Yesterday, I must admit, was a pretty discouraging day. Ken said, "Tomorrow will be better. The trip will be shorter, we'll get an earlier start, and the roads will be better." He was right on all points. We pulled out of Pea Soup Andersen's parking lot at 9:30 a.m. Our first stop was right across the street, at the TA, where we filled up on diesel before heading north on I-5.
The entire trip was on I-5, except for fuel stops (ka-ching!), until we arrived in Redding. The Elks Lodge is right on the Sacramento River Trail, so we took our evening walk along the trail--quite a difference from walking around the gas stations and parking lots in Santa Nella!
The first thing we did after arriving and filling out the paperwork in the bar was clean the bugs off the front cap. (Well, okay, it was the second thing, after having a friendly beer and chatting with the other Elks at the bar.) The bugs had had a couple of days to bake on, so they weren't about to come off easily. Some of them will be there until we have a longer ladder or hire someone to wash the rig!
We planned to insert a photo here of our Excel parked at this Elks Lodge, just to show the contrast. Unfortunately, we don't have any such photos. It must have been later that Ken started making a point of taking a photo of every campsite.
The Sacramento River is beautiful. We criss-crossed it on the trip north. Tomorrow we'll get the bikes down and take a ride along the river.
We are continuing to struggle with clearance issues. Our skid wheels grind along the pavement nearly every time we enter a driveway, even one with an almost imperceptible slope. We have to be very careful to avoid crossing a dip at an angle--that leads to the truck rails impacting the underside of the fifth wheel--and we move extremely slowly in all such situations. We couldn't back as far as we would have liked into our current space, because we were afraid the skirt would hit the parking bumper at the rear of the space.
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