Goodbye Portland!

View from friends house

We’ve spent about 10 days in Portland. For the most part we lived in the furnished basement of our friend Beverly. Janice spent most days visiting her mother in an assisted living facility in Vancouver Wash., about an hour away in terrible Portland traffic. The traffic now in Portland is as bad if not worse than that in L.A. Rumor has it that the city planners planned it that way to encourage mass transit (light rail in this case). It doesn’ seem to be working. The traffic just gets worse and worse.

While she’s at her mother’s helping out with some legal problems I get a chance to sell my puts and calls and other investment schemes. It’s great fun.

A few days after we arrived Beverly invited us to her families “pig roast” where they roasted a 150 lb pig. There were at least 50 people attending and there was still pig left over. The beer flowed freely so I was happy.

Towards the end of the stay another friend invited us to her condo at Black Butte Ranch, near Sisters, OR. It was beautiful there and she had wifi so I was happy (I’m easy).

After that we had dinner at another friends house and finally last night we spent the night at the driveway of another friend. The scenery at all these houses is breathtaking.

So much for the good stuff. I noticed that my battery meter was reading 11.5 volts (house battery) even with the battery fully charged. During charging the voltage went up to 14.2 v as it’s supposed to. The only reasonable possibility was a shorted out cell in the battery.

As the battery was over 3 years old I didn’t feel too bad and found a battery store and bought a new one. Unfortunately as I pulled off 2 cables from the old battery the corroded terminals broke off. The battery store didn’t have the equipment to crimp on new terminals so we just fitted the new terminals over the cables and wrapped the whole thing
in masking tape (didn’t even have electrical tape). Turns out the battery store had just opened 2 weeks ago and had almost no equipment.

So now we’re driving around looking to either borrow a huge crimper or find a battery shop that can handle this problem. Haven’t found one yet but at least the battery works. We’re getting 12.8 v and can watch television.

Right now we’re in a Walmart parking lot in Yreka, CA. We should reach Lassen Volcanic National Park tomorrow where we’ll stay for 2 nights.Doubt I will have wifi there.