As we planned our course toward the coast, I once again took advantage of an old friendship for a mail delivery. I hadn’t seen Andrea N. since high school, but knew she lived in Eugene and connected via Facebook. We weren’t able to make much use of her hike suggestions as Mike’s back was still recovering, but we did stop south of Bend to do a little exploring.
We took a somewhat stressful, very bumpy drive (thanks Google) to Lake Paulina where we were able to explore a lava flow and did a beautiful lakeside hike. It was amazing to be in so much green again!
We of course didn’t want to pay for camping so headed down the road a bit to park in a large parking lot for a skiing and snowmobiling recreation area (not too busy at this time of the year). All was lovely until we tried to pull the slide in the next morning. It wouldn’t move. I hit up the internets to try to find information while Mike started fiddling with everything he could find. We eventually decided that a wire probably got pinched or otherwise messed with on our bumpy ride the day before. Mike hotwired the motor to get it to pull in and we left the real fix for another time, grateful that we didn’t have to crank in it by hand.
Onto Eugene, where we had a lovely visit with Andrea and the rest of her family when they all came home. It was so nice to catch up with someone after so much time, seeing similarities to the girl I met in fourth grade and getting to know her again as an adult today. After catching up (a lot), we opened all of our Amazon packages that they had been holding for us and finally received our ballots for 2020! We left a bunch of recycling with Andrea as it had been a little difficult to find places to recycle on the road.
After giving Andrea and her family the very brief tour of our trailer, we headed out of town to try to get to our chosen campsite before dark. We were aiming for a place about halfway to the coast and didn’t quite make it before dark. Heading up a forest road in the dark, we eventually found a big enough spot to pull off the road for the night. Certainly nothing special, but a fine spot to sleep for the night. In the morning, on to the coast.