Monaco Dynasty - Our New Digs by V. Rains

Shell shocked new owners in Tuscon

I kept trying to get Roger to write this blog but he just kept putting it off, saying that he was too embarrassed about having purchased this gigantic rig we didn't really need.  When he saw me taking pictures of our motorhome interior, which I was intending to post on my Facebook page, he decided I should write the Monaco post if I wanted one.  

Separate washer and dryer instead of a combined unit

When asked why we got this monster, Roger’s answer is that we don’t know and he's sticking by that statement but these are my thoughts as to why it happened.  Unlike our usual plan of attack for getting something new and expensive, we didn’t think this through at all ahead of time.  Our Allegro Open Road was only 3 years old and this one is 5 so it wasn’t that we wanted something newer.  However, the Allegro started falling apart just after the warranty was up at one year.  By getting a used RV supposedly the major kinks have been worked out. 

My excuse is that when we took our son Chris and his dog with us last summer the Allegro was very cramped and that cramped feeling never went away.    You see, the Monaco is 45 feet long with 4 slide outs.  The Allegro was 37 feet long and only had 2 slide outs.  The Allegro could only hold about 3000 pounds of cargo weight, including the two of us which is not negligable.  The Monaco is a diesel pusher and can carry about 10,000 pounds of cargo, although where we could stuff another 7,000 pounds I don’t have a clue.  The Monaco has more living space up top but less storage space in the basement. 

One of the two couches

The Monaco is more upscale than the Allegro and it feels more like “home.”  The Monaco has lots of carved wood, about the color of our antiques back in Redlands.  The 2 couches, the 2 cab seats and dinette are covered in leather, almost the color of the leather couch and loveseat in the front room in our Redlands house (now in our Lead, SD house.)  We lost a TV (which we didn’t watch anyway) and our fake fireplace.  I kind of miss the fireplace.  And while the couches in the Monaco are pretty nice, they don't really replace the La-Z-Boy recliners we had installed in the Allegro.

Giant shower (for an RV anyway)

So you are asking, if we don’t know why it happened, we should at least know how it happened.  I don’t really know the answer to that either, but I can more or less recall what occurred.  We were at the Escapade in Tucson, AZ, the Escapees yearly RV club convention, and we ended up parked right next to the RV show.  One day when we were finished early I asked Roger if he wanted to go look at the RVs.  He said "yeah, sure" and that’s how it started.  I remember saying to the salesman that we didn’t like any of the new RVs because we like the Allegro floor plan with 1 ½ bathrooms and a large shower in the bathroom in back.  The rest is a blur.  Yes, the Monaco has sort of the same floor plan, the “rooms” are just bigger.  Way bigger.

Do we like it?  Yes.  The ride is much smoother, quieter and more stable than the Allegro.  It has a lot more bells and whistles that mostly work.  It has a 500 horsepower engine so it takes a 6% grade up a hill towing our car at 50 miles an hour.  It has electrical strips under the tiles that heat the floor and, to some extent, the room.  It also has three air conditioner/heat pumps on the roof if you want to pay for the electricity to run them all. 

Full fridge and china cabinet

No measly 6 gallon hot water heater for this baby.  It has an Aquahot system that will provide hot water for as long as you want to leave the spigot open, as well as heating the interior of the coach when it is too cold for the heat pumps to work and the system will run using either electricity or diesel fuel.  The other nice feature is the residential refrigerator which holds about three times as much food as the one in the Allegro.  It can't run on propane, but this thing has an inverter and a huge battery capacity which should provide that fridge with AC current for about three days in a pinch, although we have no current plans to test that assumption.  If the batteries run low it will also supposedly start the generator on its own and recharge them, but that's another theory we don't particularly want to test out.

So is it worth the money we paid for it?  You'll never know because we aint sayin' how much we spent.  But it certainly seems like upscale living for the time being.  We'll have to wait and see what major disasters happen between now and  when we return to Jojoba in November.

Oregon SKP

Looks just like Jojoba... sort of.

