The end of the adventure

We drove through the dry Californian countryside on our way to Reno.  Here is a photo of our very last waterfall in the US, the lovely Burney Falls fed by snow melts which travel underground to come out partly in the central creek and partly in the rock layers on either side of the creek.

Here is a map of our travels on this year long road trip around North America.  We started in Tehachapi, California and have come full circle ending in Reno, Nevada where our Canadian buyer is completing the purchase and taking our beloved Tiger back to live in Vancouver, Canada.

We loved our journey through this continent.  We loved the people, the landscape, the scenery, the supermarkets, the food, the hospitality we received from so many people we met along the way.

We are not however happy with Fleetwood,  the manufacturer of our RV.  Not because of the RV, which performed magnificently.  Fleetwood as a brand name under the corporate persona Allied Recreation Group as it calls itself , has not honoured a 2009 recall to fix a faulty part.  ARG claims that as Fleetwood Enterprise Inc no longer exists as a company, they are not liable for paying for the parts and the service work - yet they are still using the Fleetwood brand name and have a Fleetwood Customer Service number (which appears to be unattended) on a Fleetwood website.  So, our advice is -be very careful when buying Fleetwood.

Here we are without an RV, which we have now sold.  We are standing with our earthly possessions outside the hotel in Reno. We are flying out of Los Angeles and leaving the US tomorrow.  It is the end of a wonderful year.  Back to our new reality on Monday 22 September 2014.

Captive in Yreka, California

Our last two weeks in the US are even more stressful than our first week was upon arrival.  Then it was the problem of insurance.  Now it is an administrative stuff-up of which we were unaware until the prospective buyer of our RV asked where the Title Certificate was.  We did not know about such a document as it does not exist in Australia where we just transfer the registration on the back of the registration certificate – that is all the documentation one needs when selling and buying a vehicle.  But here this document, known as the “pink slip” gets mailed out about a fortnight after the registration process.

Last year we asked friends in California where we purchased the vehicle if we could use their address for the registration and we checked if it was OK for them to receive some mail for us.  They cheerfully agreed, but when mail arrived for Andrew and they did not recognise the surname (different from mine), it did not click that this was their friend Andrew and they returned all mail to sender.  We found this out when we later arrived at their house with our new RV and as they remembered a letter from the AAA we arranged for a duplicate membership card to replace the original.  But as we did not know about the existence of the “pink slip” we did not miss it.  We had plenty of opportunities during our time in California to get a duplicate but we were blissfully unaware that we did not have this vital document until now, the point of sale, and we desperately need it.  Dealing with the California Department of Motor Vehicles is only slightly less difficult than communicating with God and they are more rigid and inflexible in their requirements.

We are currently sitting in a small Californian town, Yreka, which has a DMV office where the small staff are helpful but ultimately powerless as the Rush Request for a Duplicate Title needs to be posted to the Sacramento Office by express mail.  We are now waiting for something good to happen and for the DMV in Sacramento to send the duplicate pink slip to us here by express post.  Things are looking a little hopeful as someone from God’s office actually called us this morning to ask that we go into the local DMV office so they could verify that Andrew is who he claims to be.  They photocopied and faxed his passport to Sacramento.  Now it is all in the lap of the Gods.

The organisation against whom we would like to throw darts

While we still don’t have the vital document in our hot little hands, we think/hope we are winning.  All this has been incredibly stressful and we need to remember not these awful last two weeks but the wonderful year we have had on this road trip.  We have experienced kindness, wonderful hospitality and friendship and seen amazing scenery, sights and landscapes.  

This restful image belies the great stress we are experiencing while waiting for the post at Yreka. This is Greenhorn Park in town where Canadian geese mingle with deer grazing on the lush grass.  It is a little haven to escape to in the Californian heat that we are not so used to these days after spending our time in the Washington mountains.

And looking down on Greenhorn Park from the hill above.  You can see how dry it is in California. There are some terrible bushfires burning out there, just as it often happens in Australia.  In the town of Weed, not far from here, 100 houses were destroyed yesterday.

