Sometimes the month of July can get a bit tiresome here in Southern Oregon, but nowhere near as tiresome as the Dog Days of August. I am creating this story in August, very nearly halfway through the month, and who knows, before I am finished writing today I might even talk about August a little bit. I never really know what I am going to write until I begin the actual process, so your guess is as good as mine as to what I will talk about today.
This summer has been surprising. We had the usual late June heat, which continued into the early part of July, but instead of day after day of unrelenting heat, we actually got a break now and then, and for most of the month we had no smoke. Despite fires burning to the south and to the east of our little home here in Grants Pass, the winds blew in a favorable direction and we were spared. At least until mid-month. But that part will come later in my story.
Anyone who has known me for any length of time knows how much I love to celebrate holidays. Christmas, Thanksgiving, St Paddy's Day, and all the others seem to trigger a deep need for me to do something, anything, to mark the changes on the calendar. Maybe just a flag or a small bit of decor, or as my daughter says Christmas, which often looks like the holiday threw up all over the house.
The Fourth of July has always been a favorite and I have no idea why. Maybe because of the celebrations I loved as a kid, with the huge church picnic at the Arcadia County Park, complete with a public "plunge" as we called it back then. We started with campfire biscuits for the church breakfast before daylight and ended with magnificent fireworks shows surrounded by the hot wires of spent sparklers littering all the blankets strewn across the landscape of the park.
As my kids grew I tried to recreate that same wonder for them. My kids still roll their eyes at my three-legged sack races and silly games on the lawn I made them play when I would have holiday picnics at home. I always tried to make it to the fireworks, no matter where we lived, and in Northern Idaho during the years I lived there, the kids remember watching the fireworks in the pouring rain at Riverfront Park in Spokane, or on Tubbs Hill in Coeur D'Alene. It seemed to rain a lot on the Fourth back in those days of the early 80's.
I still try to do the Fourth, and the only tradition that manages to continue no matter what is "mom's potato salad". In the past few years, we have celebrated at the house in Rocky Point until we left in 2015, and then with fireworks with the kids in the parking lot at Mo's apartments where we lived during our transition to this current life in Grants Pass.
We spent one Fourth at Lake of the Woods, with fireworks, and another Fourth or two at Daughter Melody's house in Brownsville with fireworks in the park sponsored by the local fire department. Another year Mo and I spent the day hiking here in the nearby Cathedral Hills and topped off the day with fireworks in the local Reinhart Park in Grants Pass.
Last year Mo and skipped the Fourth in favor of our cruise on Oceania to the British Isles. Didn't miss the fireworks in the least.
We thought about going north to Melody's once again this year, but the combination of unrelenting heat in late June into early July was daunting. We thought about going to the local park for a picnic and bocci ball with the family, but again the thought of being outdoors in that heat was daunting. Instead, I told the family that I would be skipping the usual celebration this year and would be staying home, indoors, with air conditioning.
Melody and Robert thought that was a great idea since they have friends near their home who throw a huge Fourth of July party yearly. Sometimes they skipped it to be with family but this year they were happy to attend. After a bit of conversation about the non-plans for the holiday, the two of them asked if they could come south for the weekend after the holiday. The only requirement was that I make potato salad.
I was absolutely up for a belated holiday and some real potato salad. We still thought that the four of us in addition to Deborah and Matthew might skip out to the beautiful Whitehorse Park along the Rogue River where we spent the day a few years ago.
Instead, the temperatures rose quickly to a high of 116 degrees and we were all extremely grateful for a cool, air-conditioned home where we could spend the day visiting, eating, knitting together, and watching movies. Once again, the day was as sweet as could be under the circumstances, and we had great fun bringing up memories of all the different years we have spent together on July Fourth.
When the Fourth was over, Mo and I spent mornings out in the yard before the heat became too much to bear and we retreated indoors to other pursuits. Puzzles are great entertainment when it is too hot to do anything else.
I spent one morning visiting the local Farmer's Market but it was already pretty darn hot by 9:30 when I left. Tomatoes are not yet ready in this area and the blackberries have yet to appear for a reasonable price. I needed to get at least a big flat of berries because my homemade blackberry/slightly strawberry jam was gone. We used the last jar at breakfast early in the month.