The morning after Guys and Dolls, we packed up the motorhome again and drove north about 2 hours to Sutherlin, just north of Roseburg.  This is a small town with no distinctive characteristics except that it is the home of another Escapees RV park called Timber Valley that we wanted to check out.  They don't take reservations, but we had no problem pulling in and getting assigned a spot.  There was a slight problem in that when we got to said spot, someone else was parked in it.  But have no fear... there were maybe 20 or 30 vacant sites to be had, so they moved us next door to a lot that was currently unoccupied.

Timber Valley is set up similar to Jojoba Hills with members buying into the co-op and getting assigned 50 x 70 foot lots.  There is a Friendship Hall, except they call it a Clubhouse, with a library and a pool table.  They don't have some of the Jojoba amenities like a swimming pool or an auto shop.  But they do have large, lush grassy areas and the park is surrounded by forest on three sides.  Every place has its pluses and minuses I suppose.  If they had ping pong on the schedule we'd be tempted to move.

There is quite a bit of wildlife in the park.  Everyone at Jojoba is familiar with the cute little bunnies that hop around there.  Well, if you took 3 or 4 of those and squeezed them together into one animal you'd get a Timber Valley rabbit like this :

Rabbitzilla

There are also wild turkeys here to gobble-gobble-gobble you awake in the mornings, squirrels, quail and even the occasional deer passing through to munch on the greenery.  We've also seen some golden eagles in the area, but not in the park itself.  We have not seen any bobcats or rattle snakes.  But we have seen these:

Vicki wants one for a pet.

I'll take a snake any day over a 4 inch slug.

Historic Oakland - of no historic interest

About 3 miles north of Sutherlin on highway 99 is the even smaller town of Oakland with its "historic" downtown area which these days means a collection of old buildings where nothing of interest ever happened.  One such building is the old Becker Drugstore with its classic soda fountain.  The current owners bought it about 6 years ago, kept the soda fountain and turned the rest of the drugstore into a restaurant.  We stopped in one afternoon and had some ice cream.  The menu listed 20 exotic flavors but they currently had only 6 or 7 of them in stock.  I got a scoop of strawberry, Vic splurged and had a chocolate malt. The interior had really been done up nicely.  You get to eat in antique easy chairs.  That's a nice touch.  If it had been a little later in the day we might have seen what the food was like, but at this point I doubt that's going to happen.

Nine miles to the south is Roseburg, a somewhat larger town that serves as the county seat for Douglas County.  That's where you go if you want to do any serious shopping from Sutherlin.  It is the home of the Douglas County Museum where we spent a pleasant afternoon perusing exhibits of local history and natural history since Christopher isn't with us this year to whine about that sort of thing.  There were a lot interesting artifacts but they were not arranged in any particular order.  I like it when a museum has been set up to tell a progressive story as you go through.  This one was more haphazard.  The day we were there Smokey the Bear was visiting, but Vickie refused to sit on his lap, so I didn't take a picture.

Roseburg also has a rhododendron garden at a park along the South Umpqua River.  A couple of years ago we went to the one in Eugene which is quite a large showplace though the rhododendrons were rather past their prime by the time we got there.  The garden in Roseburg has much more modest aspirations, but at least the flowers were in full bloom, as you can plainly see.

Rhododendron

Rhododendron

Rhododendron

Not a Rhododendron

By the way, I forgot to mention that the Ashland post was the 100th entry for this blog.  It seems like some sort of minor celebration was called for but no one threw me a party or anything.

Bonus Pics

Wild turkeys milling about in our next door neighbor's driveway

Deer snacking at Timber Valley

Ex-drugstore in Oakland, OR

The old soda fountain, popular in the afternoon.

Interior decoration of Tolly's Grill and Soda Fountain

Portrait of Buffalo Bill Cody drawn on an unmarked piece of sheet

metal using a 22 cal rifle at about 20 feet in under 4 minutes by a

local sharp shooter in the early 1900s.

