The Next 3500

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!