We woke up to another cloudy day. The Thousand Trails park has filled up a bit for the weekend. We now have a trailer and a 5th wheel across from us. Prior to yesterday, we had no one around us for about 3 sites to the right, 10 sites to the left and no one in across.
We headed out on today’s adventure to Eugene, about 60 miles to the east of us. Our plan was to go to the Saturday market. I was driving and
spotted a parking place about a block away. Eugene is known as a bike friendly city and you can see why in this picture. A place to lock your bike on the parking meter!
Plus the city is flat, except for 1 butte, so there were a lot of bikers in town. We walked over one block to the market. This market is large, using a 4 city block park, divided into 4 blocks. The first two blocks were craft items. The third block was a farmers market (which spilled over onto the adjacent street that the city closed for the day) and the last block was the political and religious kooks. Now let’s all have a sing-a-long to the tune of “where have all the flowers gone” … “Where have all the hippies gone, Eugene Oregon”! We haven’t seen this many hippies in a long, long time. All the clothing sales were of tie-dye clothing, baby clothes, kid clothes and adult clothes! Then of course there were the hats, candles, soaps, jewelry, dream-catchers, even wind chimes made of silverware. There were tarot card/palm readers and one poor woman who looked like a crazy person (it was her eyes) who did astrology. There was, on each corner, an entertainer of some sort, flute, violin, guitar… There was also a stage in the middle of the first square that we came to, where there were scheduled performers. We only had one hour on the meter, so we moved fast. It was fun looking at all the “stuff”, but living in a motor home means if you bring in something, something else has to go out! So we don’t buy a lot of “stuff”. We did buy 3 pints (a special for $8) of fresh local strawberries, two chocolate croissants for breakfast in the morning, and a chocolate-white chocolate chunk cookie. In the farthest corner, a brewery and food vendor had set up a little café. Since it was efore 11 AM, Bob skipped the beer. We also found a chocolate-cherry bread, which we tasted. The small loaf size was $5, but they had rolls for $1.50, so we bought a roll to split for dinner. Yum! One vendor had fresh mushrooms, another jellies, and one woman was selling some pretty good pies, although the price was too high for us ($14). There were a lot of tastings available, which is always fun.
We finished at the market with 10 minutes to spare! We drove a few blocks(we could not stay at that meter over the hour) to the Rogue
Brewpub for lunch. This is the street where we could park (for two hours free) around the corner from the brewpub.
A nice sculpture…
The brewpub was okay, but not that special. The tasting of the day was an orange honey wheat ale, which Bob enjoyed, but would not buy. He also had a pint of Younger’s Extra Special Bitter. They had a beer bread, which came with my meal. I really like a beer bread from a steak house in Park City Utah, and this did not even compare. They served it with butter and garlic on top and it drown out all the flavor. So I asked for a plain piece; that was a little better, but still not worth buying.
Our next stop was the 5th Street Market, which turned out to be a bust. It was actually an upscale food court. We drove around town and saw some pretty streets. We headed to Office Depot for some printer cartridges; Lowes and Home Depot looking for the indoor/outdoor thermometer. Finally found one at Fred Meyer. Fred Meyer is a lot like a Super Walmart. We drove back through the beautiful countryside to Florence. The drive was past a very large reservoir and into, then through, the mountains. The closer we got to the coast, the clearer the sky became. It was still pretty cloudy in Eugene, but by the time we arrived back in Florence, there were no clouds in the sky. We stopped for gas at the Safeway then headed for our site in the Thousand Trails park. We pulled up to the motor home and I said to Bob, gee, there is someone in the site next to us… turns out there wasn’t, we had pulled up to the wrong motor home. I noticed a sticker on the front of the coach saying “Roadrunners”. That is the name of an Alfa RV club. We have “Alfa See Ya’s” in the same spot on our coach. This one had Alfa See Ya’s below the Roadrunners. Bob said, hum, maybe they are the people we saw in Bandon.
We ate dinner, walked the dogs, and when we went past this other Alfa Gold 2004 motor home, their truck with a 4 wheeler on it, was in front,
but they were not home. There was the clue we needed to recognized the motor home as belonging to Craig and Terilu Christen who we had met last year at the Alfa See Ya’s Rally in Ft. Collins CO. Craig had climbed all over our motor home, showing Bob how to wire the coach so that the back TV could pick up the satellite. We had decided to go to the beach to try to see a sunset, so we packed up the dogs and camera. We wrote a note to attach to Craig and Terilu’s motor home, and as I was taping it to the door we heard Craig calling out “here we are”! There were greetings and hugs all around. Craig and Terilu are the wagon-masters for the Alfa See Ya Rally at the Albuquerque Balloon Festival we are attending in October. So we ended up talking to them for awhile, before we had to leave to make it to the beach. The sunset is really late here, so we had still arrived too early, as the sunset is actually close to 9 PM. The dogs had a great romp on the beach. Roxie enjoyed digging in the sand. The clouds started crowding the horizon, but I was able to get a pretty good picture.
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