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California

Mission accomplished. Not the mission of welcoming the new baby Erin. That
didn’t happen. Jacob hasn’t gone into seclusion, but Yousun and Baby Erin
have. We don’t get to see her until some other time. Well, they get to do
what they choose to do, and we get to accommodate. We did get the bassinette delivered. We met up with Jacob at Mike and
Katie’s in San Jose, had a nice visit with them and kids Jack and Allison,
and passed on the baton. We left about lunch time, and headed south for
Pinnacles National Monument. What a gorgeous drive! The California Savannah.
Gently rolling hills covered with grass so dry and brown it’s crispy, dotted
with California Live Oaks. Inland. Hot. A hundred degrees. We saw the
yellow-billed magpies again, a California Specialty. You can’t see them
anywhere but here, but once you get to the right place, they are conspicuous
and common. Just like black billed magpies everywhere else. We have gone all these years without ever seeing California Quail. Well, we
saw them as kids, but we havent seen them since we started couting birds.
Today we saw fifty of them. Not fifty, one at a time, but a giant flock of
fifty of them all around us, clicking, and calling, and clucking. They
nurdle and chortle, scurry about, and kick and scratch dirt and grass into
the air. They are so cute! They are so cute, I want to chase them down to
hug and cuddle them. I refrain. The perfect feeding station. The oak tree extends over the road. Acorns
fall from the tree onto the road. Cars drive past and crush the acorns.
Quail scurry out onto the road and eat the acorns. Not many cars drive
past, so the quail get all the time they need to eat.

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California

Wednesday. Up at seven. Stalled until nine. Drove away from Sacramento, skirted the
bay area, past San Jose, over the hill to Santa Cruz, down the coast highway
to Moss Landing. We were checked into the RV park by noon. Solid traffic.
It was like driving through central Denver. For three hours. For one
hundred sixty miles. We were prepared for the RV Park. RV parks in the wide-open spaces can be
spacious. RV Parks where real estate is more dear, like at the beach, can
be much tighter. We measure them by the average width between spaces.
Spacious parks can have average site widths of thirty or forty feet. Tight
parks will have widths of fifteen or twenty feet. That’s what we expected.
Something like a parking lot. That’s not what we got. The spaces are
fairly close, it is high rent real estate, but what a beautiful park! Right
on the peninsula next to the marina. A five minute walk to the beach and
the ocean waves. Nice level cement pads. Grass. Landscaping. Seagulls.
Shorebirds. Pelicans. Blue sky. Seventy degrees. A light ocean breeze.
Ooh. We’ll have to stay here a few days. So what are we going to do? Jacob and Yousun are in no hurry to get the
bassinette. What are we going to do with ourselves until they decide they
want the bassinette delivered? Let’s see. We’re settled in a campground at
Elkhorn Slough. It’s one of the top birding spots in the country. It’s one
of the top paddling spots in the country. We have our birding binoculars.
We have our kayaks. What can we possibly do to fill the time? We’ll have
to think of something.

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California

Tuesday. We did something different. Judy did all the guy stuff this morning. She
did all her stuff too, so really that means she did everything. She
disconnected the dump hose, the fresh water line, and the electrical. She
put the slides in, set us down off the jacks, and reinflated the suspension.
She released the air brake, put it in gear, and drove us out of our site,
out of the campground, and down the highway before she pulled over. She
doesn’t really want to drive this big thing, but she wants to make sure she
knows how to drive it. She can drive it. She can even drive it towing the
car. We’re getting close to California, so we planned out the remainder of our
trip so we won’t get stuck driving the big rig through any large city’s rush
hour traffic. Winnemucca to Reno. Past Lake Tahoe. Over Donner Pass.
Interstate all the way. An easy day. We’ll stop before we get to
Sacramento, then wait until the next morning after rush-hour, and have an
easy day down to the coast. It was a good plan. Until we forgot the part about stopping before we got
to Sacramento. We picked out a place to stop for the night on the other
side of Sacramento. The west side. We arrived on the east side of
Sacramento at 4:30 today. Oh well. This rush-hour experience will help us
keep our focus on the rest of the days we drive in California. Stop before
rush hour! It was a tough drive. I don’t know what they do with their gasoline tax
revenue in California, but they don’t appear to spend any of it maintaining
Interstate 80. What a rough road! And then, rush hour in Sacramento!
That’s it! Don’t leave before 9am. Make sure we stop by 3pm. No
exceptions. Not if there are any big cities involved. A warm evening in Sacramento. Over a hundred. I think the surge protector protected us tonight. I plugged it in to shore
power. It went through its usual set-up routine. That takes about two
minutes. Then it started rattling and buzzing until I turned it off. I
reset everything and tried it again. Same result. I moved it to another
post and got clean current, so I plugged in there with an extension cord.
The guy from the Park office came to check the outlet with a meter and found
it providing low-voltage. Yea for the surge protector. It kept us from
scrambling or frying our electronics on low voltage.
Rags the cat disappeared. He hasn’t been very good at escaping lately. In
fact, he never got out the entire trip, last trip. We searched all over.
No luck. We looked inside again. No luck. It wasn’t too alarming. He
always gets out, and he always stays close by. Finally, we found him. Judy
had opened a cabinet door under the dinette seat to get out her step stool a
few hours before. When she was through, she closed the cabinet. There he
was, perfectly happy, sitting alone in the dark, quietly waiting for someone
to open the door and let him out again.