I called Deborah and arranged for the two of us to go to the market together on another weekend, but the blackberries weren't yet ready even then. But Deb and I had a good time shopping after our yummy breakfast at Lulu's, with street tables and the best eggs Benedict in town.
Mo and I spent one morning driving out to the Applegate area to Pennington Farms so I could get the berries without having to try to track them down at the market. Nice that the flat of berries was ten dollars less than they were at the market and oh so sweet. I spent another hot day making jam to the delight of the cool air conditioning as the heat built outside.
On another day Mo picked a big bucket of apples and peeled and cored them so it was imperative that I make applesauce. The Gravenstein apples make the best applesauce ever and we treasure our little tree, old and bent as she may be.
Later in the month, Mo came in with another bucket of apples and peeled and cored them so I once again had to make something. We had plenty of sauce and so this time around I made a truly yummy apple pie/galette sort of thing. A galette is like a French pastry with the crust wrapped up around the apple filling and folded. However, it can often leak and create an oven mess. A pie is more work with two crusts and I decided to make the galette in a pie pan and it was close to perfect. And no, I didn't manage to get a photo of that spectacular-looking pie.
Here I am talking about August, even though I didn't intend to. I made the pie in early August to share with our friends Wes and Gayle who were visiting from Tucson. I will write about their visit in the next post about August. Since Gayle is such a great cook and always cooks something spectacular for us, I decided a simple apple pie wasn't enough to serve them for dessert. I decided to try a caramel whiskey cream sauce for the pie which required caramelizing sugar until it bubbled fiercely. That was an experience but the sauce came out so good I will never again buy something in a jar. And yes, Janna, one of the few I can count on one hand who still reads my blog, might have to ask for that recipe if she hasn't already tried it.
But back to more of July.
The month progressed with more heat and a bit of a windstorm that blew through. I think we got exactly 5 drops of rain, but the thunder and lightning were just enough to ignite dozens of wildfires throughout the Cascades in addition to the huge Park fire northeast of Chico in California already burning.
Right on time, on July 17th, the smoke rolled into Grants Pass and once again our skies were brown and the sun was red. The difference this year is that the smoke and poor air quality seem to dissipate every now and then and we can actually get a few blessedly gorgeous sunny days.
A few months ago Mo's brother called and asked us if we wanted to join them for a camping trip to their favorite beach park at Nehalem Bay in late July. Even though we are hesitant to leave during irrigation season, we agreed that it would be good to spend as much time as possible with family.
We departed for our 5 days on the Oregon Coast on the morning of July 22nd. Most of the time when we travel to the coast we don't go very far north. Nehalem Bay, however, is a 7-hour drive for us driving the MoHo so it makes for a bit of a long day.
Unlike our last family trip in June, this time we agreed that each family would make their own meals and we could eat at a shared table for dinners. I brought a pork loin which served us for two full meals done on the BBQ one night and in a stir fry on another night. The family agreed to a steak night with each of us bringing our own steaks and cooking them at Don and Wynn's campsite.
Our campsites weren't adjacent to each other since Dan made the reservations a bit late in the season. Sometimes it is terribly difficult to get reservations on the Oregon coast without doing them a year in advance, so we were lucky to get 4 sites for all the families.
This time, in addition to Dan and Chere, and Don and Wynn, Mo's brothers and their wives from Beaver Creek and Spokane respectively, we were joined by Nancy (wife of Mo's brother Roger who passed a few years ago) and her daughter's husband's mother and father and sister from the Tri-Cities area. Extended family this time around.
After settling in that first night, we had a round table discussion about our plans for the next morning which included paddling somewhere in the kayaks. Nehalem Bay is fed by several arms of the Nehalem River, but they are all affected by tides and we had to be sure that we kayaked with the tide and not against it.
The tide was lowest at 8:30 AM on Tuesday so made sure we were on the water as soon after that as possible. The launch was a good one for me, with a smooth surface that I could navigate easily, and Mo and I launched without incident. Dan and Chere launched their inflatable and Jennifer (Nancy's daughter's sister-in-law) and Nancy took Don's two-person inflatable while Don kayaked in the beautiful wooden boat he built himself.
We spent about three hours on the water heading toward the ocean and returning to our launch site. We didn't see a lot of wildlife, but watching the horses on the beach from the stables at the state park was fun.
