January 12, 2016 - Get Ready, Get Set, ...........................

We are finally on our way.  Steve completed all his jobs and we got the house ready.  Thank goodness our mail house scanned a piece of mail from the Department of Licensing.  I then asked Steve if his Driver's license expires on his birthday in April this year.  Low and behold it does, so he went to Anacortes and renewed his drivers license, last week  He now has a temporary, and the new permanent licence will be sent to the mail house in Seattle.  They can then forward it to Arizona where we will be stopping at a friends place (WA state DOL will not mail a driver's license out of state).  The expiring license would not have been good when we arrived back in the US later this year and Steve could not drive anywhere/anything until he go back to Washington to renew it.  Phew!

Our RV ready to be driven for the first time since we brought it here.
New roof vents and repairs since the tree branch went through the roof!

Beautiful Skagit Bay the other morning.......

We did take the RV on a test drive hitting about 60 mph and tested everything before bringing SPASIMO (our name for the RV which means "breaking" in Greek) to our home to load and get ready to leave.  OK, so when we were leaving on the 11th after many hours of preparation, the house locked up, food, kids, and cat on the RV, we went into town for a few last minute stops.  Kathy walked to to the USPS, and Steve went to pick up one last order with electrical connectors for the boat.  When Steve returned to pickup Kathy she immediately noticed an awful burning smell.  Steve knew the smell as hot brakes.  Steve quickly got out his new dandy thermal imaging camera and saw the front driver side brake was HOT (several hundred degrees hotter than normal).  We immediately drove back home to diagnose the situation.

Coming back home was good in many respects.  We were tired, we did not get to a few chores completed before we left.  They are now done and we are more rested for the first day of driving.  We feel a bit better about leaving, and we remember a few items that we forgot before.  Kevin embraces the RV as a home, Cindy prefers the house or the boat.

We left early this morning and drove all the way to Eugene OR where we are staying in an RV park.  It was a  very rainy drive.  We made several stops along the way to check the brakes.  The driver's side is still hotter than the other 3, but it seems fine on the highway.  It did get quite hot though in stop-and-go Seattle traffic.  Steve is going to look at that brake again in Eureka California where we will be stopping at one of Steve's customer's tomorrow to help him work on the wiring harness installation of a project car he has.

A wonderful rainy drive.  It never stopped, in 350 miles of driving.

We met Kathy's Aunt Vickie in Lake Oswego for lunch.  We had a great visit, although it was too short, and did not include her son Bryce, daughter Krystine, or husband Dave.

Aunt Vickie, Kevin, Kathy and Cindy in Lake Oswego, OR.

Not long after arriving in the RV park in Eugene, just as the kids were settling in for a bit of home/RV school time, Cindy saw a huge flash of light outside, and the lights in the RV flickered briefly.  Then there was quite a bit of white smoke rising up over the top of some buildings a few hundred yards away.  We decided to go look and discovered that a pickup truck had run right into a telephone pole and some of the wires were dangling from the top of the pole.  Shortly after we got there the fire trucks, police, and aid cars began to arrive.

Ooops.  Hopefully nobody was hurt.  

We hope the rest of the night is calm, although we are right next to some train tracks and the office person that checked us into the park told Kathy the trains can be a bit "active" at night.  There are also a few barking dogs close by.

Tomorrow we will leave early in the morning to make the long drive to Eureka.  We will be driving along the Oregon and California coast.  Last time we saw this coastline we were on-board our boat Adagio, a year and a half ago.