A Full-time Life

Category: Oregon homes

  • EATING LOCAL, Oregon

    Blackberries82Blackberries grow wild along every country road (and quite a few city streets) in Lane County.  In August and September, just about everybody picks at least a few handfuls.   These bushes are growing in a sunny spot on the lakeshore just a few yards from our front door.   So for the past couple of weeks we've been eating a bowl of these tasty little anti-oxidants almost every morning. 

    One of these days, I'll get serious and pick enough to pop in the freezer for later on when we're somewhere down the road.  The taste always brings back great summer memories!

    Blackberries84 All kinds of berries do well in this climate.  Those long winter rains we used to get so tired of are good for them.  We've already eaten a few pounds of blueberries (from the "Alvadore gardens").  Strawberries are good here too but we missed their main season, which is in June. 

    We've been having a heat-wave — several days of high 90s weather –very rare for this area.  The heat is making the berries very sweet.  The best berries here were hanging over the water.  It felt good to go wading for them.

  • GARDENING — OUR RV WAY

    This beautiful garden belongs to our daughter and son-in-law in Alvadore, near Eugene OR.  It's one of our favorite places to hang out. We don't get to see flowers like this too often any more, because usually we're not in the northwest during the Spring.  But in 2007 we were in Oregon in April and the flowers were at their best.   Alvadore gardens

    Some of our family and most of our non-RV friends say that their yard is what they'd miss most if they were houseless like we are.   A few RVers must miss that too because they carry outdoor-friendly houseplants with them.  When they settle in they haul out the plants and then they have their own little garden wherever they are.  We're surprised sometimes at the size and number of plants that appear.  (And it makes me tired just to think about the logistics of packing them all away when it's time to move on down the road.)  

    Fern Ridge Shores, where we're staying now, has quite a few semi-permanent residents and many of them have very nice flowers in their yards.  It does add a lot to the park.

    But someone has to admire the results of all the hard work.  So we are garden and flower appreciators.  We enjoy the yards that belong to family, old and new friends, and even perfect strangers.  We love to stroll in public parks and gardens.  

    We enjoyed all those things when we owned our own house too, but back then every visit to another garden involved, at worst, envy, or at best, trying to learn to emulate the gardener's techniques in order to make our own yard better.  And we always enjoyed the looking and planning a lot more than we did the actual work.

    We are retired from all that now and the only thing I still want to learn about flowers is how to take better pictures of them.  I like to practice while I admire other people's yards: 

    Alvadore rhody

    Flowers coburg 020 Wild rose and bee so pth will 155 Butterfly and marigolds 100_0025 Bush's farm veneta 30

  • FERN RIDGE LAKE

    Fern ridge lake 081Our home page (http://www.FullTime-Life.com) says that we became full-time RVers when we began to dread going back to our stick-house.  This is a little bit more of the story of how that transition happened.  We are staying now at Fern Ridge Shores RV Park.  It's the first place we lived as full-timers and it's nice to be back.

    By 2002, we'd been traveling quite a lot of the time since we retired but were still maintaining our Springfield house (more-or-less).  We kept kicking around the idea of selling out, but kind of wondering in the back of our minds whether it was the right decision.  Or at least it was in the back of my mind.  I think Bill had his already made up.  For me, when we were on the road I couldn't have been happier, but when we got back home I still enjoyed the house.   Usually when we first got home from a trip, I'd think about selling for a few days and then lose interest and just go back to our normal at-home life.  In a home, by the way, that was much too big for two people and with way too much yard. We still had the same house where we raised four children.  There were rooms we'd hardly even visited for years!

    So the story is really about how I made up my mind that selling out was the right thing to do.

    One afternoon in 2002 we were heading south on I-5 toward our home in Springfield after having been traveling for several months.  I began to think of the dust and accumulation of papers and so forth that awaited us at the house and literally burst into tears.  Life was so much simpler in the RV and so much more fun.  I did not want to go home!  Or, more accurately, I felt like I was already at home.  So we pulled the trailer off at the next rest-stop, pulled out our RV Bible (the Good Sam Directory of RV Parks) and called the nice people at Fern Ridge Shores, a Park about 20 miles from our house.  We'd looked at the park before because at that time two of our kids and their families lived in western Lane County near here (our daughter andson-in-law still do).  But since it was so close to our house, we never thought we'd stay there.

    Fern ridge lake rv park 085So we reserved a spot and lived in our RV here at the Lake here for several months while we readied the house for sale.  (The picture is our first RV home when we were here that time.)

    Once we weren't living in the house, getting it ready to sell was easy.  We gave a few family heirlooms to the kids, and got the rest of our stuff ready for the obligatory yard sale.  It was easy — emotionally anyway.  It was a lot of physical work to get rid of most of the accumulation of 40 years.  

    We've never missed the house!  It was a good decision for us.  Living out here on this beautiful Lake made it even easier as it reinforced what we already knew from our travels.  At this stage in our life, we don't need so much "stuff" to be happy.  We have everything we need in our traveling home.  In it we can enjoy the beauty of many different areas.  When we are visiting in Lane County,we feel at home  on the Lake.  And we can still enjoy our family and friends just like we did when we lived in Springfield for all those years.   It's nice to be here. 

    Here's the website for Fern Ridge Shores:   http://www.fernridgeshores.com.  Danna and Ron, the same couple who managed the park the first time we stayed, are still here and still doing a great job.  They really care about the park and it shows.