Dianne and I both agreed that it was finally time to take a day off. After eating lunch for breakfast, we hung around our room with the balcony door open so we could hear the surf pounding the driftwood-strewn shoreline.
I worked on Dan stuff while Dianne worked on Dianne stuff. Late in the afternoon, we walked a quarter mile over to the Battery Point lighthouse…
…then we came back to enjoy another dull sunset from our balcony.
Tomorrow, it’s off to Oregon where the gas should be a little cheaper than it is here in California.
Back in the car, we twisted up the Pacific Coast on California Highway 1.
I have friends who grew up with numerous older sisters, and buddy, I now know what it must have been like. In the car, I was only under the direction of two women.
From the dashboard, I had the female-voiced Subaru GPS navigation system constantly telling me where to go…
…and from the copilot’s seat I had The Wife telling me how to get there.
“You’re driving like an old man,” she’d tell me. “The speed limit’s 35 and you’re only going 50. Step on it!”
At least the Subie never got angry when I failed to perform as directed.
With permission from both my female overlords, I made several stops along the highway to photograph driftwood-covered beaches…
…ocean surf…
…the local wildlife…
…and to make other stops as requested…
Our route took us along the edge of the redwoods…
…to our hotel in Crescent City, California.
We checked into our room on the third (top) floor.
…which featured a cozy little balcony…
…where we could sit and watch the sun drop into the ocean…
…and see the nearby lighthouse signaling ships at sea…
…all of which we did after enjoying a seafood dinner [yes, yet another food photo] in the nearly empty hotel restaurant.
Fortunately, no bears broke into our car at Camp Richardson. We grabbed some coffee from the lobby, hauled our toys back to the car and set out for the California coast.
Our route took us up the west side of Lake Tahoe. It was on a bicycle trip around this alpine pond that Dianne and I met. I was leading a Sierra Club bicycle trip around Tahoe with two of my buddies and Dianne was the only one to sign up.
One of the most scenic spots along Tahoe’s western shore is Emerald Bay.
There’s a nice pull-off there where for a mere $6, we could park for 30 minutes and admire the view.
We continued around Tahoe and into Truckee where we had breakfast at a longtime favorite restaurant located there.
It occupies a narrow, cubbyhole site downtown, hence the “Squeeze In” name.
They specialize in omelettes. I opted for the Lake Taco version – three eggs stuffed with Chorizo sautéed with red onions, tomatoes and bell peppers with Jack cheese. Yumm!
From Truckee, we turned onto Interstate 80 and drove over Donner Pass. Following the Subaru’s GPS instructions, we exited onto California Highway 20…
…and followed that across the Central Valley and over the coastal hills now gilded with autumn grasses.
Along the way, we got to enjoy numerous construction zones.
Arriving in Fort Bragg, we checked into our motel…
…and headed off for dinner at a seaside, open-air restaurant in the fog and mist…
…where we enjoyed sourdough bread bowls filled with delicious clam chowder.
Our visitation with the in-laws over, we loaded up our toys and headed out for breakfast. Our destination was the nearby Cowboy’s Cafe, a favorite of Dianne’s relatives.
There, I splurged and ordered a two-egg breakfast with a big slab of chicken-fried steak smothered in white gravy. The restaurant was great, but I’m afraid that this sort of Texas-style breakfast will never rate high on my favorite’s list.
Dianne left her laptop at her sister’s house in Carson City, so we exited town by heading 15 miles north to Carson. Computer back in the car, we decided to drive the scenic route back by way of Genoa with a stop at Mormon Station State Historic Park.
Nevada’s first permanent, non-native settlement holds a replica of the original trading post, built in 1851.
After a short visit there, we drove up through the town of South Lake Tahoe and on to our lodging at the Camp Richardson Hotel, an edifice that’s more than a century old.
Like many old hotels, it featured a spacious lobby…
…and small, rather spartan rooms.
Dinner that evening was at Camp Richardson’s Grove restaurant, which sits on the shore of Lake Tahoe…
…offering views like this.
They warned us that bears frequent the area and warned us to make sure we took all of the food out of the car, which, of course, we did. The only bear we encountered, however, was this guy standing across the street from the hotel.
We booked three nights at the Quality Inn to allow time for a good visit with the in-laws. We arrived on Sunday afternoon at their home in Gardnerville, Nevada, where we had dinner with Dianne’s parents, Dianne’s sister, Nancy, and her husband, Kelly.
On Monday, Dianne and her mother went shopping while I hung out at the motel processing photos and just relaxing.
