Apparently, there’s quite a bit to do in Bellingham and Lynden.  (Where’s Lynden?  It’s a smaller, rural community five minutes north of Bellingham, about fifteen minutes before the Canadian border.)  Despite the main road being under construction, there are nice, long country roads to run or bike on.  Once the Memorial Day crowds finished up, the RV park we’re at is nice and quiet, and the weather has been remarkably agreeable.  Which goes nicely with the nice warm swimming pool.  On the way in to town our stop in Bellingham yielded tips on three nights of the week that we can catch some trivia, breakfast the next morning found us at a nice little diner with some damn fine food and – for lack of a “City Newspaper” – the “County News” with tips on concerts and other goings on around town.  Bellingham even has weekly all comers track meets where we can try out our track spikes we picked up in the final day’s of Joe’s for just $12.

But we haven’t done any of that1.  Yet.  We’ve been finishing up our plans for Alaska.  We’ve been planning our trip to Alaska for months2, but it snuck up on us very quickly.  And here it is.  No laptops.  No work.  No RV.  Just us and what we can carry on our backs3 for twenty-five days.  We’ll explore Bellingham when we return.  Or, perhaps, we’ll just sleep.

Monday was spent packing up bulk food in to little ziplock bags.  We made quite a mess and probably looked just a little bit suspicious, but eventually this . . . . . . got spread all around and packed in to bags like so . . . 

. . . and eventually, packed in to a pile of boxes . . . . . . which Ceridwen was informed would have cost nearly three times as much to ship prior to the invention of the flat rate box.  If you’re wondering, the boxes are getting shipped ahead to ourselves at key locations so that we don’t have to haul food for the backcountry around with us the whole time.

We still haven’t figured out how to get the whole WordPress post-via-e-mail thing to work, so we’ll have to update you when we return.  In the meantime, if technology allows we might be updating our Twitter feeds4 or posting the occasional photo to Facebook5.

1.  Well, we did get some bike & run time in.  And Ceridwen managed to take a dip in the pool today.  But that’s about it.
2.  Years, if you count the time spent on conversations like “We should go to Alaska.”  “Yeah, let’s plan that for next summer…”
3.  More or less.  Our bags suddenly seem insufficient now that we’re trying to make sure everything we needed is enclosed.
4.  Ceridwen or Keath
5.  Just Ceridwen.  Keath’s phone doesn’t do photos.

Wow.  We’ve been in Eugene since early March and all we’ve posted is that we bought a new rig.  Damn we’re bad bloggers.  We should try to remedy that.

Anyway, I’ll try to fill in the gaps with a few posts and photos this week, but here’s the summary and explanation:  we spent most of our time in Eugene enjoying all that Eugene has to offer.  All our non-work online time was pretty much eaten up by shopping for a new rig and the acoutremonts that we realized we need after the fact and planning for a vacation in Alaska.

That’s right.  Alaska.  It’s the giant elephant in the corner of the room that’s been mocking us since we started traveling the USA.  Since we sold our house in New Hampshire back in 2005, we’ve been to every state of the union but Maine, Rhode Island, Michigan, North Dakota, and Alaska1.  So, at the end of this week, we’ll be heading in to Alaska via ferry from Bellingham to Ketchikan.

We spent Friday with our rig and car in the competent care of Ron at Ron’s Hitch ‘n’ Tow.  We bought our rig over a month ago, about a week after we tracked down the perfect tow vehicle, but didn’t buy the parts to connect the two.  We finally go around to doing that a few weeks back, but the parts were delayed in getting delivered, so we ended up having to schedule the work for our last day in Eugene.  Ron was very accommodating, and fortunately very competent.  We didn’t have time for a test run, so Saturday’s 380 mile haul from Eugene to Bellingham was it.

Before leaving Eugene, we hit the Saturday Market one last time to pick up some produce and stock up on Eugene Bakery’s delicious chocolate cherry sourdough bread before we hit the road.  They only make this bread for Saturday Market, but it is quite frankly one of the most delicious baked product on the face of the earth.  We compromised between our typical single loaf and buying everything they had at three loaves: one for the road, one for the week to come, and one for the freezer.  Our plan was to be ready to roll about 30 minutes after we hit the market, but it was a beautiful day, we loitered, and finally hit the road somewhere around 2:00 in the afternoon.

