Me: briefly considers retreating back into blog silence.
Also me: proceeds to post three posts in five days.

🙂

Back to the California trip . . . if you missed the first installment, here it is: https://www.michaylaroth.com/2024/a-little-jaunt-south-part-1/.

After the Crater Lake fiasco, we drove a while longer and then stopped for the night at a KOA. Word to the wise when traveling in a motorhome: hook it up to water before you leave on your maiden voyage.

But we had literally been so busy in the days leading up to leaving that that hadn't happened, so it wasn't until we were hooked up at the KOA that we discovered that the toilet leaked and the shower didn't work.

Oops.

We set out on another driving day the next morning, crossing into California sometime that morning. Alec was livid that we had to throw out all our fruit. I should have known from past excursions south that things were so at the California border, but I didn't trust my memory, and as such I had brought along a big bowl of fruit.

Let's just say if you ever happen upon one of those fruit-stealing border stops and see a beautiful orchard of apple trees growing alongside the road, you can thank my dear husband.

We drove by Mt. Shasta, which was of course gorgeous but still can't compare with our Mt. Hood.

I'm not sure how we managed to make a twelve-hour drive take two entire days, but we didn't get to our destination till after dark. Eric's brother Alex and three of Eric's employees had beat us down, and we joined them for burgers for supper.

Arriving somewhere new and strange in the dark is not the best way to go about things if you want to start your week there with a good outlook. Especially not when said strange place is full of this little house there, that little shed there, a random camper here, a pile of garbage there (and there, and there, and there, AND THERE), and that's not even the half. Still not being able to fix the shower even though you got a bunch of stuff at Home Depot to do so also isn't very conducive to a chipper mood. Only having a water hook-up when you were hoping for a full hook-up is disappointing to say the least, but I wouldn't know just how much so until the next day.

To say we went to bed a bit trepidatious that night would be an understatement. It was suddenly like, What exactly are we doing here? And is this going to work? Eric was looking up AirBnBs on his phone while he waited for the big boys to go to sleep.

Things did not look brighter in the morning.

Eric had his biggest concrete pour of all that first day we were there, a big smooth-finish floor that would take all day and into the night. He was up and out the door before the rest of us were awake, and when he popped back in for a bit of breakfast, I cried when he left. The space was suddenly so tiny, and there were so many boys and so much noise, and I couldn't just let them watch videos into infinity, but I also couldn't let them go outside unsupervised, and I had to get at least a few things done before we could go up to the job site.

We managed. 🙂

Here's my boys on their first trek up the big hill to the job site.
And then I turned around and took a picture of our camper.Look at those beautiful hills.

We found Eric (and the job site) at the top of the hill.
It was a pretty good morning with lots going on for the boys to watch. A dump truck dumping gravel, a skidsteer making a road, a truck delivering lumber, concrete trucks bringing loads of concrete, a concrete pump squishing out concrete, and so many guys doing so many things.

The boys and I eventually went back down to the camper for lunch and naps. While the two littlest boys napped, I asked Alec to "babysit" and told him I was going to go try to shower. Try to shower, indeed. There was a solar-powered shower room on the property, and Eric had tried it the night before and gotten an ice-cold shower. I was hoping for better things in the middle of the day.

Eric didn't tell me it was a communal shower room, with literally three showers in it and no stalls, just frosted doors. The door didn't even lock. At that point I didn't really know how many other people were on the property other than our crew, and I knew they were all busy up at the concrete pour, so I put a chair in front of the door and hoped for the best. The water wasn't quite ice-cold, but it was certainly cold. 🙁

Imagine it -- no shower for days, and then when I finally got to a shower, it was not only a communal, sketchy shower but it had no hot water either.
"Me and this shower -- NOT FRIENDS." I texted Eric.

We swore off the shower room after that, and I was so glad I hadn't hauled all the boys down there to wash them off because it certainly would not have gone well.

Disappointed, I went back to the camper to do schoolwork with Alec.

