We've also added a few more pics to our photo album for this trip.
Taking a travel day off while in Oroville, we did a day trip to the small city of Chico (pop approx 87k) about 35 minutes away. Easy drive and lots of easy parking downtown without the trailer. Downtown Chico was a nice find. There is a university right downtown so there are lots of young folks with the associated eateries, cool shops and coffee places. After parking we headed for a Peet's Coffee place and sat by the window to read and watch the Chico world go by. Very nice.
Wandering around Chico, we came across a neat store that houses the National Yo-Yo Museum and store. Who knew? End result, the kid in Brian had to buy a spiffy new high density plastic "Velocity" yoyo. It used to be a yoyo was just two little pieces of wood joined together with a wooden dowel with a string wrapped around. NOT ANY MORE... these things are high tech gadgets with adjustable gaps, friction, special string and god knows what else. It's a good thing this place is near a university as it may require a full degree to figure out even the basics of tricks... like "walk the dog". We'll see how many times Brian can bop himself in the head with this one. A young man who helped us was a previous "national champion" so he did some yoyo demoing for us. He had that yoyo flying all over the place and not once did he hit himself in the head (or nuts for that matter). This pic is from their website...
Continuing our wandering we came across some excellent art galleries and other stores all within a few blocks of the edge of the university campus. We also discovered (although we might have known before and had just forgotten) that Chico is home to the Orient and Flume glass works company. We stopped in at their shop and museum too admire their exceptionally fine glass art works. The lady there was quite interested when Kris described a piece of their art work we purchased over 30 years ago. Back then we paid about $40 for the piece. Similar works today are in the $300-400 range.
Returning to the KOA at Oroville, we decided, what the heck, the casino buffet dinner last night was pretty good so let's do a repeat. This time though the casino video poker machines cheated us out of $30 before we headed for the buffet. At least it was quite good again.
After Oroville we had planned a relatively short drive southwest to Clear Lake. Clear Lake is supposed to be the largest fresh water lake in the state and the pictures of a RV park near Kelseyville looked pretty good. The short route was around the bottom of the lake but we decided, it being a very nice day, that we would drive around the top and stop somewhere along the way for a lakeside lunch. Although it is a relatively pretty drive, it was a major disappointment. The entire lakefront appears to be privately owned. We saw only one small "park" (if you can call it that) with one picnic table but there was no place to park with the trailer. The other thing we noticed is that the lake appears to have a lot of weed growth near the shore so it did not look like good swimming in any event. So we just drove around the top of the lake eventually arriving at the RV park near Kelseyville. Disappointment number two. The RV park looked like a dark, dank place out of a Stephen King novel. We drove in and right away noticed that the pool was closed and the water's edge looked pretty dirty with sludge from boats docked there. We turned a 180 and drove away. Since the day had been a relatively short drive (going around the top of the lake had added only an hour or so) we headed west over highway 175 which is a euphemism for "the windiest up and down country road, with sharp, deep dropoffs you will likely ever see". We soon realized why they had posted a sign telling folks with longer vehicles to not even think about going over this highway.
However, once again, the old proverb about good things come to those who wait (or something like that) came into play as we ended up at the Cloverdale/Healdsburg KOA which is up in the mountains above the wine country. We have stayed here a couple of times previously and had forgotten how beautiful it is up there. Not to mention the fact that the KOA folks have added a fabulous pool since we were last there. We stayed two nights in a 99% empty campground. It was great with fabulous weather and clear bright night skies with kerzillions of stars on display. We decided we would likely stay here again for a couple of more nights on our way back home later in November.
On wednesday we did a day trip into Calistoga. Wednesday was birthday day for our friend Sabina, back in Calgary. To celebrate, on her behalf, we decided to try a "mud bath spa and massage".
It was a bit weird at first but it felt real good afterwards. On a previous holiday in the Czech Republic we did a "beer spa". Comparing the two we both decided that the beer spa was nicer. Kris suggested that the mud spa was what it would be like if you were sitting in a giant cow pie.
Calistoga is about an hours drive from the KOA. The drive down highway 128 is very pretty as you go past vineyard after vineyard. The number of vineyards almost seems endless.
On Thursday we drove all of about 50 miles south to Petaluma as the last stopover before hitting San Francisco. On the way we stopped at the Francis Ford Coppola winery for a very fine lunch and pretty cool walkthrough of the displays of his films etc.
Friday was a short drive across the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco where we set up the trailer in the Candlestick RV Park for the next week while Kris attends her haute couture sewing class.
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