Fog at Camp Rilea to start the day.
We got on the road at the appointed hour (9:00 am) and, unlike what we'd expected, found very little traffic. What we did find was continuous fog swirling in off the ocean. Visibility ranged from reasonable down to about 100 feet.
Mid-morning at the Nehalem River with fog coming up from the ocean several miles away.
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Slightly inland farms getting the benefits of coastal fog.
We had been apprehensive about Saturday traffic, but for the first 100 miles there was hardly any. The road is narrow and twisty, though, so speed still wasn't possible. In fact, it was only occasionally possible to keep up to the 55 mph speed limit.
One more very foggy area, a good example of visibility going from "reasonable to 100 feet" in short order. All the fog was really beautiful.....my opinion, not Jim's.
Then we hit the Saturday traffic. Or maybe it's just everyday summer traffic on the coast.
Traffic was bumper-to-bumper for the last 30 miles so the 130-mile trip took us every bit of four hours. Between the fog and the traffic and the narrow streets with cars parked on them, it was a really stressful drive.
Then there was the accidental rest stop. There aren't any rest areas so we have to find places to pull off where we think we can fit....and the decision has to be made in a split second. There are suitable view points and pull-offs every so often on 101, so when Jim saw another RV off to the right just off 101, he thought it was another one of these safe pull-offs. Unfortunately, it wasn't. It was a road doing down towards the ocean, leading to who-knows-where. We were in an internet dead-spot so I couldn't pull up the map to see if we could get out by going forwards, so the only thing to do was turn around. Making a U-turn with our rig isn't easy, and backing towards a drop-off to the ocean just added to the fun. Jim did get us turned around okay and back on the right road but it wasn't something we'd choose to do again anytime soon.
Our campground is sort of like a parking lot but with the sites separated by dirt strips with scraggly vegetation. We can see the Yaquina Bay Bridge from our back window (pronounced Ya-kwih-na, not Ya-kee-na as I've always thought). The water and marina are right next to the campground although we can't see them from the RV.
By the time we got set up and ate lunch it was too late to do anything. Besides, we really didn't want to get back out in the traffic again. So we decided to get our least favorite chore out of the way.....laundry. We didn't start until 4:00 but figured we could get done by dinner without any trouble. Not exactly. Turned out the dryers didn't work worth a flip. Most laundromats have dryers that run for 6 minutes for $.25 so you can keep adding money until you get done. The household-type dryers here run for 45 minutes for $2.00 with no choice. After our 45 minutes were up and everything was still nearly wet, I realized the clothes were going to take hours to dry so we gave up. Everything is now spread all over the RV, hanging off the slides and the cabinet knobs and every hook and hanger we could come up with. Fortunately we had a spare set of sheets and towels or we would have had no choice but to keep on running the dryers.
Dryers are the reason doing laundry while traveling is our most detested chore. Socks and underwear and towels and sheets are all over the place. Try to find a place to hang two king size sheets up in an RV....they're hanging on hooks on the back of the bathroom door and we don't understand why Gwen hasn't tried to pull them down yet.
Don't know what we're doing tomorrow but it will be governed by which of the things on our list will be least affected by the traffic and crowds. We love the ocean and this beautiful coast, but right now the wide open spaces of Montana are looking really good.
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