I wanted coffee, but I couldn't get the generator to start, so none of the outlets worked, and I hadn't thought to bring instant coffee or a French press. 🙁 I texted Eric multiple times that I couldn't get the generator to start, and I even called him a time or two, but he was extremely busy up at the job and literally couldn't get away.

"I can't get the generator to start. I even tried starting the whole dumb camper." I texted Eric.

I also couldn't charge my phone, and when it died, I resorted to using the extra phone, but then that almost died as well. The camper was getting colder by the hour. I kept trying to turn the heat up, and it would turn on hopefully, but then the next minute it'd shut back down, and there the thermostat would sit. Not too cold yet, but not too warm either.

Things were looking pretty dire to me by that afternoon.

No heat. No proper shower. No hot water, in either the shower or the camper. Not even a charge for my phone or a cup of coffee for my soul. I had peed-on laundry from the previous night, along with muddy, concrete-y clothes from my boys' morning adventure, and no idea where a washer and dryer were, although both Eric and Alex had said they'd find out for me.

It very much felt like a fend-for-yourself kind of day, and my fend wasn't happy to be fending.

Coffee-less, cold, and fairly downhearted I trudged back up the hill with my boys after naps.

At least we could go find Eric whenever we wanted! 🙂

I just had to take a picture that made it look like Eric had poured the entire floor so far all by himself.
They were waiting on the last load of concrete to arrive, which was annoying for them but nice for me and the boys to get to watch. Here's my view of Sebastian watching.And here's Eric's view. Imagine feeling such excitement over gushing concrete. 🙂Eric let the big boys run a trowel along the edges, and of course they loved that. A peek into the future, right there.

See Eric and the three guys in a line behind him? That's his crew, and they poured the whole floor. The two guys in the back are the concrete pump guys. Eric had another concrete crew come a couple days later to pour some more outside concrete. One of the Mexican pump guys said to one of the newcomer concrete guys (also Mexican): "These guys are crazy. They poured eighty yards of concrete with just four guys. I've never seen a white guy work so hard."

Yeah, that's Eric for you. 🙂

Even Emmett got his hands in the concrete eventually.

Alec found one of his favorite things, a pile of rocks.Sebastian's Strider bike that he so dearly loves made it all the way to California.Sunset on those hills was just beautiful.

Here's Eric running his power trowel, the part of the pour that makes him stay out till all hours of the night sometimes. We knew this night wouldn't be any different, so at least that was an expectation and not a disappointment.
It's hard to be a little boy on a cool, big job site when you just want to follow your dad around and ask him all your questions and do whatever he's doing and be with him every moment, but your dad also happens to be the one in charge of the whole operation and can't be answering questions all the time. I thought this moment of Eric taking a minute for Alec at the end of the day was just so sweet.

Before the boys went to bed, Eric told me he'd found out where the laundry was, and we went and knocked at the door of one of the little houses, and an older lady led us back through a bunch of plants along a narrow little path that had music playing by it, and there in a random shed was a washer and dryer.

I was so relieved.

Here I am creeping about in the dark at the weird little laundry shed. It was slightly disconcerting to not even have seen the place in daylight to know what was in the bushes by the path.

When we came back from finding the laundry shed, the lights in the camper were a dull orange. The batteries were almost dead, which was why I couldn't get the generator to start. Eric hooked jumper cables up to one of the work pickups, and before long the generator was running and the heat was working and the lights were bright. Finally.

I put the boys to bed, and Eric was in and out for the rest of the night, literally. He'd come in and lie down between finishes, then trudge back up in the dark to go over the floor again . . . again and again, all night long. He didn't finish till 6am. Thank goodness we were living at the job site! I joked that we would need to just start driving the camper to every smooth-finish pour so we could be with him and so he could have a place to crash between finishes. Thankfully even the longest pours don't usually take that long though.

Goodness, what a day it'd been. What a strange and crazy day.