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.

Redding

After we left Hensley Lake we continued north to Roseville, just outside of Sacramento, for no reason in particular except that it happens to be exactly halfway between Hidden View Campground and Redding. This was just an overnight stay and Roseville happens to be the site of the Placer County Fairgrounds. They supposedly have 60 RV sites although not all of them have hookups. They do not take reservations but there were no events scheduled, it was the middle of the week and we are still well ahead of Memorial Day, so we figured there shouldn't be any problem. Of course, we figured wrong. All of the regular camping sites were full when we got there. What they offered us was a place to park in the grass parking lot next to the gate where there was a 30 amp electrical hookup. What the heck, for just one night we took it.

That night we ate at a Peruvian restaurant called La Huaca, which translates as a burial mound or shrine. The interior was decorated with representations of the Nazca Lines, Peru's most recognizable landmarks. I can't recall ever having eaten at a Peruvian restaurant before. Peruvian cuisine is apparently a blend of Inca traditional foods and those brought in by European interlopers and Asian immigrants. The meats were heavily sauced. There was rice and beans but they tasted nothing like what we're used to from Mexican cooking. We had skewered meat appetizers dipped in a mild, sweet chili sauce which were very good. I had a braised lamb shank and Vicki had Chupe de Camarones, a Peruvian version of cioppino. We even splurged and shared a mango flan for dessert. Everything was delicious and we quite enjoyed ourselves. We will have to be on the lookout for Peruvian restaurants in the future.

The Sundial Bridge

The next morning we fired up the diesel and moved on to Redding. We

Dynamic balance

almost always stop here when we come north but just for overnight. This time we scheduled an extra day so we could look around a little bit. We visited the Sundial Bridge which is a foot bridge over the Sacramento
River completed in 2004 and has since become something of an icon for the city. They had to get something for their 24 million bucks. On one end of the bridge is a 217 foot spar which is connected to the bridge via cables. The spar and the bridge are apparently in dynamic balance. The bridge keeps the spar from falling over and the spar prevents the bridge from collapsing into the Sacramento River. The tower is angled due north which causes it to act as a sundial. They have a dial marked out on the ground so you can read the time. It is exactly accurate only on the summer solstice and the shadow only crosses the dial between 11:00 am and 3:00 pm, so don't get rid of your Timex just yet.

Mt. Shasta from Castle Crags viewpoint

The following day we took a scenic drive through the Shasta National Forest. We drove up I-5 across the bridge above Lake Shasta which was down quite a bit from the drought but there were still a few houseboats visible below us. We stopped at Castle Crags State Park and took a short hike up to the viewpoint where you had a good view of the crags in front and Mt. Shasta off to your right. We had talked about doing this many times in the past but never quite got around to it until now. We then got back on the road and drove up to the junction with Hwy. 89.  This took us to the small town of McCloud where we stopped to take a few pictures.  Then it continued down past Mount Lassen to California 299, which in turn carried us back to Redding.  The forests up here are still fairly green and I thought the whole thing was very nice but Vicki started griping toward the end about how long the drive was.  In reality, the whole loop was only about 175 miles, no longer than the distances I had been driving in the motorhome.  Maybe I should let her drive the Monaco and I'll take over driving the Forester.

The Crags reminded us of the Needles in the Black Hills

Mt Shasta from McCloud

Hidden View

After we left Tehachapi, we got on Highway 99 and continued north. The last time we made this trip, we stayed at the Escapees Park in Coarsegold however this time we decided to try out a Corps of Engineers Park on Hensley Lake called Hidden View. Like pretty much all of the COE projects we have tried, this was a really nice campground with a few relatively minor drawbacks.

Our camp site.

There were 80 campsites of which about half are tent camping only. Of the other half, about two thirds were not long enough to accommodate our new behemoth. Fortunately, the online reservation system let you reserve specific site and told  you for each site how long the parking pad was, so we knew going in that we would fit in the space we reserved. The paved parking pad was sloped quite a bit from side to side and I didn't think the Monaco would be able to level itself but, by golly, it managed.

None of the sites had a sewer connection, but there was a dump station near the entrance and we had both water and electric connections, which was not true for all of the spaces. So, for a couple of days, we considered ourselves reasonably well-off.