Tuesday was a more exciting day. Dianne and her sister took their 95-year-old mother up to Lake Tahoe for a picnic. Accompanying the more elderly females were Nancy’s daughter, Christa, and her two teenage daughters. Four generations celebrating a girls’ day out.
While the ladies were having fun, I took the Subaru into Carson City to have the oil changed. On my way out of town, I stopped into the bank building where I first worked in Nevada some 50 years ago. It was Nevada National Bank (not Plumas) back then.
I still have nightmares about those days long ago when I actually had to work for a living.
After breakfast burritos at Riva’s Mexican Grill (which sits directly across the road from our motel), the second day of our Left Coast adventure involved a 300+ mile drive across the state of Nevada.
We were traveling on U.S. Highway 50, which decades ago Life Magazine declared to be the “Loneliest Road in America.”
It was Sunday morning and traffic was light with miles of open highway sporting nary another vehicle in front nor behind us.
The landscape offered strips of north-south running mountain ranges separated by wide-open valleys or basins.
Hillsides displayed slopes of dark barren rock occasionally blanketed with scattered patches of piñon and juniper trees.
The basins between the ranges were rife with sagebrush, rabbit brush and the occasional cow.
While I prefer slickrock canyons or glacier-clad mountains, I do appreciate the stark beauty to this part of the Great Basin Desert.
We stopped for photos on a hillside above Austin, Nevada. I watched as vehicles pulling travel trailers passed by.
While it’s nice to be able to sleep in our own little cabin on wheels, I was certainly enjoying not having to drag our trailer along on this trip!
We arrived in Minden, Nevada, and checked into our room at the Quality Inn motel. Unlike other Quality Inns, this one does not offer breakfast, the room lacks an in-room coffee maker, there’s no alarm clock and the shower-mounted shampoo dispenser was bone dry. Our quarters may be more spacious here, but I enjoyed the room at the Grand Central in Ely far more.
We hauled our toys out of the car, locked the room, and headed over to have dinner with the in-laws.
We’re off on another camping trip, this one in the Subaru. On this trip, we will endure thee weeks of overnight camping in a series of motels and hotels as we proceed up the Left Coast. No trailer to pull. No tent to erect. No meals to cook.
The first leg of our adventure was the drive across Utah from Fruita, Colorado, to Ely, Nevada.
Our first stop was in Green River, Utah, to buy a pair of watermelons to share with the in-laws.
Then it was on west through the rugged reef of rock known as the San Rafael Swell.
We exited the interstate in Salina, Utah, for lunch at Mom’s Café.
From there, we followed U.S. 50 to Scipio where we bought MAGA-priced fuel at a Flying Pilot station along I-15. It will be more expensive as we head west.
We continued west on U.S. 50 into the emptiness of western Utah.
While not spectacular, the landscape offers a feeling of spacious openness…
…and out here, it’s miles between civilization and gas stations, something that freaks out first time visitors from the East. It’s also miles between formal potty stops.
We finally pulled into Ely and drove straight to our motel, which is owned by Dianne’s nephew…
…and checked into our room. It’s not the Four Seasons, but it’s clean, comfortable and priced right.
Dinner will be a bag of popcorn and a bottle of wine.
We were meeting some of our old A-frame camper friends for a week of camping in Golden Gate Canyon State Park, which lies in the mountains above Golden, Colorado. We no longer own the A-frame, but we still love camping with our old friends.
Since we had not used the current camper for a couple of months, we arranged to take it down for a night in Robb State Park in Fruita to re-sanitize the freshwater tank.
I went out to start the truck and the starter wouldn’t crank. Dead battery. I pulled out our charger, topped up the battery and it started right up. I pulled the trailer down to the campground, filled the freshwater tank with bleach water and locked up the trailer. Back into the truck, I hit the starter and nothing happened. Battery was dead after sitting for only an hour.
Thinking there might be a problem with Tighty’s charging system, I took the truck down to the Nissan dealership. They checked it out with their state-of-the-art battery testing equipment.
and declared deader than a smelt.
So, I paid them for a nice new $500 battery. At least now, the truck worked, and I had only lost half a day of trip preparation time.
Plans were to get up with the sun, finish loading the trailer and take off for the hills by 10:00 in the morning.
We actually hit the road a bit after high noon. That’s when the next issue popped up. Our trailer tire monitors were not working.
Figuring it was just the button batteries in the tire sending units, we stopped by our neighborhood True Value hardware and bought four new batteries. I installed them all in the hardware store parking lot and the system still didn’t work.
