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.

Heading North

Well, the Rains are on the road again and since we are back to traveling, I guess I will fire up this travel blog once more. Things may be a little disjointed at first since there were a few stops last fall that we never covered, so I may go back and fill in some blanks over the next few weeks. We will see what catches my fancy.

The new home (along with new Forester toad)

We spent the winter in Aguanga,CA at Jojoba Hills, the co-op RV Park we joined the previous year. Many of the readers of the blog are members there, so I have avoided spending too much time describing it. I may do an entry on it somewhere down the line. The most important piece of interim news for those who are not aware is that we have upgraded our living accommodations. Now, instead of a 36 foot Allegro we are driving a 45 foot 2010 Monaco Dynasty. After traveling with Christopher all last summer, the Allegro was feeling a mite cramped. The new rig is considerably more spacious and elegant.

A little more spacious and elegant

We hit the highway on May 3 and headed north, aiming to spend this summer in the Pacific Northwest. Our first stop was in Tehachapi, which was also our first stop when we first started full-timing 2 years ago. It is a pleasant little mountain town whose claims to fame are a spiral train track known as the Tehachapi Loop and the lovely state prison. See my previous ruminations on Tehachapi here. We stayed in the Mountain Valley RV Park which is right next to the local airport. You might expect this to be a problem but it really wasn't. During the two days we were there I think one plane landed. There are a bunch of gliders tied down next to the runway so I suspect this airport is used mostly for weekend recreation.

The last time we were here we noted the presence of the local railway museum but did not take the time to go inside. We decided this time to go ahead and take the tour. The museum is housed inside what is supposedly the old historic train station however this is kind of a myth. The old train station had become considerably run down back in 2006 and the decision was made to restore it and install the museum. They had a bunch of old railroad artifacts in storage and spent two years of all volunteer work fixing up the building. Then, just before they moved all the stuff in, some local boys playing with fireworks managed to set the newly restored structure on fire,

The Tehachapi Depot Museum - not really that historic

reducing everything to ashes except for one end wall. There were a few fortunate aspects to this story. First of all, the exhibits were still all in storage and were not damaged. Second, the building was a standard Southern Pacific rail station design, so they had access to the original plans and material specifications. Thirdly, they had the good sense to insure the place so the rebuilding expense was covered. So they wound up building an entirely new building on the same site from the same plans and the station you see today is not really the original.

Did they utilize the one remaining wall? Well, sort of. It was too fragile to use as the end wall of the new building so they actually encased it inside the new wall that they built. So that 100-year-old wall is still there, you just can't see it.

Station master's desk

This is a tiny town and the railroad museum is about what you would expect under the circumstances. A ticket window, the station master's desk, some train signals, the usual assortment. What made this museum stand out was the two little-old-lady volunteer docents who personally toured us through the building and answered any questions we had. They were eager to please. I probably could have gotten them to make us tea if we had wanted some. They, more than anything, made this an above average museum experience.

Among the nuggets of information we got at the museum was the fact that an average of 30-50 trains a day go around the Tehachapi Loop however Monday is always track maintenance day

Tehachapi Loop (Aeriel photo from the museum)

and no trains would be allowed on that section of rail until three o'clock that afternoon. I wanted to try and get a picture of a train going around the loop this trip and figured there would probably be multiple trains waiting in line to go through the signals after three. So we drove up to the lookout point above the loop at about 3:30 and kept watch, but after waiting at the lookout point for 45 min. I finally gave up and we drove back to camp. What the heck, we will probably be through this way again at some point.  If you really want to get a feel for this engineering marvel, someone has posted a video of a train going around the loop using a helicopter drone here.

Here is my photo of the loop sans train