Twenty and Out!

As we mentioned in our last post, our rationale for this part of our nomadic adventure is to locate a potential place to settle down after the adventure ends. A place that has water, a great view, and a place where the grand kids want to visit.

While in Olympia we got to see a few houses and properties, but it seems that the supply of houses for sale right now is quite low. People with 2% mortgages who might want to trade up to a bigger place, but don’t want to trade up to a 7% mortgage so they’re sitting tight. Each of the agents we met with said things will eventually pick up and more places will come on the market. But that’s okay with us, we’re not buying right now, we’re just looking.

So, with no homes to see, we had some extra days in Olympia. We decided to do what we normally do, find a good book, relax, cook good dinners, and just hang. But that only goes so far with Nancy who gets a bit of cabin fever. After a couple of days like that, she looked around for things to do. She found a local sculpture garden a few miles from our cabin. The Monarch Sculpture Park and Art Center is a contemporary outdoor sculpture park and center for the arts. Pretty interesting place as you can see by the pictures below.

After the garden, we went to the grocery store to pick up some odds and ends. As John was passing through the vegetable section, he spied a group of cardboard boxes that looked out of place in a modern grocery store. Sure enough, the boxes were filled with different types of mushrooms. One box caught his eye…the box with morel mushrooms.

John and his sons have been foraging for morels in Pennsylvania for years. Some years are good, and many are not so good. An aside: last weekend John's son Brad and family found 4 1/2 pounds of morels in northern California. Here's John's grandaughter, Alexa with one large morel.

Never ever has John seen morels in a grocery store so he had to pick up a few. But not too many because they cost $50.00 a pound. John bought $7.00 worth and that night he made homemade pizza on a gas grill topped with local asparagus and morels.

Another interesting place was Johnson’s Smokehouse. This was a grocery store/sandwich shop with more types of jerky than either of us has ever seen. Plus they had a nice selection of trucker’s hats, the new rage in head gear.

Before we leave Olympia, let’s mention one more interesting thing. Everywhere we traveled around Olympia we saw these little booths on the side of the road that served coffee. We know Washington is the home of Starbucks, but they must love their coffee because these drive through places always had cars lined up (except in the picture below that was taken in the early evening when everyone had switched to stronger liquids.)

After leaving Olympia, we drove to Portland and stayed at a nice Airbnb. We arrived on a sunny Saturday afternoon and decided to go to one of the many food truck courts around the city.

Nancy had read that the beer place was run by a guy from Glenside, PA outside Philly. So, when we went to the beer truck, she proceeded to chat up the bartender. He told her that the guy she was looking for owned a bar down the street but that he was an diehard Eagles fan, so the conversation progressed from there. While she was chatting, a line was forming behind her but neither the bartender nor the people in line seemed to mind her asking question after question. We had noticed that everyone we met in the Pacific Northwest, from grocery baggers to bartenders were super friendly. It wasn’t until John tapped Nancy on the shoulder to tell her that there were people in line behind her that she noticed and thanked the bartender and the people in line.

After we picked up our food and had our beers we saw a couple, one of whom had a Philadelphia Eagles tee-shirt on. They were from Philly and were in Portland for a conference. Small world indeed.

The next day we went to look at some floating homes. Floating homes are houses just like those built on land, except that they are built on a float which allows the home to rise and fall with the tide. We were really interested in the possibility of someday owning a floating home. The only city in the world with more floating homes than Portland is Amsterdam.

The first place we went to had homes on the Columbia River but were directly across from a shipping port with cranes and large cargo ships, plus the homes and the maintenance of the dock area weren’t that nice; kind of run down plus the number of homeless encampments around the entrance was off putting. But once again, we came upon one homeowner who was the friendliest guy working on his planters floating next to his home. He and his wife had lived there for 20 years their house was a distinctive purple color with flowers everywhere!

Our next stop was at a floating home open house north of the city also on the Columbia River. When we arrived, a man was there to direct us to the open hose. Strangely enough, he had a Cape May, NJ sweatshirt on. He was originally from Pennsylvania and his wife, the realtor we were about to meet, was from Portland. The house she showed us was really nice and you could tell the homeowners association kept the entire marina in great shape. The house had three bedrooms, two baths, a really nice new kitchen, a great deck on the water and a garage with a motorized garage door that opened to the water where you could store all kinds of different boats, kayaks, and jet skis. The neighbors next door were really nice and talked about the neighborhood parties and get-togethers.

As we’ll notice with the rest of our house tours, John immediately falls in love with a place while Nancy asks the tough questions. The only real issue with this place was that it was in the middle of a row of houses. There wasn’t much view of the river or the island across the way, nor was there a view of the western sky, which is one of Nancy’s top priorities.

The next day a different real estate agent showed us a few places we didn’t like and one beautifully decorated floating home that of course John fell in love with. Nancy liked it too, but the third bedroom was too small.