The original plan was to take it easy.  380 used to be a stretch for the most we’d try on a single day, so we figured we’d see what roadside distractions caught our fancy and call it a night half way through.  Once we were on the road we realized that the only thing half way were casinos and truck stops.  So, after considering a few other options between Olympia and Seattle, we settled on pushing through to Bellingham in one day.  The new rig is a world apart from Vantom and Zoombie as far as power and control.  We took turns driving, enjoying the vast expanse of views, and eventually learned that there was a wine tasking room in Bellingham open until 10:00.  This seemed like a good enough destination, so we confirmed that there was reasonable options for RV parking, an exit strategy in case said options were insufficient, and headed in to town.  The parking was sufficient, the wine was delicious, and we made it to our campground in Lyndon, WA in time to set up before the sun was down.

For the record, Lyndon lists one of it’s key attractions as being “close to Canada.”  If it weren’t for the roadside construction, we could ride our bikes over the border.  Hopefully we’ll find some time to go visit, but our primary focus is to get everything packed up and ready to roll for our trip to Alaska.

1.  We’d been to Maine and Rhode Island multiple times, but haven’t actually visited since setting forth on “the journey.”

Ah, Facebook, how you have reduced our reliance on our blog to spread photos and the random tales of our lives.  But we don’t want the blogosphere to feel left out, so here’s a photo of our new set up.  It’s sweetalicious.  It’s so cool it makes me make up words.

Hmm.  It rained the past few weeks we were in Redding, but the very last day it was gorgeous.  See last day for more info about our general malingering in the lovely weather.  When we got to Eugene, it was cold and raining, nay, snowing and sleeting.  WTF!  We had not come here for the weather, but nonetheless, this sucked simian gonads.  We compensated by being ill.  Keath at the beginning of the week, Ceridwen at the end.  Keath’s schedule allowed him to run the Run to the Shamrock run, while Ceridwen’s made her go to the race, get her T-shirt, then want to die.  Either way, not a great time in the Lewin dynasty.  We’re back on track now, and even though the internet is very odd at this location, we are persevering in our pursuits.   Ceridwen wimped out and finally ordered that express card she’s been meaning to order for a while now and Keath ordered his air card that works from Oracle, given that the wifi here is oddly slow.  Ceridwen’s computer seems to think she’s on a mobile phone and Keath’s just refuses to work at all.  This means we’ve purchased library cards and have spent time at cafes.  And bars.  That’s right, East Coast Friends, bars have Wifi!  And strong ass drinks, Ceridwen attempts to write as she’s drunk.  Bars with wifi!  It may have been some time since we were in NH, but hanging drinking and surfing was never part of the equation we remembered.

We’re getting ready for our next few weeks here: Ceridwen registered for a jewelry making class at the U of O that will last seven weeks, a near infinity for us and Keath has plots for doing something with photos that Ceridwen has yet to fully grasp.  Other than these artsy pursuits, we plan to do some hiking and strap on some packs in rehearsal for Alaska.  Wish us luck!

Yeah, so we’re mixing our hip hop references.

It’s been a while.  Last summer, following a jaunt through the Erie Canal (for Ceridwen) and a few weeks in London (for Keath), we entered SoCal via I-10 from Phoenix.  With the exception of our two month jaunt around the world (Sacramento to Las Vegas to New Jersey to Savannah to Las Vegas to Portugal to New Hampshire to Sacramento), we’ve been in California since July.  Though we’ve slowly wiggled our way north, it’s a damn big state.  And we’ve had our fill.  So it’s time to cross that great Oregonian border.

We’ll even be leaving the proposed state of Jefferson.

This morning we ran the Nor-Cal John Frank Memorial.  Ceridwen did the 3 Miler and came in fourth in her age group.  Initially, they had her registered as a guy, where she would have been second in the guy’s age group.  I did the 10 Miler and, though I came in 74th and second to last in my age group, I managed to come in under 70 minutes, which is just under a 7 minute mile and a faster pace than my fastest 10k.  So go go both of us.

