Wednesday July 17th 2019

This area has been on a bit of a weather roller coaster the last few days. It has been alternating between sunny days and cloudy days. Today was another cloudy day. The day started cloudy and the cloud cover thickened as the day progressed. Overnight showers are in the forecast before the sun returns tomorrow.

First up on today’s agenda was restocking my food supply. I drove a few miles north to Albany Oregon in search of the Walmart. It would have been easy to return to Interstate 5 and travel north one exit, but I decided to see something different. I chose to travel on Oregon 99E which parallels the interstate. All I really got for my trouble was a tour of the downtown area after I made a wrong turn. Eventually I got to the Walmart near the intersection of Interstate 5 and US 20.

I was curious to see if the grocery shopping experience in Oregon would be different than other states. Oregon has some different consumer laws and environmental protection laws. For example, they still require service station attendants to pump gas for you at the filling station. I was ready for a ban on plastic bags or a bag fee. All I found was a ten cent deposit fee on each bottle of Gator Aid I purchased. I still left Walmart with a dozen half full plastic bags to find a way to recycle as well as the task of figuring out how to recycle the Gator Aid bottles to get my deposit back.

This afternoon I got busy making reservations for the next few weeks of travel. I had to get a little creative to work around all of the issues with availability I’ve been encountering. I booked two two week blocks in August at campgrounds only a few miles away from each other. I’ll be in the Coos Bay Oregon area for four straight weeks. The southern two thirds of the Oregon coast is within about 100 miles north and south from there, so I should have plenty to see.

I still couldn’t find anything on the coast for the Labor Day weekend. There were reservations available at campgrounds inland from the coast. I have booked the holiday weekend and the following week at the same campground I’m in now. It’s about sixty miles inland from the coast. After the holiday, I’ll return to the coast at Astoria in the far northern part of the state for a few days before starting east. For the middle week in September I’ll be back in the Columbia River Gap at the KOA in Cascade Locks. After that I’ll make my way toward Reno and Pahrump Nevada for a few weeks, but I haven’t made those reservations yet.