I am sitting here in the Lava Lake RV Resort in the Cascade
Mountains with 3500 miles and 39 days in the Vogue behind me. This
has been one hell of a trip, and one I don't plan to do again. At
least, not like this. Took me a couple of times to realize that
driving from Fest to Burning Man takes the worst week of my life and
puts it smack dab in-between the two very best weeks of my life.
With that in mind, it's a good thing I have the cat with me this time
so I don't have to worry about him or rush to get back, taking my
time this year, seeing some sights and trying to enjoy life a little
bit.
It's raining this morning, first time I've seen that since the
playa. It's great because of the severe drought that's been hitting
the West Coast. Also cool because it means I have an excuse to sit
with the computer and not be outside in the awesomeness. I stopped
in a NorCal town called, “Weed” to play a round of disc golf
before coming to Oregon, seen pictures the past few days of the town
on fire. I guess that's the double edged sword of living up here
amid the beauty of the mountains and forests, when the fire comes, it
doesn't care. I will most likely pass Weed again on my way South,
not sure if I want to go see the devastation or just leave it to disc
golf memories and pictures. I will probably stop though, since I've
never seen anything like that before. And yeah, I might go see how
the course fared.
I guess I should catch up a little on the past months goings on.
Fest was Delightful! Best one in a long time because the most
magical thing happened to me this year... Groundz came a callin!
It's this Festies dream come true! For those not in the know,
Groundz is the original committee formed to put together the
Philadelphia Folk Festival. The, “First Family” as it were. The
second family on the farm was Graphix, now there's a whole lot of
stuff I could go into about that on many levels and this could turn
into a massively huge story about my 18 year history at FolkFest and
what I know of it's 53 years, but that's not what you came here for.
Suffice it to say that, due to some serious Festival Magic, I began
volunteering with Graphix I believe my third year. I did that for a
bunch of years, went back to being a paying customer for several
years and then wound up volunteering again with Parking the last 4 or
5. Then earlier this year, while I was up there this year a month
ahead of time for the Parking Picnic, one of my friends from Goundz
said they could use some help and would I come up the next weekend.
Um... HELL YES!!! I ended up on his crew doing carpentry work,
couldn't have imagined anything better! Suffice it to say that him
saying to me, “You're a Groundz kid”... Even just thinking about
it gets me goose pimply and watery eyed. Being asked to actually be
on grounds is probably the greatest honor I've experienced (And the
Chairman asked me 4 times just to be sure!). Without naming names, a
chairman of another committee (of which there are now 60) said to me,
“I'm jealous. I see how they are over there. How close a Family it
is.” It's funny that the RV was all about getting me out of
Pennsylvania and now all I want to do is park it on that farm for the
summer along side my family and leave my blood, sweat and tears at a
magical place I call Home.
But until then... The Dude and I have the road.
I don't even want to go into all the mechanical issues with the
Vogue this year. I had to put in another alternator, this time in
Indiana. The regulator went and it was pouring a shit ton of power
into the battery... Enough that it boiled the damn thing almost dry.
And it was a brand new battery (yes, another thing that was replaced
last year as well). There are lots of other little stresses, oil
pressure and engine temps, a one time coolant drip, occasional hard
shifting, etc. Etc.
Burning Man was awesome yet again. I
found out they have a disc golf course there, got to play a couple of
rounds but only went once because it was miles away. Gave them some
sponsor cash and got some schwag (discs, stickers and t-shirts). The
guy that puts the course together has asked me a couple of times if I
want to help them set up... Thinking about it, especially since I
won't be driving out again, although great in theory, there are just
too many problems to make it worthwhile. So next year I can fly out
and make early entry (Wednesday) to help build. I boarded The Dude
in Reno. He wasn't happy but I think even he knows it was worth it
to come along on the trip.
After the first time I went to Burning Man, my friend Melissa went
to Burning Man. After I dropped her off t the airport last year I
went to Lake Tahoe. This year, she came to Tahoe as well. It's SUCH
a peaceful place to decompress after the burn. She rented a car so
we could leave the campground, that was really cool this year. Went
up the mountain to see The LA Boys (a group of young Jaggoffs from
our Burning Man camp) and went into South Lake Tahoe for some awesome
BBQ.
From Tahoe I again headed West on 80 but this year but that's
where the similarities to last year end. Having become the Disc Golf
addict that I am, my first stop was in Rocklin, Ca. I stopped there
last year to go to the Camping World store, this year it was for the
Disc Golf course. It was flat and sandy with a marshy little creek
that almost took my proto f7. Probably would have had a local not
come by and picked it out of the marsh. There were lots of oak trees
but the course was pretty wide open and nothing longer than a par 3.
Not like what I'm used to on the East Coast. From there I set my
sights on Shasta Lake thinking it would be a good place to camp but
the lake was so low it just looked creepy. From there I stopped next
in Weed to play a nice little mountain course with a great view of Mt
Shasta.