Close of business Friday there was no action by Sacramento DMV according to the US express delivery service tracking mechanism, so we decided to go to Kangaroo Lake some 40 miles from Yreka up in the mountains.  The weekend away from our troubles was very therapeutic.  We did not spend as much time angsting about pink slips as we did back in the town.  And it was a lot cooler.

We had a really relaxing time at Kangaroo Lake.  It reminded us of another lovely place back in Western Australia near a mining town Newman, called Kalgan Pool.  It too was a popular swimming hole for locals and we were lucky to be told about it by someone.  Much smaller than this place but the ambiance was not dissimilar.

The campground is a delightful one and there were campers and day picnickers there all weekend.  Here we are doing a little housekeeping.

Two ladies chatting at the picnic table while a deer grazes nearby.  How delightful is that?

We met a lovely family who were camping out with their teenage children - all avid card players and we whiled away a couple of hours playing rummy with them.  Raoul the father supervised, Ana the mother gave us delicious Mexican rice and barbecued chicken and the young card sharps, Claudia and Raoul Junior played cards with us..

Another highlight was Bear the labrador in the kayak with his owner.  It was a scream watching Bear's majestic demeanor while he was being ferried across the water.









Awful reality hit when we returned to Yreka on Monday and the USP tracking service still showed no document in transit.  The nightmare continues.

In the pink at last!  Above is our card out of jail.  Arrived today and we can now drive approximately 250 miles to Reno in Nevada to complete the sale of our Tiger the Tioga.  We have now been able to book our flights home for the following day.  Returning to OZ on Monday 22 September.  We are SOoooooooo happy.

The Oregon coast

We had intended to use our last 10 days to amble slowly down the Oregon coast which is lovely.  Not as spectacular as the Californian coast but nice nevertheless.  Circumstances have stymied this plan and we have had to rush back to California but here are some shots  of the Oregon coast.

View from Cape Foulweather

A beach on the coast

Cape Foulweather again

Grey whales are often seen here and there were about three or four feeding in the area.  They are very difficult to capture on camera and this is the best we could do.

We visited the Tillamook Cheese factory which reminded us both of the Tilba Tilba cheese factory in NSW and of the numerous ones we had been to in Tasmania.  It takes 10 pounds (1.16 gallons) of milk to make one pound of Tillamook cheese.

It is appropriate that we pay due respect to one of our saviours on this trip, Walmart.  This chain allows RVs to park in their very large carparks overnight and many many travellers right through the US and Canada take advantage of this.  They of course do their grocery shopping at the stores and use restrooms.  The stores are generally open 24 hours and we are tremendously grateful.  It has saved us much money to stay in their carparks overnight in between state parks and forest campgrounds.

Mt Rainier and Mt St Helens - Washington State

Majestic Mt Rainier in Washington has an alluring conical snow covered peak that presents a formidable challenge to aspiring climbers.  We were told that the world’s best mountain climbers come and climb in Washington which has a number of fine mountains.

Tiger at Sunrise Point car park. There was a guy with powerful binoculars set up here and we saw a bear sow with a cub on the slopes through the binoculars

We went on a hike and saw several marmots. Just before this shot the marmot's mate was playing with his/her mate but it was too quick for us to capture, sadly.

Andrew went on a 4 mile Skyline loop hike and took this photo of people doing crampon practice on the ice.

Paradise Valley with Mt Adams in the distance behind the Pinnacle.

Our next stop was at Mt St Helens which is infamous for its 1980 volcanic eruption that set off an explosion bigger than the combined power of 1,500 atomic bombs.  57 people perished and the earthquake measuring 5.1 on the Richter scale sparked one of the biggest landslides in human history and buried 230 sq miles of forest under millions of tons of volcanic rock and ash.  Gritty ash spread across a vast stretch covering lands in ash as far away as western Montana.

We drove up to Windy Ridge viewpoint where at 5 miles from the mountain, you can look across at the gaping crater created when the northeast flank of Mt St Helens blew out, leaving a chasm 1.2 miles wide and 2.4 miles long.  Before that, the perfectly shaped mountain was referred to as the American Mt Fuji.

Mt St Helens and an old lava dome (centre). A new dome is growing in the valley behind.

