Day 2 -- Angel's Camp, California to Oakhurst, California -- 110 Miles

Traveling in east central California has been quite a change for us because of the warmer-than-Nevada temperatures. While our home town's morning temps usually hover around high thirties to low forties, here in the Gold Country as we travel Highway 49, the morning temps have probably been close to thirty degrees warmer. It's not so startling for breaking camp in the morning, but by afternoon the temps have gone up another ten degrees so that the post setup activity definitely calls for ice cold cocktails of some sort to cool off.

Today, as we traveled south along Highway 49, many of the village names seemed so familiar that it occurred to us that we might have traveled this same route way back in the late mid 1980s when we were just a newly married couple. I remember us taking a stagecoach ride in the heavily tourist-visited mining town of Columbia, and I'm pretty sure we wandered the Sierra Railroad property in Jamestown as well. No trains were running that day, but back then I was always up for photographing anything railroad related. Later that evening we had dinner in Jamestown, and I distinctly remember the chicken pot pie as being outstanding!

Part of the reason you see only 110 miles racked up today is because of the challenging nature of Highway 49 between Angel's Camp and the town of Oakhurst near the entrance to Yosemite Park. To say that the road is narrow is like saying Yosemite National Park has a few nice trees. Concetta informed me that the route is nicknamed "The Golden Chain" highway, probably because it links all the old gold mining towns. Or perhaps it's because the tiny winding road whips back and forth, up and down, and around dozens of hairpin curves making it hard to see long stretches out ahead.

The entire route is festooned with acres of wild flowers including California's famous poppy. There's so many "edge-of-a-cliff" drop-offs that you can't really focus on the geology, though I think I saw lots of basalt, schist, and granite blur by us. I remember seeing a documentary on California's geology that said the state is overlaid with a great deal of ocean-bottom limestone and sediment that was scraped off the Pacific Plate as most of that plate dove beneath the North American Plate. This has resulted in ocean-bottom fossils being found at the very TOP of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

As per normal, we stopped often today to gaze at the wonderful views and one of the most startling was the Tuolumne River Canyon south of the Hetch Hetchy aqueduct facility near the town of Moccasin, California. Here one could plainly see that hydraulic mining from the 1850s had turned the pristine and wooded river canyon into countless piles of rubble stone once the top soil had been washed down stream. The original use for the waters dammed in the Hetch Hetchy Canyon was to provide water for the hydraulic mining.

When I was a child of about twelve, I had two consuming interests in life and hoped to pursue them further when I was an adult. The first was reading about pirates and diving on treasure ships with men like Mel Fisher and Bob Marks. The second was the exploration of ghost towns and doing lots of ghost town photography. As fate would have it, I never really got to pursue either of those interests outside of briefly using a metal detector in search of old coins, and digging for old bottles in the San Gabriel Mountains when I was attending Eliot Junior High in my home town of Altadena, California. I found a few neat old coins and I still have a shelf full of old bottles, but the only ghost town I really ever explored was in Bodie, California.

We had a few tense moments early this morning after leaving camp when we rounded a bend and ended up right in the middle of some sort parade in the town of Sonora. The parade looked to be countless blocks long and every single access to mainstream had been blocked. Now if you've ever been in any of the gold country towns you know that they have a fairly passable main street through the heart of the area, but once you get on any side streets or bypass routes your chances of success drop precipitously.

When we finally reached the intersection where cops were diverting traffic around town, we found it was basically built largely for compact cars and bicycles. When we rolled up, the cops had to remove all the traffic cones to give us the best chance of making the turn without flattening them and whatever else got in the way. It took quite a few twists and turns and reroutes and detours to finally get out of town, but we made it without incident.

After we finally had been on the road for five hours and Concetta had set us up for a campsite in Oakhurst, we were certainly ready to do a little kicking back. The camp turned out to be a bit dusty and raggedy, but it will do for the night. There's a nice "babbling brook" nearby for sound effects and I think the fact that we're a block of the main highway should give us some peace and quiet. We topped up the gas tank before we sought out our camp, and Concetta is busily cooking chicken for dinner. Tomorrow we're headed down the mountain toward Fresno where my cousin is waiting to welcome us to her house in Clovis on the outskirts of Fresno.

Day 1 -- Carson City, Nevada to Angel's Camp, California -- 127 Miles

Today began our summer vacation to California for 2024. Granted, California is not a state that we normally try to visit, but we decided that it was high time that we paid a visit to some of our relatives, both mine and Concetta's, as we had not seen any of them for a long time. To that end, we started by assessing our 32-foot Fleetwood Jamboree to see what damage it had accumulated on our last several, very long distance road trips.

The first thing I did was turn the ignition key to on and operate the buttons that caused the living room and the bedroom to expand, a feature that's called a "slide-out." The rooms seemed to operate as designed, however when the living room slider was fully extended it finished with a rather alarming sort of tearing sound. Naturally I dashed outside to see just what obstruction the room had encountered. There, to my dismay, I could see that the awning material that sort of shields the slide out from rain had neatly separated from the coach. Once I studied the fabric of the awning I could easily see that both needed replacing.