For the Jojoba Hills quilters - pioneer quilt made in the mid-19th century without any giant sewing machine

Ashland

On leaving Redding we headed north on the I-5 again and shortly crossed the border into Oregon.  They have some drought problems up here too but it is way wetter and greener than California.  I had remembered the Oregon I-5 corridor as being mostly cities and farmland and was surprised at how heavily forested the southern portion is.  There are a lot of steep up and down grades that make you feel like you are in "the mountains" but the ups and downs balance out pretty well,so we were seldom actually above 2000 feet.  Finally, we crested one last big "up" and we were looking down into the Rogue Valley at Ashland.

Howard Prairie Lake

We have been visiting the Oregon Shakespeare Festival at Ashland every few years for over 2 decades and always have a great time.  The only drawback has always been that the motorhome parks in the Ashland/Medford area generally suck.  We've stayed in asphalt parking lots, camper ghettos and freeway sidings all of which wanted too much money for too little RV space.  Two years ago we decided to move a little further afield and stayed at a county park in the mountains east of Ashland called Howard Prairie Lake.  It was a really nice campground but it is a 30-40 minute drive from Ashland and sits at 4500 feet.  We got snowed on while we were there and initially had trouble getting our heater to work.  You can see the story here.

Emigrant Lake RV campground

There is another county park just south of Ashland at Emigrant Lake Recreation Area.  We had avoided it because multiple online reviews complained of a sewer smell in the area.  But those complaints seem to have trailed off in the RV park reviews over the past couple of years, so we decided to take a chance.  It turned out to be a good call, this park is beautiful and there is no smell I could detect.  The parking pads are 50 feet long, just enough to get our monstrosity onto.  It has full hookups and 50 amp electricity, everything you could ask for.  And it is only 10 minutes from the theater district in Ashland.  Perfect.

The Bowmer Theater in Ashland

We only got tickets to one show.  The Shakespeare du jour was Pericles, not considered one of the Bard's finest, so we decided to skip that and instead go to one of Shakespeare's lesser known works, Guys and Dolls. As it turns out, there is some controversy about whether Shakespeare was actually the author of this play.  Some critics point out the unusual English constructions and theorize that this show was, in fact, authored by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows with music and lyrics by Frank Loesser.  This hypothesis is supported by the fact that the first known production of the play was in 1950, a few years after Shakespeare retired.

Guys and Dolls, authorship controversial

Whoever wrote it, experts agree that the show is based on the short stories of Damon Runyon from the 1920s and 1930s.  Runyon was primarily a newspaper reporter for the Hearst syndicate and was paid handsomely for this work, but tended to gamble his money away faster than it came in.  He discovered that he could generously supplement his income by writing short stories which were, at the time, considered the quintessential American literary form (because we weren't able to concentrate long enough to get through an entire novel).  He gave his characters some peculiarities of speech including some odd slang, a complete lack of contractions and elaborate euphemisms for threats and violence.  The most notable however is that Runyon's characters always speak in the present tense.  There is no past or future tense in his stories.   Nicely and Nathan never "went" to Mindy's for lunch.  Instead "Last week me and Nathan go to Mindy's for lunch and have some cheesecake after, being as how they do not have any strudel."

Runyon's Broadway gamblers - who talks like that?

Now,  many authors have found ways of producing various dialects to make the written page feel more like how people from certain places and/or classes actually talk.  But that's not what Runyon was doing.  New Yorkers in the 1920s did not talk that way.  Broadway showgirls did not talk that way.  Petty mobsters did not talk that way.  Probably no one on the planet has ever actually talked that way in day to day speech.  It was a complete affectation on Runyon's part that gave his stories a unique sound and feel.  But after Guys and Dolls hit Broadway, it was picked up by that other phenomenon of the 1950's and became humorous "mobster speak" in many TV scripts.  I remember the bad guys talking that way in Superman when I was a kid.

Anyway, we really enjoyed the show and will surely be back again in a couple or three years.  For now, back on the road in the morning.