Trip Log:
Nov. 1-18: Blue River, Oregon to Truckee, California
| 11/8McKenzie Highway, Blue River, Oregon, US |
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After checking email, we found out that our friend, Calef, from Vermont was kayaking in Blue River, OR. So we decided to try to find him on our way to Pacific City, OR. About 45 miles East of I-5, on the McKenzie Hwy, Marty sighted a bunch of kayaks parked in a turn out. Rover pulled over to ask if they knew Calef and sure enough, they said that he was across the street in the "hole", competing. Calef recognized us from the water and paddled over to say hi. We spent the next hour watching him and his team mates compete in the icing waters of the Blue River (N 44°09.243'W122°20.460'). Calef had a great first run/ride, and showed us why he won 3rd in the World last year in Spain. Since the surf wasn't too great in Pacific
City, Marty, the Harvester of the Sea, decided we should test our inflatable
dinghy and try crabbing for dungeness crabs. After figuring out how to
start the Mercury, we motored to mouth of the river and caught about a
dozen huge crabs, relative to blue claws from Jersey. The minimum in Oregon
is 6.25" versus Jersey's 4.5". Rover fetched a note from Mike Slade while we were crabbing. Mike had previously seen our web site and knew Rover as soon as he sighted it on the road. Funny enough, we ended up hooking up with Mike when we got to Portland. Unfortunately, it started to rain on Sunday night and Rover's fuse no.3 kept blowing. Fuse no. 3 runs the tachometer, reverse lights and the windshield wipers. After mutilating Rover by dismantling the dashboard, cutting the reverse lights wire, and unplugging the tac, Marty isolated the problem to the windshield wipers. After disengaging the wiper delay unit, the fused stopped blowing... |
| 11/12 Hossack's Portland, Oregon, US |
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Fuse no. three blew again Monday morning, so we decided to out run the rain, and headed for Portland. We went directly to British & European Auto Repair (503.221.1700) where Marty and Rover spent a couple of hours troubleshooting with Johnny until they found a wire that had been spliced and was rubbing against the chassis. To celebrate solving Fuse no. 3 prob, that night we cooked up our fruits of the sea, Jersey style, like Marty's Mom taught us - crabs cleaned, drenched in olive oil, garlic, parsley, oregano, Old Bay, and baked at 350 until they turn bright red... heaven.
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Rover's charm gained us two new sponsors: Warn Industries and ARB! Marty posted a message on the D-90 source to see if any body had contacts at Warn Industries. Sure enough, Mike Slade, who left a note on our windshield in Pacific City, is a professional photographer for Warn Industries. Mike arrange a comprehensive tour of the Warn facilities in Clackamas, OR. Next we drove to Seattle to visit ARB, which distributes to all of the Americas. ARB geared us up with IPF lights and heavy duty springs for our saggy rear-end. The ARB springs lifted up our back-end a good 4 inches.
Rover started to make a funny pinging noise whenever we started from or came to a stop, or took a right turn. We called Mike Slade for local help and he introduced us to Quattro Sports - a place for serious Rover mods. Steven and Timm helped us replace Rover's rear springs, grease and tighten the right-rear wheel bearing, replace the front brake pads, which were just about gone, and replace our pan hard bushing. While we narrowed the scope of the problem, we could still hear the mystery ping when we left. Marty found out Oregon Land Rover was featuring the new Freelander when he convinced them to open up their parts department for a pan hard bushing. So we decided to take it for a test drive. Rover's thoughts: cool GPS system and interesting auto/manual shifting, but nothing compared to a Defender.
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| 11/19 Jacek & Michele's Place, Ashland, Oregon, US |
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Rover's Warn winch helped our friend, Jacek, who is building his own home in Oregon, to pull 500 feet of cable weighing about 5 lbs. per foot. The solution: we fed the winch cable through the conduit in 80' increments and then pulled the cable through with the winch. What would have taken hours and many sore muscles took us a fraction of the time with our the winch. En route to Truckee, Rover plowed through about six inches of snow over the Lassen Park summit (Hwy. 44, el 8,512 ft). |
| 11/21 Good Dog Ranch, Truckee, California, US |
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| Spent Turkey day with Livernose and played in the Good Dog Ranch Srabble championship. |
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