Spirit Lake full of dead logs washed down in the lava flow.  Trees uprooted, shattered and swept away.  They have been there ever since, 34 years ago.

Meta Lake with dead trees and recovery growth.

North Cascades Highway and the National Park - Washington State

This park, east of Seattle, is the wildest of all the Pacific Northwest wildernesses, often called the American Alps.  Thanks to their impregnability, the North Cascades were inaccessible to humans until relatively recently.  The first road was built across the region in 1972.  There is very little in the way of settlements and while the road through it is very good and very scenic, the park is, with its wildness and ruggedness, a real hiker’s paradise.  The range has the highest concentration of glaciers in the US.

 

The town of Concrete, one of the first mileposts one comes to after leaving the coast, is named for the material it produced from the 1930s to the 1950s when it functioned as a company town.  Most of its public buildings are still made of concrete.  Could not resist taking a photo of its welcome emblem :-)

Beautiful Diablo Dam comes next.  The green-blue colour of the water in the lake is the result of rock flour.  These suspended particles of fine glacial sediments are washed down from the high country.

The Washington pass overlook at 5,477ft is the highest point on the North Cascades Highway and here you get a superb view of the Cascade peaks.

We met an Australian couple roughly our age from the NSW Central Coast at the park's visitors centre and spent some time chatting to them and their son who is living in Portland, Oregon for a year.  They are just at the tail end of a two year trip and their adventures - including back-packing in South America - make us look like timorous travellers :-)  And here I was thinking of ourselves as intrepid ones.

Capturing this squirrel, industriously gathering what looks like a small pine cone, was made possible by the sports mode on the camera, but it is a little hazy.  The squirrel was going back and forth, regular as clock work across the car park we were at, picking up these tasty morsels to take back to its nest. 

A cute little pika nibbling on a plant.

Vancouver

We are on a roll here on the western side of Canada visiting people we met in Baja.  In Vancouver itself, we stayed with Tom and Patty.  Patty is Alison's sister and they too were at Playa Coyote - the friendliest beach in Mexico.  Apart from an opportunity to explore the city on foot, Tom took us out on his boat.  Seeing this lovely city from the water gives you an entirely different perspective.

Waterfront apartment blocks.  I was intrigued by the design of this twisted building.

These are floating houses in a harbour inlet.

Kneeling workers painted on cement silos.  A couple of Brazilian artists have been commissioned to do the artwork.

A great deal of the harbour/river banks are full of wooden logs which have been brought down the coast from the northern forests to be processed at the Vancouver sawmills.  Until the sawmills are ready for them, they are stored on the water in huge bundles.  Seals who like to bask in the sun, usually on rocks, treat the logs in a similar way.

Rich men's toys - large boats with their own helicopter.

Small ferries carry passengers across the various inlets up and down the harbour.

Interesting murals in Chinatown - snapshots of history, depicting Chinese progress over time.

Tom and Patty's dining table brings back vivid memories of Baja with all the shells displayed from the beaches down there.  Patty is a dedicated shell collector and connoisseur.

Visit to Maple Ridge

We next visited Bob and Linda at Maple Ridge, some 30 kms out of Vancouver.  We had met them on the same beach, Playa Coyote, in Baja, as Alison and Tom.  We had also spent a few extra days with Bob and Linda at Playa Tekalote and now they gave us a wonderful time in their home - squeezing us in between camping/fishing trips :-)

Two photos taken on their deck.  The first one shows the lovely Golden Ears peaks in the background which do not show up on the second one with Bob, Andrew and Linda.





We went touring with them to both Whistler and to Stanley Park in Vancouver and we saw many interesting things on the way.  The first was something called Wild Play Element Park in a provincial park.  This is a serious adventure obstacle course with climbing, nets and flying foxes.

Canadians are very sporty.  The photos below are of the mountain bike trails at Whistler which are part of the ski run in winter.

On the road to Whistler - more wonderful snow-capped mountains.

Street in Whistler village.

Below are a pair of naughty racoons that were raiding the rubbish in Stanley Park.  If you just look at the one on the left you think it is a cat but just look at the face of the one on the right.  Cute or what?

Our first glimpse of Vancouver from Cypress lookout.