Hensley Lake (or what's left of it)

Under more favorable conditions this would have been a really nice place to camp however, like everyplace else in California these days, the area was dry as a bone. The "lake" was down a good 120 to 150 feet. There was a concrete boat ramp but the water level was a good 60-80 feet below the bottom of the ramp so nobody was launching any boats. There was allegedly a swimming beach on the far side of the lake but with a body of water so shallow and with the recent warm weather it was a setup for nigleria so the better part of valor was to stay dry. Still, it was a pretty pleasant area and there were only about a dozen campers scattered around. We could have done worse.

The evening after we arrived we decided to take the back roads up to Coarsegold and Oakhurst. County Road 400 covered the 17 mile distance in only 35 miles of twists and turns. It was typical California with scrub oaks every 40 or 50 feet and tinder-dry grass filling in the in-between spaces. We intended to visit a microbrewery to try some local brew but every seat in the place was taken when we walked in and nobody appeared to be leaving so we turned around and marched out again. For dinner we went to a BBQ joint at the south end of Oakhurst.

An ersatz train hides a 30 foot BBQ

Out front was what sort of looks like an old steam train but was actually a 30 foot long, woodfired barbecue pit where the proprietor slow smokes meats for 12-24 hours before serving. The menu is not extensive consisting of several types of meat, beans, coleslaw and potato salad, and they don't have a liquor license even for beer and wine. Vicki had barbecued chicken and I had beef ribs. Their homemade barbecue sauce was excellent and we considered the meal a success despite the lack of suds.


This morning we packed up and headed out to continue our journey. Since we had no sewer connection in Tehachapi either, we were now carrying four days worth of waste water and definitely needed to stop at the dump on the way out. We have always done this the traditional way using a 3 inch diameter flexible plastic sewer line and gravity drainage. But this rig has something special, an electric macerator and pump. This is a device that is supposed to grind up your solid wastes into a liquid slurry so you can pump it out through a long, flexible, 1 inch hose which is supposed to be much easier and allow you to dump uphill if needed.  We had never tried this so we decided it was about time.

We pulled into the dump station and up to the first drain, then got out and opened up the utility bay door. We unwound the small drain hose and dragged it over to the drain opening, only to discover that it was locked. No problem. There was another drain 20 feet further along and the hose would stretch about 30 or 35 feet so we just stretched it out and put it in the drain opening for the other dump station. We hooked up the macerator pump to the sewer connection in the RV bay, turned on the switch and opened up the drain valve. The macerator motor hummed away gaily and sewage started draining through the hose from our black water tank. For about 20 seconds. Then it stopped.

Apparently our slurry was not slushy enough and the hose had become hopelessly plugged. So now there we were with the hose from the macerator filled with raw sewage and no way to empty it out. This hose is a small enough diameter that you cannot get the fluid to drain even from the segment below the blockage. It is like a straw with your finger held over the end of it.

So far, everything was still contained but we had no way to escape without a major sewage disaster.  I finally closed the black tank valve and disconnected the macerator which immediately dumped a couple of pints of raw sewage, one of them onto the ground and the other into our utility bay. By and large, this really didn't solve our problems. We still had a hose full of nastiness we had no good way to deal with. I finally took out my Swiss Army knife and cut the hose where it connected to the useless machine. Now I could hold it up and seperate it from the rig but the material inside the hose still wasn't going anywhere. Unless I lowered the cut end of the hose too much in which case it would squirt little jets of liquid feces.  On Vicki's jacket sleeve as it turned out.  I was getting more popular by the minute.  Finally, I took the flush hose from the dump site, pressed up against the end of the macerator hose and had Vicki turn on the water. This finally produced enough pressure to dislodge the blockage and we were able to drain the hose out.

I immediately dumped the offending hose in the nearest trashcan. The macerator motor is still bolted to the bottom of the utility bay but it won't be as soon as I can get some tools out to work on it since we are certainly never going to use it again and it is just taking up space. We hosed out the Bay with large volumes of water and hosed down all of the places where the sewage had spilled on the ground. This created a small sewage lake around the locked drain opening but we discovered that by standing on the handle we could get the cover to open just enough to allow a trickle of drainage and over the course of about 20 min. were able to drain away the sewage and get the area reasonably clean again. We then pulled forward to the other dump station, hooked up our old three-inch sewer hose and finished draining our tanks the old-fashioned way, using the miracle of gravity. So much for new technology.