For the first full week after school got out, I took my family to Oregon. We went to the Cannon Beach on the north coast, by way of the inland route, stopping in Grants Pass for a day on the way up.
It was cold and rainy the first half of the trip, and school was still in session in Oregon, so we were able to avoid the crowds.
When we plugged in at the Cannon Beach RV Resort (probably the nicest campsite we’ve stayed at so far), the 100-volt electricity went out in our 2026 Trade Wind. We paid handsomely for a mobile RV mechanic to come take a look, and after he dug into the innards of the electrical system, he determined that the console warning on the Victron about a bad inverter was likely correct. So we called the Airstream dealer in Portland and they said they had the part we needed.
So the next morning we hitched up, told the camp hosts that we’d be back in the evening, and headed to Portland, where I went to high school. We spent the afternoon at OMSI (the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry), which had an exhibit on artifacts recovered from the wreckage of the Titanic. The gift shop at the end of the exhibit was a bit obscene, capitalizing on the tragedy. But I have to admit that we spent some money there.
Unfortunately after spending the day troubleshooting the Airstream and conferring with the factory in Ohio, the service team told us they did not, in fact, have the inverter we needed. When we got back home we would have to contact the Bay Area Airstream dealer and coordinate on getting the part shipped there and take a day trip to get it swapped out.
We got back to Cannon Beach and took our dog Ella to the shore.
We also took a day trip to Astoria. We didn’t take photos at the usual Goonies spots like on our previous visit, but we did get to visit the Astoria Column, after getting lost on a detour to the Lewis and Clark National Park.
On the way back, a major heat wave hit while we were in Grants Pass, and since our air conditioning was out, I decided we better head back to the solar-powered comfort of home a day earlier than we had planned. When we got to Redding, we cranked the thermostat down, and by the time we got to the house, it was 77º inside.
We took our 10-year-old APBT Ella along on this trip. She was mostly well-behaved after the training she received in the springtime. But she did end up breaking the screen on the emergency exit window in the Airstream.