The last two days we have spent in Paradise were filled with almost no productive labor because we chose to do the laundry and watch the birds so I won’t bore any readers with detailed descriptions of the nothing we did. But today was our last full day in the Thousand Trails Paradise Campground so we had to do a little. It was also the day of the first total eclipse in the U.S. in more than 30 years. Here in Paradise, we only got to witness a 92% eclipse. Down south in Oregon, there was a big swath across the state where the eclipse was total and that had a detrimental effect on our ability to get reservations anywhere in the state. Small municipal airports, large pastures and county fairgrounds under the swath were filled with camping eclipse devotees. I wonder how many of them got hammered last night and slept through the big event this morning.
Paradise Campground is sort of located in the boonies so we were too disinterested in driving to a store where we could pay too much for approved eclipse viewing glasses. Instead, we poked a hole in a in an Irish Cream cardboard box and watched the progress of the eclipse with a pinhole camera. The images in the pinhole camera were not nearly as colorful or spectacular as the images we were able to see on the idiot box.
We are old so we may not have seen everything but we did notice that it got a lot darker and about 6 or 8 degrees cooler during this showy astronomical event. The birds around the campground seemed to think it was nighttime so they all went home and dummied up.
We were seated right outside the trailer watching the little image in the box when some other full-time RVers named Greg and Rowena accompanied by their large malemute named Sky Bear strolled by our viewing area and we struck up a conversation. These folks ended up staying around for a few hours and beers and glasses of wine. They were only about the third couple we have met in 37 months on the road that were seemingly completely compatible with us. Both of our RVs are headed basically south so maybe we’ll see them again.
After the excitement of the eclipse, we started our chores involving picking up all our stuff and stowing it, dumping the waste tanks, filling the water tank and making it look like we were never here. Peggy zinged through her fun chart pretty quickly which was great because I have been having a run-in with Plantar Fasciitis, a medieval disease afflicting old fat guys and maybe others, and Peggy generously jumped in to help on my chores. I imagine she got tired of my limping around and, because she is a sweetheart, she took the part of the load off this old geezer.
Tomorrow we will pull in the satellite antenna, disconnect the power umbilical, hook the Barbarian Invader to Charlotte’s fifth wheel hitch and bugger off. We are headed to Oregon tomorrow (where there are now ample camping opportunities) for Peg’s nephew’s wedding next weekend.