After that we kicked around Portland for a few days. One day we drove south to the Willamette Valley to visit some wineries. BTW, John’s brother David told us before we left for the west coast that Willamette isn’t pronounced Wil –A–Met but Will–am–it. Darned if he wasn’t right…he’s one smart cookie! Gone are the days of free pours at wineries or even inexpensive pours. Nowadays it’s $45 to $75 for a few 2-ounce pours. We opted to go to a nice restaurant that was noted to have wines from all over the region. Tasted some nice Pinot Gris and Pinot Noir.

Our original plan was to go from Portland south through Oregon to California, but plans change. Maybe because of the real estate slowdown or whatever reason, some of the towns we were going to visit didn’t have anything for us to look at. We decided instead to travel further east into Nevada and Utah to visit some national parks. But before we headed east, John wanted to visit one more Oregon town, Eugene.

For some reason John had always wanted to visit Eugene. Somewhere in his old memory bank, he thought the Phillies had a farm team there. When he looked it up it’s the Giants who have a farm team. The other reason he wanted to visit Eugene is that he and Nancy had made a connection with a real estate agent in Eugene. We had been having a running email exchange with Brandon, the agent and he had gone way out of his way to not only look for properties for us but also into zoning issues with adding a dock to a property…among other things. So, John asked him if he’d like to have lunch in Eugene with us and he agreed.

We met him at a brew house off the main highway and we hit it off immediately. John mentioned he thought Eugene was a Phillies farm team and Brandon said that at one time it was. He got really animated and told us that Mike Schmidt, Greg Luzinski, and Larry Bowa had all played in Eugene years ago. Wow! We spent a good amount of time reminiscing about the 1980’s Phillies. We spent the rest of the time talking about each other’s lives and interests. We think we made a friend in Eugene, Oregon. Brandon will continue to look for places we might be interested in.

Now it was time to head east. The drives between cities out west are long, so we decided to drive no more than seven hours a day, taking 1 ½ hour driving shifts. After leaving Eugene we stayed in an Airbnb tree house in Medford Oregon.

The next day was a long drive to Reno, Nevada. We passed out of Oregon into northern California where we got to see Mt. Shasta.

In Reno we stayed in a cute little place with whimsical wallpaper and several tchotchkes.

The following day was another long drive to Salt Lake City where we spent a day relaxing before yesterday’s long drive to Moab, Utah where we’ll begin with Arches National Park. Traveling the backroads of the US you get to see a lot of interesting things and stop at some fine food eateries.

Speaking of yesterday’s long drive, back in the 1990’s John and three co-workers had driven from Salt Lake City to Bryce National Park over a long weekend while visiting SLC for business. He remembers that drive for the changing scenery, from the aspen forests to the red rock mountains. So, we decided to try the same drive. We decided to go big highways and then cut over to Fishlake National Forest. The Fishlake National Forest in central Utah features majestic stands of aspen encircling open mountain meadows that are lush with a diverse community of forbs and grasses. If you’ve never heard of the aspen forest in Utah, it’s worth a look at this website.

The aspen forest is actually called the Pando, which is a clonal organism representing an individual male quaking aspen. It was identified as a single living organism because its parts possess identical genetic markers, and it is assumed to have a massive interconnected underground root system.

We popped the address into the GPS and off we went. We were totally off…off the beaten path. The GPS took us to a sign that said we were in the park, but the road was gravel and dirt. We decided to continue and met some fellow travelers along the way.

But we continued, on and on. Finally, we reached a small plot of aspens, stopped, and took pictures.

But we wanted to see more so we continued. We finally reached a clearing where a family on ATV’s was taking a break. At this point we didn’t know exactly where we were. The dad showed us how far off we were from the visitor’s center and told us that if we continued up the road we were traveling we’d probably run into a snow blocked road. All-in-all we traveled 20 miles one way on the gravel road. So we turned around and it was twenty and out! But we had a good time and had another odd story to tell.

Before we go, let’s talk about our rental car. We picked up a mid-size Toyota in Seattle back in early May. We’ve noticed that when coming back to the right lane after passing, the steering feels like it pulls to the right. Then, the other day a maintenance alert appeared on the dash. So today Nancy asked John if we should call the rental company and report this – especially since we will be driving across Route 50 through Neveda in a few days. Route 50 is commonly known as “The Loneliest Road” in the country. He agreed, but his level of patience keeps him from spending time on the phone with customer support. So, Nancy took over (again). The company wanted to send a tow truck four hours to pick up our car and then, the next day, return with a new car on another tow truck! We thought this was crazy. Why not bring the new loaner with the tow truck on the first trip? (See, this is where John’s head would have exploded!) Instead, after multiple calls, Nancy- talked them into bringing a new loaner when they bring the tow truck to pick up the old loaner. So here we sit and wait in Moab, Utah, a few miles from Arches National Park waiting for a tow truck to arrive with our new loaner. UPDATE: the car rental guy just called and said he got a runaround about bringing the car before our car is picked up. But he convinced whomever. But now they won't arrive until this evening.

Such is the life of the nomadic adventurer.

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John and Nancy