon found us in Santa Fe for a quick tour of some shops and cathedrals and dinner. The pups enjoyed the walk around downtown. My dogs are very visual and watch TV and also think statues are real.
Luna barked at the statue of John the Baptist but Lily was way into St. Francis of Assisi.
Spent the last night at a campground in "where-are-you-taking-me-Linda?" Clayton, NM. Hey-we took the quickest route home, which was the back roads.
Ate a BBQ lunch in Wichita, KS just three hours from home where I again gave a tour of the trailer in the restaurant parking lot to a woman who had been looking at Casitas.
The trip total - 6,915 miles, 22 days, 26 mpg without the trailer, 19 mpg with the trailer. That did include a lot of elevation changes and some 75+ mph driving after leaving California. We actually got home a day early to give my buddy a day of rest before returning to work. I will now post some photos!
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