California

Team Toto traverses tall peaks, rests in Yreka

April 9, 2015 By drpaddle 2 Comments

Over the mountains yesterday (most of them, anyway). The weather gods were smiling on us: dry, calm, wonderfully clear it was. Traffic fairly light for I-5. I think I counted six passes with their associated climbs and long downhill grades.

Apparently we survived, finding our way to the Yreka (California) RV Park.

Walk around the rig long enough, find the one angle that includes a bit of nature, then crop as needed. Presto! The RV park looks altogether tolerable.

Going up the hills worked out fine. TinMan slipped down to third gear when needed, and we were able to keep up our stately 55-mph speed except on the very steepest parts (down to 50). I think I could have leaned on the accelerator some more and TinMan would have obliged with second gear and a lot of revs, but it did not seem worth the gas or the strain. Much of the time the curves and traffic would keep us down at 50 (even a bit less) anyway.

Interesting to watch TinMan’s estimated gas mileage for the tank fluctuate. We averaged 12.5 in the mountains — better than I expected — but by the time we approached each summit the number would be down to 10.something.

Going downhill was my greatest concern before we left in the morning. I knew it was important to let the engine and transmission keep our speed down, so we wouldn’t over-use (and overheat) the brakes. I wasn’t at all sure, however, about how to time my downshift. For a 4% grade? A 5 or a 6? At the crest of the hill, or somewhere on the way down?

I got my answers in plenty of time. I-5 through the Siskiyou mountains in southern Oregon has been laid out, it would seem, for my education. Some smaller uphill grades showed me what engine RPM I could expect at 55 mph in 3rd gear, so I knew it would be completely comfortable to downshift into 3rd whenever needed.

The first few downgrades taught me: no downshift for 4%… downshift for 5% grades if they’re long… downshift for 6% grades at the top of the hill. Yes, we used brakes, but very little. Just as it should be. I watched the taillights on other RVs to get a sense for their brake usage — I think we used ours less. It all felt very controlled, comfortable, safe. Perfect day for my initiation into mountain driving with Toto following us.

At 4,.310 feet above sea level, Siskiyou Summit, just north of the California border, was the highest pass we traversed. The most challenging, from a driving perspective, was south of that, in California: the Anderson Grade Summit. Only 3100 feet high, but steeper, longer grades all the same, with plenty of sharper curves. I-5 saved the best for last.

My lessons for the day were complete. We overnighted here in Yreka, and today we’ll do our last bit of mountain driving for a while, in Shasta County, then onto our destination at Folsom Lake State Recreation Area. Where there are snakes.

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The separation is in the preparation

April 5, 2015 By drpaddle 6 Comments

Tinman and Toto in the driveway, ready to head out. Almost.

TinMan and Toto are positioned to head for California.

We’re preparing for our longest trip ever. 11 days, 10 nights, six different campsites. Yippee!

Around our home turf there is a young NFL quarterback who is just super. Knows his stuff, wins games, goes to Super Bowls, the whole thing. He says The Separation is in the Preparation. He says it a lot. He believes it. It seems to be working, and he is about to get a sizable raise.

Sooz should have been an NFL quarterback. She lives to plan, and then re-plan, and so on. I, too, place a high value on planning, but I don’t so much like to do it. But, as a former IT project manager type, Sooz is always casting about for something to plan. So when a trip is in the offing, I’m really enjoying some fantastic ROI on my life partnership. One of my best investments ever.

Okay, planning. We have been planning our upcoming California trip for many months. We’ve done lots of online research into RV parks and campgrounds, mountain passes, spring weather patterns and some other stuff.

You don’t go to visit people in Granite Bay, California in the middle of summer. It’s too hot. Even they think it’s too hot, and they live there. So you visit in the spring or fall, when it will only be 80 (F) in the daytime and cool at night.

Our trip to California won’t be like, well, your trip to California, assuming you actually want to see the place. We’ve been there (lived there for most of our lives), so, yeah, Yosemite, Marina Del Rey, Hollywood, whatever, who cares. (We will admit to wanting to see certain places in California, but they’re more about special times in our lives and not so much concerned with places tourists, or campers, want to go).

Instead, this strategically planned trip will give us some quality time with family and friends, and some good experience with Toto. What sorts of experiences?

