ON THE ROAD AGAIN

 November 21, 2020

We left on our winter snowbird travels on Saturday, Nov 21st. With these crazy times of Covid, we discussed whether we should travel or not. Even though AZ is a hot spot, we decided to go because we wouldn't be doing  anything different down there as in Renton from , but at least we would be in better weather. We are very careful, don't go to very places places, always wear our masks and use lots of hand sanitizer. 

We decided to do something different this year. Denny is getting tired of driving to so many places. We usually  stop every 2-4 weeks at different cities.  This year we decided to only stay at 2 campgrounds. We are staying at Buckeye, Ca for 3 months and Palm Springs for 2 months. Only 2 parks this year compared to 11 last year. 

We have done this route so many times, we know exactly how far we can go each day and what parks to stay at. We stopped at Albany, Or. ,  the first night, 259 miles, 2nd night, Weed, Ca, 289 miles, 3rd night, Patterson, Ca, 316 miles and the 4th night, Bakersfield, Ca 225 miles.  We usually go south from here to Menifee, Ca, our usual  destination, but not going there anymore. Because Az is further, we stayed at Needles, Ca for our 5th night, 264 miles. From there to Buckeye was only 123 miles, our shorts drive.  All total we drove 1476 miles in 30 hours over a span of 6 days. 

Along the way, we saw alot of the burned areas from the wildfires earlier this year. Seeing the devastation is different than hearing about it or seeing it on TV. It was amazing to see. 

We have a RV GPS that sits on our dashboard. We put in the dimensions of our RV and it will tell us if the road is good for us to drive on.  We have learned to pay attention to it and if it says, not rated for an RV, DON'T go on it. The first year we had it, we were leaving Jackson Hole Wyoming. It looked like a good road in the direction we wanted to go, eventho the GPS said, not rated for RV's. We went anyway. BIG MISTAKE. Less than a mile on it, it became a road we didn't want to be on, very steep, very curvy with no place to turn around. By the time we got to the top, the radiator was over heating. I think that happened to alot of people because there was a huge parking area to pull over on to cool down. We learned our lesson, follow what it says! In the picture below, you can see how foggy it was for a few days.

At Bakersfield, we stop at the Orange Grove RV Park. It is in the middle of an orange grove. When  oranges are in season, you can pick all you want, there are 2 trees at each site. Eventho they were heavy with fruit,  they weren't in season. We have picked a couple of plastic grocery bags full before. They were delicious, you can't get fresher than that.