Stub Stewart State Park, Buxton, OR

Day 8 (May 24, 2017)

We picked up our fifth wheel on Day 8. We were to be there at 7AM. Naturally this was the one night that Kya had us up twice with an upset tummy. She slept through the night for the first 7 nights just fine. We roll in at 7am to the RV dealer and they’re struggling to get power working. Oops. The hard wired surge protector that Gary had wanted installed worked fine the day before, but overnight shorted out. Sooooo after a few hours of their tech people struggling with all that, we went for an inline surge protector. Then the auto leveling system wasn’t working great. I’m not getting warm fuzzies by this time. Two of their tech guys work on it…. tell us it’s “all set.” Oh-kay… if you say so.

Then we had to load in all the bins from the back of our truck that we brought out with us AND the 22 items that we ordered from Amazon that got shipped directly to the RV place… some were small… like a 4-piece grill set and some were bigger… like the grill itself.

Finally at about 11:15ish, we’re ready to hit the road. I try not to wet myself and off we go. Me clutching the directions to get to Stub Stewart State Park in Buxton, Oregon and Gary driving with two hands on the wheel. Kya obliviously sleeping in the back seat. Yes, we have GPS on the truck, but it’s not the most reliable when towing a 39 ft. house behind you. We mapped out ALL of our routes to the various campgrounds with Google Maps and have a paper copy, a pdf version and we’ll use the GPS in Gary’s truck. Plus we checked them all through All Stays, which is a way to make sure we’re not going under a 10 ft. underpass when we’re 13 ft. high. We only had to go 50 miles this first day. Gary drove beautifully, except for going over a curb or two once we actually got to the campground… windy roads. No harm done other than some open cabinets on the inside with spilled contents. We’ll get better with time. (You warned that stuff would land on the floor at some time or another M&P.)

We had a back-in site. That’s all that was available. Luckily the campground was quiet. There was a gentleman in his fifth wheel all hitched up ready to go in the site next to ours. I gently went up to him and said if he wanted to go now before we started the back-in process, it might in his best interest because he may be stuck here for a little while since this is a new rig and we haven’t done this before. He said no worries, he was making some phone calls. I said “ok, well, we may be your entertainment for the afternoon.” We eventually got parked. It wasn’t pretty but we did it. The gentleman I previously mentioned was by himself and ended up having to go into a different site with a rig that was similar size to ours. He backed it in by himself lickity split… if only.

We toasted ourselves on getting to the campground in one piece, and found out, of course, that the auto-landing gear wasn’t “all set.” Gary managed to get it working manually… not perfectly level, but we weren’t going to roll away so I was happy.

Then we ended up spending the rest of the day and evening unpacking our myriad of stuff and trying to find a place for everything. It’s basically like setting up a second home. We also had to learn all the systems… air conditioning, heating, where all the light switches are (more challenging than you might think), operating the stove, the awning, how to unhitch and hitch, etc.

Days 9 & 10 (May 25 – 26, 2017)

The next morning Gary was up before me and walked Kya and when he came back he realized there were deer feeding right outside the RV. They were adorable… just grazing. They stayed for quite awhile and we snapped pictures.

We ran around the next two days getting in groceries, some items from Home Depot, etc. and organizing all said stuff. Thank you Meigs & Paul for some of the advice on how to store things so we didn’t have too much jostling going on. We did take time out from the work to enjoy a campfire, watch the deer graze, enjoy a libation or two and walk Kya. We had no wifi at the campground… nice to be unplugged for awhile.

Stub Stewart State Park is gorgeous with loads of hiking/biking trails and large spacious sites. We would definitely come back to this gem of a state park.