Travels with a Tiny Trailer – Day 5: the Home Stretch
Back to Bro’s house after our wet, windy, but wonderful weekend at Ft. Stevens State Park. A night snuggled under C’s cozy quilts, and a day spent visiting nearby relatives. Then it’s time to hit the road again.
About those bicycles that we never used. I hate to ask Bro to get up on a ladder to hoist them to the top of the Tiny Trailer, since he has been allergic to ladders since his death-defying dive a few years ago. But wrestling them into the back of Sis’s compact SUV was such a pain. Then I get a flash of brilliance – why not take the front wheels off the bikes? Doh! Suddenly stashing the unused wheels was so easy! We are packed and ready to roll by the time Bro and his wife C have left for work.
Our first stop – a quick visit to the local grocery to replenish our stocks of butter, cheese, and wine. By the time we exit the grocery, the morning drizzle has given way to sunshine. We make excellent progress down I-5 through Portland and Salem, and stop for our mid-day refreshment at the Albany rest stop about 15 miles south of Salem. Okay, so a highway rest-stop is not exactly a camping haven, but the big rigs kept their distance, and this particular stop does boast the world’s quaintest rest stop visitors’ center.
We follow Bro’s sage advice for our evening stop, and mak our way to Schroeder County Park tucked away behind suburban streets just outside Grant’s Pass. This is a lovely park right on the Rogue River, with lots of trailer sites, and EVERY ONE OF THEM A PULL-THROUGH SITE! No more spending a half hour backing and swerving into the site! A chance to eat before 9PM! Truly a Hidden Gem!
We actually got to set up in daylight. Since it was NOT raining, we left the add-on tent in its wrapper in back of the SUV, and used the convenient picnic table. We cooked our chicken on our two burner range, and ate by head-lamp light. And afterward we built a fire from a bit of shredded newspaper and five twigs. Now THIS is what camping is about!
And so to bed. The most triumphant day of our trip – on our own, and everything worked!
Astoria is way out on the furthest northwestern tip of Oregon, at the mouth of the Columbia River. It is the oldest city in the state of Oregon, founded in 1811, and named for John Jacob Astor, the New York investor whose American Fur Company founded Fort Astoria at the site. (Yes, the Waldorf-Astoria in New York is also named for him.) In bygone years Astoria was a bustling harbor, with schooner after schooner fighting her way past the dreaded Columbia River bar to pick up timber, fish, and furs, dropping off supplies and merchandise for the well-to-do families of trappers, fishermen, and lumberjacks.
We stopped for lunch after our museum visit at the Rogue Public House, a brewpub located in a re-purposed fish cannery out on a pier just down from the museum. We enjoyed their boutique beer, plus an excellent pizza and salad. Then we took advantage of a temporary cessation of rainfall to stroll the delightfully un-restored, un-modernized, un-redeveloped downtown.
At one end of Commercial Street is the wonderful wedding cake-like Liberty Theatre, located, of course, in the Astor Building. (See photo above.) We were visiting in October, so the Box Office was spectrally staffed.
If you are going camping in a tiny trailer, and you left your bikes at home because the forecast call for a 99% chance of rain, better hope you can find some indoor activity to pass the time! If you are camping at 
If you are going to spend some time in a small museum on a rainy weekend, it helps if Executive Director happens to be an old friend from college. Dr. Samuel E. Johnson and I had more than a few memories dating back to our freshman year Ballroom Dancing classes together. (I took the class to fill a Physical Education requirement; I suspect Sam took it because at that time the ratio of men to women at our college was officially 3.5 / 1, and it was chance to meet girls.)
Dry shoes for Sis, a couple of chocolate bars, working lighters for the stove, and a hot lunch in our stomachs – what could be finer than driving up I-5 as the sky clears and the sun shines on us. Our operating rule is that the driver minds the road while the person riding shotgun manages the heater/AC and the sound track. I’m driving so we are listening to Sis’s playlist of Scottish reels, blue grass, and Nova Scotian folk music. Not my favorite but she put up with my Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Joan Baez, and other 60’s relics for the previous day. Won’t hurt me to listen to something different.
The Douglas County Museum is at the far end of the
We get dressed in the confines of the tiny trailer. It’s not easy to pull on trousers without being able to stand up , but we manage it. Our water-resistant jackets are about dry after a night of hanging inside, and our moods improve as we plan on quickly making a hot breakfast on the two-burner stove in the pop-up kitchen in the back of the trailer. Sis fills the water carrier. All we need to do is boil water, and we’ll have coffee and instant oatmeal with fruit and brown sugar mixed in. So much easier than camping with a propane stove – nothing to set up, nothing to connect, just a quick flick of the lighter and….
In the morning, in daylight, we can see that the un-protected section of the tent roof is quite obviously not rain-proof. However, the bottom of the tent is water-proof, and Sis’s shoes are sitting soggily in a considerable puddle that has collected inside the tent.
Allyson Johnson 