Californee, Here We Come!

It was our last night at Seven Feathers and it rained. It was quiet when we went to sleep, but by 2:30 AM it was raining loud enough to wake us up. It's a good thing we had decided to sleep in the living room again as it was dripping into the pan on the bed...

The picture on the left is one I took the first day we were here of the little stream that flows next to the campground. You have to look very hard to see the water. I took the picture on the right just before we left. It's still not a great deal of water, but it's sure a lot more than it was a week ago!

This is what Interstate 5 was like when we left this morning --

As we left the mountain passes and came into California (and were stopped with all incoming traffic at the inspection station checking for citrus fruit) we began to see blue skies --

Our first glimpse of Mount Shasta --

The closer we got, the bluer the sky --

Mount Shasta loomed cold and beautiful on the horizon when we stopped at the Weed Rest Area --

The trees in California are still golden, holding their color. The ones in the NW have already dropped the biggest share of their leaves and the forests no longer show the contrasts.

Interstate 5 goes south below the Cascade Mountains into the valley between the Coast Range and the Sierras. We began to see flat land fruit and nut trees AND olive groves --

We drove south until about 3:30, ending up at Old Orchard RV Park in Orland where we have stayed many times before. It's a small park and the people who run it are elderly. Since we didn't come this way last year, we weren't sure it would still be open... We'll spend a couple of nights here then continue moseying towards Arizona. We're thinking we'll most likely try to be there December 1st.

A Catch-up Day

Mount Shasta was out in all of its glory yesterday as we drove south on Interstate 5. It always surprises me how mountainous southern Oregon is. We didn't leave too early as the weather forecast had said there would be black ice early in the morning. By the time we came through the several passes the roads were pretty much bare and dry, though there was as much as a foot of snow in places.

In the Siskiyou Mountains, you go through the highest pass on I5 at 4315 feet, then pop out into the high valleys of northern California with Mount Shasta shining in the sun.

We came as far as Orland, California yesterday and are staying at Old Orchard RV Park. We had stayed here when we came through last March. Old Orchard is an older RV Park with a somewhat unusual layout -- the 52 pull-through sites are all in a large circle. You drive around the outside of the circle and pull into your site. When it's time to leave, you just pull out into the inner circle and drive out. The center and the outside of the circle are all planted with walnut and almond trees of the original orchard. It was very pretty when we were here in the spring, but of course now the trees are all bare.

We'll spend today here, catching up on chores and being lazy. We need to plan our route to Arizona and make some plans -- albeit in Jello -- for the next couple of weeks.