Florance OR to Burns OR 2017

                            September 5th 2015

      Hi everyone, we have been home for about six weeks now and finally trying to get in the mood to start blogging again. We suffered very little hurricane damage to our home, but we lost our dock and our seawall suffered major damaged, and will have to be replaced. A costly expense the insurance doesn’t cover. I want to try and continue blogging about our trip out west as a diary for us and for future reference. I hope what I write will also help some of you with your travels. Linda did keep a journal which is a tremendous help. Now all I have to do is put it to type. There are a lot of details we are both trying to remember. We will start by telling of our 3,000 mile trip back to Florida. This is my second attempted to start blogging again. I feel it is something I must do to keep my mind active and to help remember the great trip we had even with some of the problems we encountered.

    Here we go. We were on the coast of Oregon in the city of Florence,  at a Thousand Trails RV Park when hurricane Irma hit the coast of Florida and passed through our home town of Cocoa leaving a path of devastation. After several phone calls to friends in our development we decided we better head home. Life is so different now that we are home owners then when we traveled full time for almost ten years.  At any rate we made the decision to head home to our adopted state of Florida.

     Many forest fires delayed our start back east. We didn’t want to make many detours with a lot of added mileage, so we just waited till we could go in the direction we planned. We did travel through some heavy smoke in Eugene and Sisters Oregon area. We passed some beautiful country we wanted to visit. Hopefully some day we may get back. There were many “fire camps” along the way up McKenzie Pass at 5325 feet high through the Cascades, which is open only in the summer. There were many lava flows in the area. There is world class fly fishing in several rivers   Smoke is heavy at times. We pass signs along the way telling the folks level one evacuation is in place, get ready to go. As we pass through the city of Sisters there is what looks of an old western town. Wish we could stop and visit. There is a RV park right in town. Then we pass through some more heavy smoke. We drive through the Oregon Badlands Wilderness.  We then continue along route 20 with not much but wilderness and few towns. A good two lane road. Our destination is Burns RV Park in Burns OR. Trip of 329 miles, much further then we like to travel in a day. Good thing we called we procured one of the last spaces where we could pull through and didn’t have to unhook. The park did fill up that night. We will do a review of this park in another post. Gas in the area was $3.09 a gallon.

 

In the city of Eugene

Through the McKenzie Pass and over the Cascades

Lava Flows

A huge load to bring over the Pass

More smoke approaching the city of Sisters

The cute city of Sisters, deserves a revisit

Top photo on right is an RV park in the town of Sisters, next a working ranch and finally a "full" service gas station. Remember them. Most attends in uniform.