Yesterday we travelled from Chehalis WA to Depoe Bay OR.  It should have been about 3.5 hours and we left at 9am, expecting to get to our destination and set up in time to have lunch before 1pm.

Well!  about 9:30am as we were driving along, a car pulled alongside Jeff and the passenger pointed repeatedly to the trailer.  Hm…?  Her actions were rather frantic, so we pulled to the shoulder on I-5 and Jeff got out to take a look.  One of the trailer tires was flat!…not only flat, it was shredded to the point where there was a little rubber and some cording and we were driving on the rim!

Luckily our trailer has 2 axels and four tires but that was a large load on that remaining tire on that side.  Our trailer weighs about 10,000 pounds!!

Luckily the bad tire was on the outside, cause we couldn’t drive any longer on that rim, even to the next exit about a mile further.

So, Jeff pulled out the spare tire and the jack that came with the trailer, and  started working to change the tire.  That jack was useless!!  It was way underpowered to left a fully loaded trailer!  So, our next idea was to call AAA – we pay for it after all and our trailer is included in the services.  They said it would be an hour till a towtruck arrived with tools to change the tire.

Just as I hung up the phone a towtruck pulled up!  Wow – that was fast!  Not really, it was the WSDOT (Washington State Dept of Transportation) that has trucks driving around looking for road hazards and people in trouble.  He said he knew we were up ahead as he had stopped to pick up the remains of our tire about a mile back.

His jack couldn’t even lift the trailer!  I told him we had already called AAA, so he left and we waited.  A state trooper stopped to see if we were okay and we chatted for a few minutes.

While we were waiting I gingerly stepped up into the trailer and fixed a couple of sandwiches and some fruit for lunch – no way we were going to make it to our destination by lunchtime!

Ok, the tow truck arrived about 11:15 and got the tire changed out in about 15 minutes.  Their jack made it look easy!  There were two guys, one was being trained and both were very nice!  Once the spare tire was on, both tires on that side looked a bit low and when he checked the pressure, yep, both were under-pressure about 20 pounds each.  They offered to drive with us following to a Les Schwab dealer about 14 miles down the road, and we took them up on that offer!

So, at Les Schwab they looked at all our tires and all were cracking and in pretty bad shape!  So, we decided to buy 4 new tires and avoid more problems.  We were there about 1.5 hours and by the time we left it was 2pm.

The guy at Les Schwab suggested an alternative route to our destination so we could avoid Portland, although he said we’d be through there by about 3pm and should miss most of rush hour.

So, we get on the road again and within just a few miles see a LED sign indicating “Wreck ahead – prepare to stop”.  Traffic inched along for about an hour and we only got a few miles.  Ok, it’s now 3pm and we’re not even close to Portland yet.

We hit the major rush hour through Portland!  Then we had 2 more hours to go to get to our destination so we ended up stopped at a Subway for a quick dinner.

We finally arrived at our destination RV park at 8pm, right on the Oregon coast although we couldn’t tell because it was very foggy!  Got set up and finally in the comfort of our home as it was getting dark.

Whew!  We don’t like to travel with the trailer for more than 6 hours, but this one ended up being an 11 hour day, which much of it sitting in slow traffic or on the side of the road or in a waiting room at Les Schwab.  Hopefully we don’t repeat this experience anytime soon!

Jeff writes: August 3, I finally got to ( a sixty year wait) ride on a steam locomotive, something I wanted to do since first seeing one in 1954 when we moved to Long Island. We are in Chehalis, Washington, about 75 miles south of Seattle.

We went to the Chehalis-Centralia Railroad and Museum. They have a 1916 Baldwin 2-8-2 Mikado steam locomotive. The engine uses recycled crank case oil as fuel. It takes about 1000 gallons for the 1-1/4 hours ride. It also carries 4000 gallons of water to create steam using about 1000 gallons for the ride. This engine was used to haul timber in the area. I actually got to ride in the cab with the engineers and learned about the propulsion system and brakes. As we were about to get going, they ran into a problem that took 2 hours to repair. We finally got going.  Boy, what a bumpy ride but exciting.

I got some really good pictures of the engine at rest and along the track (see below) . I also got a short video as we started out.  Here’s the link to the video on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8pEikxFeXc

The day we visited Mount Rainier was cloudy and it never did clear up.  We were disappointed in that because our pictures didn’t turn out as well as we wanted, but the views of the mountain were all we hoped for and more.

As you drive up to Mount Rainier you don’t see the mountain because of the old-growth forests and the hills between you and the mountain.  We were on some switchbacks and at one point we were driving south (away from the mountain) but I saw a hill appear to the north that had some snow on it, so I turned to look more and THERE IT WAS!  It was HUGE!  It was REALLY HUGE and RIGHT THERE!

Jeff couldn’t see it and there was no place to stop for a while, but when we did come to a parking area and got our first real view of the mountain we could only just stare up at it for a few minutes.  It’s over 14,000 ft and nothing else around it is anywhere near that tall so it sticks up there by itself!

We’ve been to Mount Whitney which is higher (highest point in the lower 48 states) but it’s surrounded by other tall mountains and what you see is the mountain range…and also depending on your viewpoint other mountains appear taller quite often.  It detracts from the awesomeness, I feel.

We’ve also seen other mountain peaks that are standing by themselves (Shasta, Lassen, McLaughlin, Baker) but this one was truly impressive!!

One thing I was impressed with is that there are 25 very large glaciers on Mount Rainier.  That’s as many glaciers as there are in the entire Glacier National Park, which is spread out over many miles and many peaks.  One glacier, Nisqually, feeds a very large riverbed full of boulders that you can see in one of the photos below.

Here are the photos we took:

While in Southern Washington we are staying in Chehalis so that we can visit both Mount St. Helens and Mt. Rainer.

We visited Mount St. Helens on a day that started off really cloudy and foggy and when we arrived at the visitors center we were fogged in.  We were concerned that we wouldn’t see anything but the rangers assured us that we would drive up through the fog and then it would be clear.  And, it was!

Mount St. Helens is not a real high mountain at 8,300 ft.  But, the crater…it’s HUGE!  It really did blast out the whole side of the mountain!

Jeff and I were both really impressed and decided that if we had a top 3 list of places we’d been to so far, this is on that list!  (the others are Yellowstone and Carlsbad Caverns).

We were surprised to find that the mountain is not being quiet right now.  It’s growing again!  Inside the huge crater is  dome that is building up and there’s a little amount of steam coming from it that is visible to the naked eye from the Johnston Ridge Observatory a few miles away.  There have been small eruptions since the big one in 1980 as well!  Yipes!!  People in this area talk about eruptions like we talk about earthquakes in Southern California…something to laugh about and maybe be prepared for, but not too scary.

In the pictures below I’ve labeled one that was taken before the eruption, one shortly afterward, and one that we took that shows how much the dome has grown since the eruption.  Also included are several more of the area including the devastation that still exists today for several miles around the volcano due to the ash (as deep as 20 feet in some places) and the downed trees that are still scattered all over the place.  The forests for several miles around are new forests, planted in the 80s to replace all that was totally destroyed when the mountain erupted.