Making Old Things New

Saturday: (08/29) Our usual Saturday shopping run to start our day. Lou made apricot waffles for breakfast. Lou wanted to start sand blasting some metal chairs she found. I got it out but it didn’t work. Hasn’t been used in years and the nozzle was clogged by deposits, rust and ? I figured out how to disassemble it and cleaned everything up and it now works. She was then able to start cleaning down to bear metal. It will take a little while to complete them. I also pruned the wisteria plant on the arbor so it would quit grabbing and trying to strangle me. It gets vicious when it’s overgrown. Green salads for lunch I plotted a route for a new hike I’ll be leading next Friday. Now I know how long and how much of a climb it will be. Enchiladas for dinner.

Sunday: (08/30) I made corned beef hash and eggs for breakfast.

Lou was busy de-painting her chairs. I relaxed all morning and finally got to work in the afternoon. I fixed the air compressor. It had a leak on the pressure switch. I removed some paving bricks on the side yard to locate a leak in a water line that feeds all the faucets in the back yard. After confirming it was in that area I’ll now wait for the dirt to dry out some so i don’t have to play in the mud. I also repaired a lock on one of our doors. That was enough work. Enchiladas for lunch. We had dinner at the Olive Garden Restaurant.

Monday: (08/31) Blintzes for breakfast. I did my usual morning activity, little. I seem to only get going about noon.

I got back to work on on the water line repair. I dug out and exposed the pipes. There is a clutter of them in that spot. I turned on the water again and the leak was obvious. I cut out the bad pipes and was then called to lunch by Lou. She and Dawn were in Santa Clara. I met them at the Chinese buffet there. I then stopped by the hardware store and picked up some parts to repair the pipes. Once home I installed the new piping and then spent much of the afternoon fixing the sprinkler system emitters. All the water in the backyard has been off since April. For some reason, many drip system tubes and emitters were damaged. I’ll be testing and adjusting the sprinklers for most of the rest of the week. Dinner was corn on the cob and chocolate peanut butter pie.

Tuesday: (09/01) Leftover corned beef hash for breakfast. I relaxed all morning. Not too unusual. I had a dentist appointment to fix a couple of teeth this morning. That only took 20 minutes but I stretched it into a few hours. I stopped by Harbor Freight and found some sand blasting media for Lou. I also picked up a few sprinkler parts. Lunch at my Dim Sum King restaurant. I spent some time working on a website that had problems. it went down while I was on my hike and I finally fixed it. Dawn BBQ’d a steak and prepared baked potatoes and corn on the cob for dinner.

Exploring Medford, Oregon

Thursday: (08/20) Breakfast at Brothers Restaurant after the short one mile walk downtown. I caught a bus back to the motel but I missed my stop. I got off at an electric bike shop I wanted to visit but they didn’t open until 1100 so I walked back to the motel. I packed my backpack and changed to a double room. Lou and Dawn are on their way. Then it was time to return to the bike shop. I, of course, took the long way looking through the neighborhood. I talked with the owner about electric bikes and test drove one I liked. Then I headed back downtown, walking, and had lunch at Louie’s, a nice chorizo soup and a salad. Then I took a bus to Medford to look around. Lou and Dawn arrived to met me in Medford. We looked around the Fred Meyers store and had dinners at McGrath’s. A final stop at the Caldera Tap Room back in Ashland for desert and we finally got back to the motel.

Downtown Ashland

Sanborn Loop Hike

Friday: (08/28) The usual L&L sausage, egg and cheese English muffin breakfast. I picked up Jessica on the way to meet the other hikers at Sanborn County Park. We hike about a 1/2 mile on the road to another trailhead then up to the top of the mountain on the new Bay Area Ridge Trail segment. Then along the Skyline trail and down the San Andreas trail back to our cars. A nice 9.6 mile hike on a rather warm but nice day with a nice group of fellow San Jose Mid-week Hikers. The elevation change was 1683 feet with an overall 3600 foot climb. Here is the GPS track for the hike. One pair of my new hiking shoes arrived today. I located two pair a couple of days ago online. I tried to find my size of Cascadia 9 shoes but none were available so i bought a pair of Cascadia 10 shoes as replacements for the shoes I started this recent segment of the PCT. The Cascadia 10 shoes don’t have a great life expectancy so i looked again and found a couple of pair online at Roadrunner Sports. I had a Ham and cheese sandwich for lunch and enjoyed a shower and washed my hiking clothes. I relaxed the rest of the day. Chili size for dinner.

 
Nice view and a good group.

