Sacramento, CA - Stuck in Sacramento With the RV Blues Again

With a nod to Bob Dylan, that's a pretty sorry parody.

Well, we new tires on our RV but, to my dismay, they are not white walls. Gary has volunteered to chalk them up but I don't think that’s the same. I guess they’ll just have to do. On the way back, we took the long way around so that we could get out on the Interstate to test them. The ride in our last RV was just awful and, whenever, we hit a bump, I had to hold on for dear life or I’d bounce out of my seat. In the Journey, the ride was smooth and after the first needless automatic grabbing on the bar, I learned that I did not need to grab and hold on. Smooth ride, easy handling with our old tires and we wanted to test these new ones out to see if the ride and handling were the same. Yes. they were.

We have decided to stay in Sacramento for another week. With all the movement between the campground and Freightliner and back and up to East Bay Tire and back, we really didn’t feel as if we were ready for more movement. We really wanted to sit for a while. We also took a look at the weather report for the Eureka, CA area and it was 10 days of rain. No sun, not partly sunny, not even a partly cloudy day, it was all cloudy and rain. oof-da. Now, we realize that it will quite probably rain for the 10 days after these 10 but it couldn’t get worse. Maybe if we wait a week, we’ll get at least one sunny day. Finally, we wanted to give Sacramento a chance. We hear that there are some nice museums and places to see and we thought another week might give us some time to explore. Of course, I then had to make changes to our schedule and change some reservations.

We haven’t escaped the rain by being here though, we had rain all day today in Sacramento. It’s great since rain is really needed here. This one rainy day won’t fill the reservoirs but it’s better than nothing and it’s a start.

Let me digress for a bit here. We tell people from California that we are from Iowa and the first word out of their mouths is ‘tornados.’ They know how destructive they are and couldn’t imagine living in a tornado prone area. We have tried to explain that earthquakes which destroy large swaths of land are much more destructive than tornadoes which carve out a narrower path of destruction. But, to no avail. People out here are familiar with and have learned to live with earthquakes but tornadoes are something strange that they have not experienced. I suppose it’s all summed up in the phrase: ‘Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.

I don’t want to minimize the danger in tornadoes - they are terrible and wreck havoc. One time, my father, who owned a lumber yard, was out playing golf on the golf course several miles from the lumber yard. The foursome heard the tornado warnings, looked up and saw lumber flying all over. ‘Looks like it hit the yard,’ my father said.

But, here we two Iowans are in Sacramento, earthquake territory, listening to tornado warnings. How ironic. And, they’re listing counties and roads where the tornado warnings are. How close is that to us? I don’t know. I rush for my atlas and Gary rushes for Google maps. Now, Gary and I know what a tornado siren sounds like and we know what to do when we hear those sirens, we hide in our safe area. They do have warnings out here but they come on cell phones. When they were interviewed on TV, people admitted that their cell phones were making calls to them. But there were two responses: either they ignored them because they didn’t know what they were or - and here is the dangerous thing - they rushed out to see where the tornado was.

Every now and then you see something in a campground that just chills you. The usual is when someone is working gloveless with the sewer hose and then goes inside to get a drink of water. But here is what we saw today - a tow. ‘Put your RV in neutral and just follow me’, the guy in the pick-up said. But we heard the background story later. This was the guy’s 4th tow and it was his brother-in-law. Seems that the 3rd tow had broken some plate under the RV by which it could be towed regularly and safely. And a tow costs only (whoopee) $800. I guess that’s why we have towing insurance.

The other day we saw a man standing directly in back of his RV over his tow bar directing his wife in the towed to come towards him. Why wasn't he standing off to the side? Why was he standing directly between a moving car and the RV? Oh, my.

One thing that I like about walking in California and Arizona and probably other states as well is that the law says when pedestrians are crossing the street in a designated crosswalk, they have the right of way. Cars must stop. Californians walk to the curb and stride out into the street as if they owned it, knowing that vehicles will stop. Gary and I are from Iowa and stopping for pedestrians is not the law, in fact sometimes I think that pedestrians carry points that drivers can rack up. So, Gary and I stop at the curb and look both ways. BUT - when cars see us at the curb, they just naturally stop too, waiting for us to cross. We’re trying to learn that when we get to the curb, to look quickly both ways and stride out, just like the Californians. However, it would be just our luck to get a tourist from Iowa who didn’t know the law.

We saw this sign today while walking and wondered what a ‘viral’ event was?

Our campground is right on the American Biking Trail through Sacramento, and we have certainly taken advantage of it. We’ve gone north, we’e gone south and we’ve made some loops. With views like these, it’s all nice.

We walked through the college and saw this intensely bright design on one of the buildings.

Meanwhile I was looking through the LL Bean website for a new sweater and found one I rather liked. I looked at the reviews and one younger customer said that ‘her grandmother really liked this sweater.’ Agh-h-h. Who wants to buy something that grandmother’s like?

Every now and then Gary checks his junk e-mail folder to see if there is anything of value, anything that got shunted to this folder that we really need to look at. Today he found an e-mail from a ‘sexy, sensual, witty female’ who has been seeing him around the store but who is too shy to say anything. Now, the only ‘store’ that Gary has been to recently is East Bay Tire and the Freightliner Service Center. We’re trying to imagine which pile of Michelin tires or which carton of oil this ‘sexy’ woman was hiding behind. If she’s hiding, she did a great job since Gary did not see her (at least not that he told me about).