May 5th, 2016:
I have never written a blog or any piece of publicly available material, that is supposed to be a good read. But now, I already told everybody who expressed interest in pictures and reports on our 3-months long road trip, that I am going to send them a link to my blog.
Fortunately, I like writing, or at least I like thinking about writing, which is probably a good start.
Expectedly, it took us quite long to pack up the car, but we were not in a great hurry to leave, because we are on vacation. Around 5 pm we left. We only had to turn around once to retrieve the “butt hammock”, we had forgotten at home. Such a hammock is used on long climbs to sit comfortably while your partner is climbing.
We stocked up on a good selection of food items at Trader Joe’s and drove past Seattle to stay at Walmart overnight. The first night in our car on the homemade sleeping platform was quite comfortable, although I had imagined it to be in a nicer setting, maybe with a mountain view and not next to the highway. Todd expressed some feeling of claustrophobia and had to confirm that the hatch is actually not fully closed, in case he needed to get out. I found it quite roomy and comfortable, having slept in a Honda Civic on a previous road trip with my sister. Of course, our Subaru Forester is the better suited road trip car, but I loved my Honda and it had served us so well driving down the West Coast to San Francisco in 2014.
We started off to Yosemite (~14 h) or another Walmart (< 14 h) at 6.30 am after a cup of 1$ coffee. Who knows if we are going to use the “Allstay Walmart ONP App” again tonight. I asked Todd if he had anything to report yet and he said: “We climbed zero things.”
May 7th, 2016:
If I asked Todd now if he had anything to report yet, the answer would be quite different. We did climb four things now, but we also had a lot of trouble to get here, to Smith Rock, Oregon. This was not one of the destinations we had originally planned to stop. But nevermind, it is very nice here:
I will never forget this small town called Medford, because that is how far our Subaru almost made it. After the “AT oil temp” light was flashing and we decided to bring it to the Subaru service centre 20 miles further, the engine overheated and we stopped on the side of the highway.
I called BCAA and they told us the tow truck would be there in about 35 min and actually it was there much faster. We do not have to pay for the towing, because up to 100 miles of towing are free as a BCAA plus member, hurray!
Unfortunately the fixing of the car will not be free.. At the South Oregon dealership, we were trying to make up our mind up to which cost it would be reasonable to fix it, while they checked out the car. I do not think we actually made up our mind, we were just hoping that it would not be too expensive. After all the money we spent for preparing the trip and turning our car into a comfortable “camper van”, the trip budget was not very big anymore. When Steffen, the nice Subaru guy, came back into the waiting room he told us that the radiator was cracked, and possibly more (head gasket, duty transfer solenoid). The radiator has to be fixed so they can figure out what else is wrong. Now we really did not know what to do. Starting to spend money to find out how much more money needs to be spent and possibly going over the car’s value is weird. After a good hour, some random craigslist searches and some tears, we had half decided to fix it as not fixing it would mean the end of the trip, no car, no way of getting home easily with all our shit and no place to sleep, as we are subletting our room in Vancouver. Steffen offered to give us a rental for a very cheap fee for the week and said he would call us on Monday when they know more after fixing the radiator. To be clear here, the tears had nothing to do with the cheap rental offer, as the offer had already been given before I cried. He said he likes us and wants to help us out.
So, now we are test driving that pretty awesome 2016 Forester, that warns you if you leave the lane (without signaling) and breaks for you if you get to close to the car in front.
We have never been to Smith Rock and enjoy it here, hoping that the head gasket is doing ok…
Climb monkey space!