Now What?

~Wednesday, October 19, 2022~

Day 857

Thinking our stay would end in Bend on Thursday, we were needing something to bridge the gap between Oregon and our reservation in Napa on Sunday. Once again, we found ourselves back to the concerns of smoke. Bend appears to be pretty bad. At least where we’re staying has cleaner air. We devoted several hours to studying maps, looking for areas in Northern California that we’d perhaps never visited. At least the air quality was good there. Having lived in California most of our lives, we came to the realization that we’ve already seen everything there. We even thought about visiting our old stomping ground of Sugar Pine Point on the west shores of Lake Tahoe, but at this time of year, the weather is not conducive to a non hookup facility. In the end, we decided to just stay put until Saturday morning, hoping for clearer skies. Checking in with Rob, he said he could accommodate us but that we’d have to move about 5 campsites over. No biggee. We’re just happy they had a spot. Now for Saturday night. Rather than drive the entire 465 miles to Napa, we needed to be in a spot that would allow us to break up our drive. That’s where Harvest Host came in. What better place to stay on a Saturday than at a brewery. Looks like we’ll be guests at the Mt. Shasta Brewing Company in Weed, CA, that will break up the drive quite nicely, leaving us about 250 miles to go on Sunday.

When trying to pack a lot in a “TO DO” list kind of day, it helps to divide and conquer. So, while Jeff did the grocery shopping (we were pretty much on fumes), I stayed back to take care of cleaning and laundry. The laundry facilities are conveniently located about 20 steps away from our site. Couldn’t get easier than that. Ah….now that’s more like it!! $1.50/load and the dryer a total steal at 25 cents for 10 minutes meaning I could do a dry load for about 75 cents. When all was said and done, the cost to do laundry that day……$14, way cheaper than our $40 in Alaska or Canada. Wish I could say the same about gas prices. When we started our trip in June of 2020, the truck cost us about $95 to fill up. Today, it’s hovering around $150, which is significantly less than what we experienced over the summer 😝💰. Let’s hope they keep headed in the ⬇️direction.