Next I discovered that the automatic step extender that had quit working on our 2022 trip to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, that we had paid $450.00 to have fixed, quit working again. The RV fixit company had replaced the computer board which, I suppose, didn't turn out to be the issue at all. So that was the second thing that I put on my list to have addressed before we could leave.

The third thing was something I discovered when I went onto the roof to look at the torn awning. When I approached the edge of the slide-out where the awning attached, I chanced to step on a portion of the roof adjacent to the air conditioner and discovered that the roof felt soft and spongy like a rafter was perhaps broken. So that went onto my list as well.

When I stopped in at the fixit shop they were able to give me an appointment date in April that was amazingly soon. It was so soon that I breathed a sign of relief thinking that they would be able to solve all my problems before we wanted to hit the road in early May. We even dropped the rig off a week early so the crew could jump right on our job if they had a spare hour here and there.

As you might guess that didn't happen. Not only did our rig sit on the back lot up until our appointment date, it actually didn't move until the day after. Naturally I took to stopping in from time to time after that for updates. "Well," they told me, "they had the awning material in stock so that job would be no problem." They went on to say that the automatic step problem was no doubt a bad motor so they were sending for one. The problem with the roof really didn't seem to interest them and I decided not to push it in the interest of time.

Sadly, things only got worse from there. Although the awnings went in about two weeks later, there was no explanation as to why they didn't jump right on that job since they had the materials and my appointment had come and gone. They didn't seem to think that getting the new motor was all that important so when they should have expressed mailed it to themselves, they sort of sat back and waited for the regular mail to show. The roof, well, the roof was never even brought up.

Finally we got the rig back about the time we desperately needed it and we set about getting it ready. In the course of that duty I decided to try and get the step to work myself. Once again I pulled the clevis pin and tried timing the step so when it wanted to retract it was in the retract mode and not the extend mode. once I had done that I reinstalled a pin, though not the original pin as it was so difficult I couldn't manage it. I just got an old nail, secured the two step components together and slid the nail into place. I then bent both ends down so it wouldn't slide out again and voyla, it worked.....sadly in one direction only.

But hey, one direction was better than none. And it was certainly better than using the rickety PVC ladder we had been forced to use on the last trip. I discovered that the step would lower on its own but needed a great deal of help to retract. So now I just help it and all seems to go well.

So this morning we were finally ready. The rig was loaded with every possible accoutrement that we could possibly need for the next month. Two days previous I had taken it to town to fill the gas tank -- a sobering experience -- and then stopped at the Propane dealer for a top up. The rig performed as expected, the new awnings looked good, and all seemed right with the world -- not counting the step and roof -- as I rolled out of the back yard where we customarily park it, and headed for the front yard driveway to pick up Concetta.

The only sticky part of taking the rig from the back to the front is a tiny point were I have to clear the overhanging garage roof before proceeding down the side of the house toward the gate. I always have to swing way wide and just barely clear my neighbor's fence in order to safely slide by.

As you might guess at this point since I brought up this subject today I didn't quite get close enough to neighbor Dave's fence and the very tip of the fascia board and tile roof clipped the starboard side awnings just firmly enough to rip them entirely off. Only the barest thread of fabric, sinews, and shattered superstructure kept the entire assembladge from landing on the ground.

Not only the newly installed bedroom awning was destroyed, but the 16 foot awning that provides shade when extended from the side of rig on hot days was violently dismantled. With a heavy heart I stowed away the various sad components, put on an equally sad, but determined face, and we rolled out of the yard on our vacation bruised by not deterred in any way. After all, an RV Trip costs a king's ransom every time you hit the road and we weren't going to let mere money -- sob -- ruin our trip.

So we set off down Highway 395 south, segued onto Route 88 south in Minden, and followed the path of the gold-seekers of 1849 as they picked their way across the Carson Valley, bolder-hopped their way up the impossibly rugged Carson River Canyon, and crested the mighty Sierra Nevada at Carson Pass with their incredibly sturdy covered wagons.

Slowly, so as not to tempt the Fates any further, we crested Carson Pass ourselves, passed through Tragedy Springs where the three ex-Mormon Battalion gold seekers were murdered, and rolled on toward Jackson, California. We stopped for lunch at a handy pull-out near the very top of the pass.

Once in Jackson we called ahead and secured a spot for the night in Angel's Camp then spent a lovely hour just cruising California Route 49 to our nightly destination. Once when we had to pull over anyway to let the more time conscious drivers pass, we stopped for time to stretch our legs and enjoy a few minutes just taking in the view and the nearby carpet of wildflowers.

Briefly we thought about staying an additional day in Angel's Camp and would have if the camp had offered a shuttle back to the old town section of the town where we had seen several nice restaurants as we passed through. But sadly, no such shuttle was available, so tomorrow we will be traveling on to see what accommodations we can turn up on our way to visit my cousin in the Fresno area and pay our respects to her brother who has recently passed.

So we bid you exciting and happy travels of your own and perhaps slightly better luck in the mechanical category.