At supper that evening we all decided that it would be wise to take a kayak break the next day and that each family could do their own thing before we met for supper. Mo and I chose to spend our time walking on the beach early in the day before the winds started up.
Of course, Mattie was in sandy beach heaven. Mo and I love camping at Harris Beach on the Southern Oregon Coast at Brookings where there are many rocks and sea stacks to navigate. Although there aren't a lot of rocks at Nehalem Beach, there are dunes between the campground and the beach. Walking the beach is delightful, but climbing the dunes is hard for the best of us and I am certainly not the best! My legs were toast by the end of our day.
In the afternoon that day Mo and I did a bit of back-country driving to attempt to track down the boat launches that were located on the various drainages feeding into the bay. Despite the detailed maps Dan found online, most of the launches were mud holes at low tide or were down steep banks that we couldn't possibly navigate. Dan and Don drove around to other sites as well and came to the same conclusion.
The family skipped kayaking on Thursday and once again did our own thing with Mattie as the brothers and their wives did their own thing as well. Mo and I chose to drive to the day-use area to access the beach, thinking that the dunes might be less daunting from that location. Instead, the trail was even steeper and softer and by the time we got back that morning I was completely wiped out and had to rest enough so that I could still walk well enough to join the family for a shared supper at a local eatery in Manzanita near the campground.
Looking back, I realized that I didn't take a single photo of our day at the beach. I think I was tired of packing the camera and was definitely not into taking more family photos with the phone of people eating again. Made me laugh when I looked back at this attempting to add a photo or two to this part of the story!
Friday morning we were awakened by a bit of scary news. Don's wife Wynn had a medical emergency, and she and Don ended up spending the night in the hospital at Seaside, 23 miles north, where the nearest emergency room was located. They arrived back in camp early in the morning, but Wynn definitely wanted to get on the road and get back to Spokane as soon as possible. Dan and Chere and Don and Wynn departed the campground by 8am and Mo and I expected to make a leisurely departure before 9.
Everything was going smoothly and on time until I attempted to retract the HWH semi-automatic levelers. Nada. Nothing worked. No matter how I tried the levelers would not respond. We were supposed to be out of the campground by noon but had no clue what to do. I started calling mobile RV repair services, but one was out of town, another was too fully booked to even consider coming to us at the park, and finally, one of the mobile services took pity on us and suggested we call HWH directly and provided us with a phone number that isn't easily obtained.
The park ranger came around to see if they could help, but they weren't allowed to do any of that kind of work on our rig. They did say that they would figure out a way to tell the people coming into our site that they would have to go to another available site.
There was no way that Mo could do what was needed because the bolts were much too tight to loosen. As luck would have it, Nancy's in-laws hadn't left yet and Rick (Nancy's daughter's father-in-law) said he would make an attempt to help. I finally got on the phone with HWH and Rick spent almost three hours with them attempting to get the levelers to retract. The final solution was for him to undo each of the four hoses that released a bit of the hydraulic fluid to release the pressure and allow the jacks to retract. With the jacks finally up we were able to leave the park before our required departure hour.
Mo and I were very happy when we pulled out of that campground just before noon.
We were mentally and physically exhausted by the time we actually got on the road and still had almost 8 hours of driving ahead of us. As we got closer to Grants Pass it was obvious that smoky skies were filling the valley. We pulled into the driveway just before dark, two very tired and worn-out travelers.
As always, we spent the next two days after we returned from the trip unpacking and cleaning up the MoHo before settling into our late summer routine of watering, trimming, mowing, and doing laundry. I baked some cookies and brownies to send to Rick as a simple thank you for all his help with the levelers. We would have been seriously stranded without his help, with all the mobile guys quoting days to weeks before they could get to us.
The last week of July was truly beautiful with temperatures moderating into the high 90's each afternoon with cool nights and beautiful mornings. We had several days with no smoke that made me remember with delight what summer can bring.
We ordered a 2000-gallon load of water to be delivered to our cisterns which gave us a bit of reprieve from the summertime issue of our well and the flowers all said thank you. I spent time in a chair outside simply watching the sky and the leaves on the big trees while Mo raked the lower pasture cleaning up the debris from the windstorm.