Home Again

Monday: (08/24) First day home. Enjoyed a late morning. Granola for breakfast. I tinkered at the computer all morning. Salads for lunch. We did a shopping run. I stopped by Central Computer for a new WiFi adapter fr my laptop. Lou and Dawn had to occupy themselves at a nearby thrift store. Tough life. LUU Noodle House for dinner. We also stopped by Walmart to pickup an Tracfone airtime card for our spare cell phone. The phone has been missing since December but appeared during the unpacking after our trip and needed to be reactivated. The internal Wifi died. Next stop was Best Buy for Dawn to get more time on her possible new phone. She is still deciding. I stopped at the REI store next door and got a replacement pair of hiking pants to replace my defective pair that has a broken zipper.

Tuesday: (08/25) A breakfast sandwich to start the day. I did miss them. Lou and Dawn were off to exercise class. I was busy blogging. I need to post some photos from the hike. Organizing a bunch of photos takes a lot of time. I also plugged a hole in our sunroom door where a dog door was. Stuffed tomatoes for lunch. Steak, baked spuds and corn on the cob for dinner.

Wednesday: (08/26) I was busy adding photos and polishing the blog entries for the period of my PCT section hike. Granola for breakfast. Green salad with chicken salad for lunch. Ham quesodillas for dinner.

Thursday: (08/27) Up early and got ready to go. I stopped by L&L Hawaiian for a breakfast sandwich. I had a dentist appointment at 0800 in Cupertino. After that I looked around the Harbor Freight store to waste some time. I then met members of my hiking group in Campbell for a walk, lunch and a movie. We went to Aqui’s restaurant for lunch, sort of a fusion Mexican restaurant. The movie was The Man From Uncle. It was surprisingly good and is likely a new franchise to rival 007 James Bond movies. On the way home I stopped and had the Jeep washed. That just about used the day up. I fixed quesodillas for all for dinner. I have a lot of tortillas leftover from my hike that need to be used up.

Eureka! We Looked At It

Sunday: (08/23) We always like to visit Eureka. Breakfast at a new restaurant, the Golden Harvest. We had noticed a crowd there and tried it out. The crowd was right. We had some regular stops to make while we were here. We started with our required visit to Pierson Building Center. A nice garden center, Koi pond, and reading rooms. The hardware and tools section are the most complete we know of. We always speed some time there when nearby. Our second visit wasn’t too productive. The Redwood Acres Fairgrounds in Eureka rents out their horse barns to horse owners and they have a population of cats there that have been abandoned. A local vet keeps them healthy and the barn residents take care of them. Something happened and most of the cats were gone. We only saw three instead of 30 or so. The area is also closed to visitors and has a resident manager now. We were told that a bunch of cats have disappeared and they suspect a coyote or bobcat has been eating well. We suspect something else has happened since many of the barns are also empty. probably just new management? Such a loss. We like to visit cats but don’t want one of our own. This was one of our best spots to get a dose of cats. We also visited a couple of thrift stores and a bookstore and of course the Winco Market. Our final stop as we left town was a stop at the Loleta Cheese factory in Loleta. Then we were on the road home.We arrived home around 10pm

Another Fair Day

Saturday: (08/22) We continued South toward Trinidad. While passing through Klamath we noticed a fair of some sort, so we stopped. It was their Salmon Festival. We enjoyed their parade and looking through the booths. I got to enjoy some very nice berry cobbler as a breakfast prelude. We continued on to Trinidad stopping at Trinidad Bay Eatery for what turned out to be lunch because it was near noon and they no longer served breakfast.  Nice lunch. Then on to Ferndale to the Humbolt County Fair. We enjoyed the crafts, art, animals, and shows. Later we got a motel room and headed out to the Samoa Peninsula to the Cookhouse, an old logging camp cookhouse, for dinner. After too much for dinner, we headed back to the motel for the night.

 
Salmon Festival parade. On the right is a home built wooden sports car, one of the cars on display at the festival by a classic car club.

Ashland Zero

Wednesday: (08/19) Up at 0710, too early for breakfast next door at the Morning Glory Restaurant. I took a walk around the Southern Oregon University across the street and around the neighborhood as I waited. A nice chicken fried steak. Then I headed downtown, explored, picked up my resupply box at the Post Office and caught a bus back to the motel. Lunch again at the Mexican restaurant nearby. They make a great chili relleno. I returned downtown to explore and stopped for a beer at the Caldera Brewery Tap House where i enjoyed a couple of beers and some nice French onion soup for dinner.

My resupply box looked like it had been kicked all the way to Ashland. All the contents survived.