It was a Friday-the-13th kinda Day!

After a two-day delay, our motor home was finally successfully towed to a diesel repair shop in Coos Bay, Oregon--LTM Truck and RV Repair. On the way, Denisa envisioned one of those state-of-the-art mechanic shops with a line of bays ready to confidentally solve any diesel motor home's problem. It would have a neat customer lounge where she could spend her time catching up on blog-writing and trying not to worry too much about how expensive this repair was going to be. But that's not exactly what we found. LTM is on the edge of town, and its property was littered with old and wrecked vehicles in different stages of disrepair. It looks like they do all of the work outside, because the shop is too full of junk and junked vehicles. The "customer lounge" must be that ripped old office chair sitting next to the port-a-potty outside. 

Even though we arrived on the afternoon of the 12th, they didn't get much done as our mechanic couldn't figure out how to use the machine that drains the coolant. So we spent the night in our motor home in our "picturesque surroundings," hoping that tomorrow would be more productive. But then we remembered that tomorrow was Friday-the-13th!

We explored the property that evening. We found that the only nice part of our surroundings was the big tree out back, next to the little river. Because she refused to take a picture of the junky yard, Denisa took a picture of the tree.

It must have been high tide when that picture was taken, and this river is obviously connected to the tidal waterway not far from here. When she returned to sit under the tree later, we found that the creek was almost dry. It was low tide in Coos Bay.

Denisa also found some wild blackberry bushes on the edge of the property. She had to walk over some rusty junk and wade through tall grass, but she picked a few more blackberries.

Mark googled the best place to eat in Coos Bay, and that's how he found Vinnie's. We ordered the signature "Godfather" sandwich. It was two hamburger patties, three slices of cheese, two layers of pulled pork, barbecue sauce, and grilled onions on an over-sized bun. The two of us split it and still took home enough meat for another meal! It was the best part of our time in Coos Bay!

The morning of Friday-the-13th started early, and we were glad that our mechanic arrived on time and worked hard. But it seemed that their equipment didn't always work, or our mechanic didn't know how to run things. We faced delays while he learned. Mark had already diagnosed our problem and determined the parts needed to fix it. Mark had discovered that our dash air-conditioner compressor had locked up, and that's what caused the serpentine belt to break. So Mark called Freightliner to get the compressor and serpentine belt's parts numbers, and they were ordered while we were still sitting in Port Orford. Mark's knowledge sped us up by a couple days since we didn't have to wait for the diagnosis and then ordering parts AFTER we got here. The good news is that the parts were here by the time our tow truck finally got us to Coos Bay.

After a very tedious day of miss-starts, and wasted time, the new compressor was finally installed, the new serpentine belt in place, and they had recharged the air-conditioning system with coolant. By 5:00 p.m. the motor home was running again, but our dash air was not cool. It must be Friday-the-13th! We could sit here in Coos Bay all weekend and hope they could figure out the problem on Monday, or we could leave with a partially fixed motor home. Since we're on a tight schedule (made tighter by the three day delay for the tow truck problems), we decided to cut our losses and leave Coos Bay. So we headed south down the coastal 101 highway.

Because we are finally crossing the California state line today, we made a last stop in Oregon for diesel. We haven't mentioned it before, but Oregon is the only state we know that doesn't allow you to pump your own fuel. All their gas stations are manned with attendants to do that for you. While Oregon fuel is pretty pricy, we know that we will pay more in California. We paid $3.83 per gallon for diesel today, and that's the most we've ever paid for fuel since we started full-timing 6.5 years ago.

As we drove further south down the 101 in the fog, we caught sight of a cloud of smoke on the horizon.

It must be a Friday-the-13th kinda day for a new fire to start this close to the coast!

We were close to the town of Gold Beach, and we were worried that a forest fire had been started nearby.

That's when we started seeing fire trucks coming our way. We would see 11 different fire vehicles heading toward that fire. They must have gotten it under control, because we never saw this fire registered on the inciweb.nwcg.gov website. We check Inciweb daily to see the status of old fires, and to check where new fires have been reported.

It's about this time we got to the most southern Oregon coast where RVs are allowed to spend the night in pull-offs right beside the ocean. We thought about stopping here tonight, but we really need to get further down the road today. Later, we would find that we should have stopped here on Friday-the-13th.

It had been foggy all day, but it started to rain as we crossed the state border and saw the "Welcome to California" sign. It's now 8:30, and we're glad that we're close to the end of our drive today. We're planning to stay at the Lucky 7 Casino in Smith River, California. They welcome RVers, and we stayed there four years ago.

But when we pulled into the casino, they had cones placed in front of the RV parking lot. What?!? It must be Friday-the-13th! We called and found they were having a car show tomorrow, so they needed that parking lot to be empty. We didn't have a back-up plan, so we pulled over and started looking for options. By now it is dark, and driving a big motor home on the winding roads on the coast is not a fun thing to do in the dark.

Our best option was to stay 17 miles down the road at the Elk Valley Casino. The last five miles were on narrow country roads, and we wondered if this Friday-the-13th would every be over. But we were glad that this casino was open and welcomed a late-night RV to a parking lot out back. When we finally got settled in this evening, we had lots of company as others had planned to be at the more accessible Lucky 7 Casino also. The good news is that the motor home is running well (even though we don't have a dash air-conditioner), and we finally have a place to stay tonight. Whew! It was a long and stressful day, and we're glad this Friday-the-13th is officially over!