It was now 1:00 p.m. in the afternoon…
…and we had a good five-hour drive to make it to our reserved campsite at Golden Gate Canyon State Park.
We arrived and found our campsite to be short and slanted with the starboard wheels 3½ inches lower than the port-side wheels. Adding to the problem was that the slideout had to fit into a tight space between a tree and the pole with the electrical hookup connections.
We positioned the trailer, placed stacking blocks under the low side wheels and slowly drove forward. The blocks slid, refusing to stay in place. We tried twice more with the same luck. It was now getting dark. We resorted to Plan B.
I fashioned a long ramp of blocks and drove around the block. Reentering our site, I pulled the trailer up onto the ramp. The ramp stayed in place and the trailer now sat nearly level left to right. We disconnected the truck, leveled the trailer front to back and turned in. Instead of devouring the planned bowls of chili for dinner, we decided to just nuke some popcorn and call it a night.
That’s when we discovered the microwave wasn’t working. It appeared to have no power. The trailer was plugged into 120-volt current, all of our outlets were working fine, and the microwave breaker hadn’t tripped. Threats cast and curses mumbled at the appliance did nothing to solve the problem. So, we just got out some crackers and cheese, opened a box of Argentine red wine…
…and vowed to make the best of things. Tomorrow will be repair day.
The first thing to fix was the microwave. I figured it was just a disconnected power cord, and after removing four screws and lifting the unit out, I discovered that was exactly the problem.
Dianne, being a member of the female persuasion, decided she needed to clean the dust off the top of the unit – the part that sits unseen inside of the cabinet.
I plugged the cord back into the outlet, lifted the now dust-free unit back up and screwed it black in place. The blue “clock” indicator light remained still lit, assuring me that it’s still plugged into the 120-volt outlet.
My next project was to see if I could fix the Tire Pressure Monitoring System (TPMS). Our aftermarket, Tire Minder unit, is a four-part system. Sensors on the tire valve stems measure the tire pressure and broadcast the readings to a sending unit mounted near the front of the trailer. A receiving unit inside the truck receives the signal and sends it to an app on my cell phone, which screams at me if the pressure readings on any of the tires drops below a preset level.
I figured the sending unit near the front of the trailer may have had its power cord disconnected when I was working on some other electronics in the same compartment. Inspecting the wires, all seemed to be intact, but without my wiring tools and clips, there wasn’t much I could do. Repair of the TPMS will have to wait until we return home.
Next project will be repairing the large window blind in the dining room. These accordion blinds have been something of a hemorrhoid. I’d love to replace them with something different, but the wife seems to be not fond of that idea. We’ll see…
Done. Blind now stays up. At least it does right now. The strings on these accordion blinds break with regularity, so I suspect it won’t be long and I’ll be doing some more blind repairing.
Now, time to finish my coffee and contemplate what to fix next.
It was Wednesday, our third full day in camp. Anything needing repairing today will just have to wait until tomorrow. Today, we were going for a hike.
Our destination was the remains of the Tallman Ranch, built in the 1870s by Swedish immigrant Anders Tallman. The total hike down the Buffalo Trail would be around four miles with 600-feet of vertical.
We drove Gap Road to the trailhead where road crews were out installing new washboard ridges in the gravel roadway.
The hike to the ranch was mostly downhill on what was once a road. Along the roadway, we saw gilded aspen and passed the unnamed remains of a former homestead.
A fork in the trail led to the Tallman Ranch, whose buildings are still remarkably well preserved.
The home was locked, but we tested the front porch swing…
…and walked down to a small dam-built pond that covers the Tallmans’ old potato patch.
We followed the Mountain Lion Trail back to the Buffalo Trail and began retracing our steps back to the trailhead. We tried to spot the Phillips Homestead which the Park’s Historic Places brochure indicated was in the area, but no luck.
We took it slow and easy on the walk back to the car. The foliage and the terrain provided a glorious setting for ogling the beauty of nature. I’ve often wondered if the pioneers who lived out here appreciated the setting’s beauty or did they only see the landscape as an array of obstacles to overcome.
A word of warning to anyone following in our footsteps. The park’s trail names are lies. Approaching the trailhead, we spotted a few rabbits…
but on the entire length of the Buffalo Trail, we spotted nary a single bison. We also failed to see a cougar on the Mountain Lion Trail, which was fine. Maybe tomorrow we’ll head down to the park’s visitor center and file a complaint.