Oregon.
Holy fucking mountains! I really have to hand it to the Vogue,
she's been rockin it up and down this crazy shit. There is a road to
get up to Crater Lake that is the scariest road I have been on in the
bus. There was no shoulder, no guardrail and the drop-off was
hundreds of feet straight down. I rode the center line and still
felt like I was too close to the edge. The views are so worth it
though.
My first stop was not Roseburg. That's where I had to turn around
because my Burner friend that lives there apparently lives in Winston
a few miles back. After a couple of days of hanging out and using
his wifi I went over to Whistler's Bend campground, home of one of
the coolest Disc Golf courses I've played to date. Unfortunately,
I'm one of the last people who got to play the course in it's
original incarnation. The campground is adding a bunch of full
hookup RV sites where the first 5 holes have stood for many years.
Their most famous hole, “Top of the World” is going from 14 to 13
and they added an awkward shot around the showers and bathrooms to
old 14's alt basket. I got to play 1 and 2 my first couple of times
but they were destroyed too the last day I was there. Top of the
World is a throw down off a mountaintop. It was spectacular!
Probably threw it a dozen times, ya gotta throw two or three after
climbing all the way up there! I hung my first throw WAY out to the
right and it just kept going straight forever. I was sure it was
just going to keep going off that way. I thought it was never going
to turn. It just kept going. But... In the end... A Boss is a Boss.
It hooked up like nothing I've ever seen, made a 90 degree left turn
and started heading towards the basket!! That first one landed about
35' right, pin high. My closest birdie putt was about a 25 footer
uphill at the basket in a perfect straight line from the tee. My big
mistake was not buying an inflatable kayak (or even a tube) before
going to Whistler's. With a short walk across the neck of the oxbow,
there would be quite a fun ride down the Umpqua river right back to
my campsite. Whistler's is one place I'm going to have to look into
being a campground host at one of these days. The idea of getting to
spend a month or three camped out literally ON that cool a disc golf
course is hard to beat. Speaking of which, I thought it was uber
cool that all the disc golfers camped out there had their portable
baskets set up at their campsites. I wanted to get a picture of it
but there wasn't a good angle where I could get more than a couple in
the shot. After three nights there it was time to go get bent.
Bend.
With this portion of today's tale you will understand just how
much my life has begun to revolve around Disc Golf (Or Frolf, as they
call it here out West). With each frisbee costing as much as an
entire box of golf balls, most people put their name and number on
their discs in the hopes that it will be returned if it gets lost.
I've probably found and returned two dozen in the year since I've
started playing and about half of the ones I've lost have come back
(or are waiting for me to pick them up when I get back to PA). One
of the ones I found at my home course in Sellersville, Pa. had a guys
name on it and in stead of a phone number it said, “For a free
kombucha bring to humm kombucha”. So I did. I have to say, it was
one off the coolest Road experiences I have had. The people I met at
humm kombucha were truly delightful! Just sitting here for a while
with a goofy smile on my face thinking about it.
I went up to
Sisters and played the course from the picture on the disc. I
probably should have stopped in the little Old West tourist trap town
that is Sisters but I was on a mission to get to the next course the
guy at humm kombucha told me about, Mt. Bachelor.
Which brings us to Lava Lakes RV Resort, which I thought would be
close enough to the course to spend the night at and then go play in
the morning before moving on. Silly me. I need to look at the map
before picking a road and see what kind of climbs I'm going to put
the old girl through. Having alrready passed the highest peak on
this road (Mt. Bachelor) to get to the campground, there's no way
we're gonna climb back up there to take a chairlift up and walk down
a mountain (My knees don't like walking downhill). That overnight
was 4 days ago... It's beautiful here. One weird thing here is that
the ground sounds hollow. All sorts of places when I walk it just
has this hollow thunk to it. On the roads, on the trails, on the
hunks of lava, even on the gravel pad my RV is sitting on. It's
eerie.
Besides Disc Golfing, I have been doing some Geocaching along the
way on this trip. It's a great way to get out and see some local
stuff. I know where Little Lava Lake gets it's water from thanks to
Geocaching. And were it not for the cache there I probably wouldn't
have gone down to that lake at all which also means I wouldn't have
gotten to see the giant tree graveyard along the trail. I need to
get online and pay the 3 bucks so I can load up my real GPS with all
the caches along my travel route, trying to do it with a smartphone
in remote areas is nearly impossible.
That's pretty much where we're at at this point in the trip. I'm
about to get the bus ready to head the rest of the way down the
mountain and then onward to Klamath Falls to see another friend from
Burning Man. 97, the road from there to Weed, where I will pick the
I5 back up, was closed the other day because of the fire so I will
end up seeing it.
Oh, and let's not forget the deer. Oregon has some seriously inquisitive deer!