We rewarded ourselves with breakfast gelato via one last visit1 to Sweet Spot, a local tasty treat who’s web presence is really just a MySpace page.  In addition to the Guinness gelato she made for St.Patty’s day, she had an “Almond Joy” mix she had just made, which was wicked tasty – and very good with Donatella.

The plan was to then get back home and pack the rig up for a nice early departure on Sunday.  However, it was such a beautiful day out we kept making excuses for important things we needed to do outside.  Like, for example, riding our bikes to the grocery store to get distilled water to refill our battery with, and, you know, taking a mile detour on the way back to make sure the ginormous mega-church down the road was still a blight on the landscape.  So, while the outside of our rig is more than ready to roll, we had a bit of inside work to do that we intended to have.

We set ourselves a goal of being done by 8:00 with time to shower and get to Pio Loco for one last round of drinks in Redding.   Their food isn’t very interesting, but they make a mean Sangria.

And so, having paid our respects to Redding sushi, running, gelato, cycling, and drinking cultures, we are ready to engage Oregon in our shenanegans.  See you there!

1.  We also had our one last visit to Kampai Sushi last night, which was equally awesome.  Unlike our midweek lunches, they are packed on Friday nights.

A lot of RVers talk about their RV trips as if they’ve been camping.  They are very wrong.  Camping is done in a tent and cooking outside, not having a stove and a television.  Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I’ll continue the story of when our RV got filled with camping equipment.  You see, we’re planning a trip to Alaska in June and we’re going to go backcountry camping for at least a third of it.  Our current equipment is bulky and cumbersome since it’s meant for car camping.  We used it all a few weeks ago to go camping in Shasta Lake, but we only had to carry it fifteen feet.  This trip we’ll be hauling everything with us in rucksacks.  We checked with the REI in Seattle to see if renting their equipment would be better, but the astronomical price of $1200 for three weeks was a bit silly, so I loaded up my virtual shopping cart at Campmor, which sells name brand stuff at silly low prices.  I kind of wish it had been a real shopping cart, since it would have been fun to toss backpacking stoves and mummy bags into a cart at high speeds, like some kind of outdoorsy Supermarket Sweep.

Yesterday all our goodies arrived in two large boxes with no extra space whatsoever.  Go economical packing.  They even put pieces of paper over all our equipment so that when we slit the boxes we didn’t slit our sleeping mats or something.  Clever, these people.

As you can imagine, a shipment of this size led to quite a mess in our little home.  Here’s Keath trying to save a little space by stuffing his sleeping bag into the stuff sack.

Once we had unloaded and somewhat cleared out our space we figured we should test the equipment so we’d know if it wasn’t comfortable.  I’d rather know now rather than one bush plane flight too late.  So we lay our stuff out and settled in for the night, headlamps and all.  Not much room for ballroom dancing now.  We also turned off the furnace and opened all the windows for a more authentic test environment. 

The verdict?  Our stuff is super comfy.  I have a hard time with camp mats because when I sleep on my side my hip digs into the ground, but my Big Agnes mat was so cushy I never felt the floor.  The only problem was the lack of lumbar support, but an extra pillow will take care of that.  I have that problem in some beds, so there’s not much to be done about that.  The sleeping bags are awesome and really warm.  I’ve never had a mummy bag before and it’s nice to feel all swaddled up.  It discourages movement without actually inhibiting it and I slept through the night without getting up.  Good thing since I probably would have broken my neck trying to get to the bathroom.

Hello?  Operator?  Yes, I’d like the number for the Lamborhini Protection Association.  Yes, connect me please.  Thanks.  Hi, yeah, there’s a guy in my RV park who has his Murciélago parked in front of his fifth wheel.  Uh, yeah, it’s called a resort, but there’s kids and stuff around. Yes, that’s right, kids on scooters.  Teenagers?  Oh yeah, them too.    Oh, and it’s raining.  A lot.  Cover? No, no cover.  Out in the open.  I know, it is terrible.  Calm down, I didn’t mean to upset you, sir.  Breathe into a paper bag.  I know it’s distressing.  Just doing my civic duty.  Thanks.