Mountain passes. We’ll be going over six baby ones and one young adult — that one only a little over 4,000 feet– so just challenging enough for us less experienced trailerist types.
Weather. We’ve tried to time this trip to be after most mountain snow in the passes, and after heaviest rain in the northwest, but before it gets too hot in central California. As of this morning’s weather forecasts, we should miss snow in the passes on the way down — but we may have to delay a day while en route. Day 2 of our trip will involve the four highest passes, and the forecast keeps moving back and forth regarding snow for that day. If we know there will be snow in those passes we will delay a day and spend some quality time in our first RV park. We have snow chains for both TinMan and Toto — we’re required to carry them — but we don’t want to use them.
RV parks. We’ve never stayed in one. But we want to get down to our first California destination in just three days, so we’ve found a couple of RV parks to try on the way down, and we have pull-through spaces reserved. We hope they’re sufficiently level that we don’t have to unhitch on these first two overnights. Don’t want to do that. We’ll be staying in two more (different) RV parks on our slightly different route back home.
Dry camping — another first for us. We’ll stay two nights at Doran Regional Park in Bodega Bay, CA… no hookups! We’ll have to fill up our water tank a bit when we arrive, rely on our solar to keep the batteries happy, and use the dump station when we head back north. We paid extra for the higher-capacity, two-battery setup, and for the solar panel and controller, so it’s about time we try ’em out.
Mobile drudgery. Hard as I try, I’m still not retired, and my clients want me to write stuff for them. I’ll have the laptop, the smartphone-with-wifi-hotspot feature, and a spot in the TotoLounge to work. I also picked up a cellular booster and antenna that had just been replaced by a new model, and we’ll see how that works before I go drilling holes in Toto’s roof.I think there’s a white paper wanting me to write it during this trip, and there may be other stuff. If I can focus on the work, it will inform our plans for future travel before the eventual retirement thing happens.

So there. Lots of new experiences to try. Fortunately we’re a strong team, with complementary skills, and I think it will be good. We’ll find out.

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Still in the powder room, but not for long

April 4, 2015 By drpaddle Leave a Comment

At last, we’re going on a trip — our longest to-date. In a few days we’ll head out to California’s Central Valley, where family members are having birthdays and we are going to help celebrate. We’ll also head to the coast to get a snootful of ocean breeze and meet up with a longtime friend who is also Wally’s human breeder. That doesn’t sound right, and I’m working through how to say it better. At any rate she is a Cairn terrier breeder and one of her bitches gave birth to Wally nearly seven years ago. Wow that doesn’t sound much better. Anyway you’ll learn more about her in a few days if you stop by. Here, I mean.

New shower curtain. New nonskid grid thing on the floor. Shower caddie on the wall and NOT on the floor. Progress.

It turns out you just can’t show your new trailer to family if it still has a stock vinyl shower curtain and an unadorned shower floor. So today I installed a kind-of non-skid grid onto the floor, and a quick-dry shower curtain too.

I also “tested” the re-installed Command shower caddie. This time I let the sticky things cure for three days before I got any weight involved. I think it will work better. Note that I still haven’t worked up the courage to put the shampoo/conditioner combo in there. Baby steps.

The shower flooring is made of Duragrid tiles. They promise to help keep our shower clean and safe. I’m not sure how the clean part works. Showers are hard to clean — it’s a fact of life everyone must face after the age of 30.

Duragrid tile shower mat, installed. In the shower.

Just look at the fine workmanship, and the tasteful, understated, bland beige.

The tiles are easy to interlock unless you try to do it wrong, and then it’s quite the challenge. I only got half-way through the project before I figured out the right (and easy) way to connect them. Perhaps there were some instructions I failed to read.

The tiles come in 12-inch squares and, unless you order the optional 8-square-foot shower floor from Escape Trailer Industries ($850) (not really), you have to do some trimming. I ended up trimming a couple of inches off one side and adding to another side. The trimming involved a utility knife, some kitchen shears (don’t tell Sooz), and some difficulty with the dogs’ water bowl, which is always in your way no matter where you are or what you’re doing in our kitchen.

There are now thousands of tiny Duragrid bits on the kitchen floor, and I think we’ll be discovering them for months. Yes, I used the mini Shark vac to clean up my mess. But I’m certain there are more bits down there on the floor.

One thing about grids of any kind underfoot: Tyler won’t walk on them. If he sees anything like that in the street or on a dock, he walks around. Doesn’t. Like. Grids. We’re pretty sure he wasn’t going to spend much time in the powder room anyway.

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