I took photos of birds and leaves and trees and even got a good shot of the almost full moon.
Summer is a gift that I often tend to dismiss. I realize that I may only have a dozen or fewer summers in my lifetime so I had better enjoy each and every one.
Your flowers are lovely in spite of your limited water. It's good you can fill your cistern externally too! I enjoyed seeing all your photos of years gone by July 4th celebrations. We usually just stay home--firework displays are always so crowded and now there's the issue of a puppy in our house. Caramel whiskey sauce--I'm not sure I've ever had that--send me the recipe! Hope Wynn's health scare isn't too serious. Stay cool and out of the smoke--our smoke has rolled back in but the temps are still unseasonably cool--we will take it!
ReplyDeleteThanks so much for commenting. Seems to be something that doesn't happen much as it used to. Wynn's health is handled and with propert meds isn't serious thank goodness. Recipe sent via emal.
DeleteComment from a dear long time reader and friend Erin: Well, looks like no commenting from me ... not even when I am reading on the laptop. Anyway, I couldn't not comment on how beautiful the photo from your 2015 Fourth of July is. Glad you guys managed to get the levelers retracted. That was always one of my fears when we were camping.
ReplyDeleteErin
Another comment from a loyal long time reader, Liz: This was one packed to the brim blog, and I loved it! Not the part about Wynn’s medical emergency or your locked levelers though. I too would appreciate your sharing the caramel sauce recipe. What you and Mo are still willing and able to do is very impressive! I so miss our RVing days. Fingers crossed for you that you won’t have to deal with much smoke the rest of the summer. Personally, I am looking forward to cool, crisp fall days.
ReplyDeleteLiz W
Sent from my iPad
You and I are on the same wavelength as far as hot summer temps is concerned. Yuk. Summers for me are something to be endured, but, as you reminded me, I need to enjoy each day! Thanks for your newsy post, easier to keep up with friends this way. Jimmy and I "missed" 4th of July holiday as we were in Norway, no fireworks needed! Nice and cool there, too. I'm glad your RV fix was less expensive than our last repair!! Bad news when the RV's don't perform on the road (or in C/G's) which dampens the vacation. I made tater salad for our Lake Tahoe trip, but I don't add radishes, 'cause they don't like me! Fantastic that you had a "family" month and could spend time with loved ones. It's so important. I sure enjoyed your pictures! Take heart: the Dog Days are almost over!
ReplyDeleteLOVE the title of this post! How wonderful!! That you do an entire month in one post is amazing to me. As you can see from my last two, I can hardly do a week in one post. What wonderful memories of your childhood 4th of July. No wonder you love holidays. Your pictures are so well organized. I am amazed that you can whip out things from the 80’s. I know I’d be happy to skip the 4th for a cruise in the British Isles. I am just flummoxed at even the thought of 116 degrees. You are quite a trooper. I would move. Or at least relocate in the MoHo for the summer. It’s beginning to seem that we have to stay in during the winter because it is too cold and bitter and also in the summer because temperatures are triple digits. You definitely made the best of the latter. I am so totally envious of your daughter being so close that you can go to the farmer’s market and breakfast together on a whim. Oh how I wish I could at least have seen your galette. Better would be to taste it of course. How I wish I could have sent you some of our seemingly never ending rain. The pictures of kayaking and the beach were wonderful and I’m so glad you had such a good time but Oh those jacks…I have definitely been there and done that. So glad you had someone to help. Gorgeous picture of the hummingbird. I hate to think that we have only a dozen summers remaining. Thanks for reminding me to remember to cherish
ReplyDeleteIt has taken me a while to read about July and August and the later is almost over. I guess I'm that behind myself.
ReplyDeleteIt's all about the potato salad, which looks delicious and similar to my Mom, with radishes. Or maybe it's that meal of a bloody mary. Hard to believe the heat you got. I can almost taste that blackberry jam. Maybe because a friend brought me red raspberry spread that is oh so good. That caramel whiskey cream sauce sounds spectacular. I'd say July was filled with family, good food, people, and activities despite the smoke. I hear too many horror stories on levelers. I stick with plastic pads or boards. Glad you also had some beautiful July home time. I will one day make it to your place to enjoy your yard, and cooking.