Happy
Thanksgiving!!
We hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving. We are
spending the day with Don's mom, who lives near where we are volunteering.
We spent a month in the Seattle area taking care of our annual physical, seeing friends and family, etc. Had a great time seeing everyone.
We left the Puyallup fair campground about 10 a.m. November
17th and got to Albany, Oregon around 3 p.m. The drive was comfortable with no
problems and no crazy drivers.
We were going to stay at Waterloo County Park in Lebanon but
decided we didn't want to drive the extra half hour, so we stayed in the
Albany-Corvallis KOA. We aren't big on KOA's, mostly because of the price, but
in this case, the cost in diesel to get to Waterloo made it a wash. After
setting up, we drove down to Harrisburg to check out a different RV Park, to
see if it looked like a good place to move to, while we waited for our parking
spot at the state park to open up. It looked acceptable, if not austere, so we
decided to move there the next day. It was also considerably cheaper, with the
same amenities that we would be using anywhere we stayed.
Tuesday morning, the 18th, we moved down to Harrisburg and
stayed at the River Life Resort for a week. It's an ex hotel/RV park that is
being turned into a church, with retreat capabilities. They are adding a
sanctuary, which is taking up some of the pull-through RV spots (especially
during construction). There are no trees, picnic tables or fire rings, but
there are concrete site pads, neat and clean hook-up facilities and they keep
the grass areas between the sites well mowed. The RV park/hotel were built not
too many years ago, but someone forgot to have rebar put in the concrete site
pads, so they are all cracking and a few of them have sunken areas that the
owners have to fill in with gravel. It's generally not an issue for those
parking in the sites. The original owners went out of business and the church
bought it a couple years ago. I suspect the reason was mostly due to it being
nowhere near a heavily traveled corridor, so it didn't get much business. It
had many available spots while we were there, though there were quite a few
spots taken by the construction workers.
The weekly cost was considerably less than KOA or even the county
park and it wasn't too far from the state park that we are volunteering at for
the winter.
We were able to get over to Don's mom's house a couple times
during the week and we went to our new volunteer location, to get the lay of
the land, meet the people we will be working with and see just what we will be
doing as volunteers.
The couple that we are replacing as volunteers were
originally going to leave the day after Thanksgiving, but had a family
emergency and left the Sunday before Thanksgiving. We moved into the spot they
vacated, on Tuesday.
Penny pulled the trailer from our Harrisburg spot to the
state park. She needed to get some experience pulling the trailer in case she
was forced to do it in an emergency. She did very well and fortunately the
roads were relatively straight and level and there was little traffic. Optimum
conditions for the first time someone is pulling a trailer this large.
The spot we are parked in is kind of tight, so it took us a
while to get situated exactly right. We have a tree that could have been a
problem at our right rear corner and we had to make sure it would not interfere
with our slide or the rear corner of the trailer. There is a building on our
left side and we are the largest rig they have ever had in the park. The front
end of our trailer reaches clear out to the driveway. We even had to have them
cut a couple limbs off the tree that we are parked next too, just so we could
back into the site without scraping the roof with the tree limbs.
There are a bunch of ducks, chickens and turkeys that the
camp hosts feed each morning and evening.
There is also a cat that lives in the mills who helps keep
the mouse population down. His name is Bucky, though we don't know how he got
that name. His problem is, he has a wheat allergy but lives in a flour mill, so
every day he has to be given his medicine. He really dislikes the eye drops but
takes his other medicine well. We just sprinkle it on some tuna and it's gone
in short order.
The facility has only been in the state park's ownership for seven years, so there is still a lot of work to be done to get it back to good condition. They have a timber framing carpenter working on fixing the basement that has been flooded a few times, a needs some of the woodwork replaced. They also want to ultimately get all of the grain out of all the workings, which will help cut down on the mouse problem. There are volunteers in the community that come in once or twice a week to work on various projects, including a retired professor from one of the Oregon universities that is going through all the archive material, to build as much of an historical record of the mills as possible. Others are trying to catalog all the equipment that exists, so they can make an historically accurate recreation of what was in the mills and how they worked. I only have a couple pictures of the outside of the mills at the moment, but will get some of the inside as time goes on.
This is the house the owners used to live in. It is now the on-site ranger's house.
