From Phoenix to Fallon 12-28-07

What a day. We’ll go along in our travels lollygagging here to there, but then we have a couple of days like yesterday and today and we are like a pitbull with a bone. We are tired of winter weather in a trailer and need to get back to Fallon to get stuff done there and we are racing the weather systems that are trucking in one after the other!

This morning we weren’t rushing to leave Phoenix, Oregon because they still had chain controls over Siskiyou Summit just north of the California/Oregon border, but we were hearing about another storm that was going to hit in the afternoon and if we weren’t out by then we were going to be stuck for about three days. So that made us antsy and we noticed people starting to pull out, so we started putting stuff away to get moving. Then on the scanner I heard that they were lifting the chain controls so we got hopping.

We pulled out at 9:45. The road over the summit was mostly clear pavement. It was flurrying a little bit and high fog and cold, but not bad. The traffic bottled up at the top but all went well. We all crawled down the other side and it was pretty smooth sailing by the time we hit California. We stopped in Weed and fueled up. Larry so badly wanted to take 89 off of 5 but the road condition recording said vehicles towing needed chains. I’m not as brave as he is, we have experienced many times living in snow country that the roads are open even when the recording says chains required. I know that even if chains weren’t required those roads are shady and I knew I would be clinging to the seat the whole way worrying about sliding out on ice. So then I checked 299 and it was the same, chain controls and the same with our old Highway 36.

So Larry decided we would take Highway 99 from Red Bluff through Chico connected to Highway 70 above Oroville, then picked up Highway 65 below Marysville to 193 east out of Lincoln which tied us into Highway 80 at Newcastle which is just west of Auburn. We were able to bypass Sacramento and it was nicer than I-5. We had never been on 193 and it was a pretty piece of road. We had decided to just push on to Fallon because the weather seemed like it was going to be bad for the next few days and the weather today wasn’t too bad.

I was on the phone a lot checking road conditions and talking to my friend Mary and our daughter Andrea for weather checks. Highway 80 over the Donner Summit can be ugly, but all reports sounded like we would be fine. It was nerve racking though because it was so very cold, we figured all the traffic would keep it from freezing up too soon after dark. It was 26 degrees over the top at 7,220 feet. It was snowing going up but quit as we got to the top. Most of the traffic traveled along at safe speeds and not doing anything crazy. We ran out of windshield fluid, forgot to fill it up at our last stop and couldn’t stop when our warning flashed on the dash. We were down to almost zero visibility out our windshield when we found an exit we managed to take without landing ourselves into a snow bank. The other reason we were having a hard time seeing was our headlights were coated in dirty road slush.

We hit Reno just about 7 and pressed on into Fallon. There is about 4 inches of snow on the ground here in Fallon and it’s icy. We are not ready for living back in snow country. We slipped and slid across the Wal-Mart parking lot to get more windshield fluid and RV winterizing fluid. The snow was covering our favorite place to stay with the trailer, the Fairgrounds, and we were afraid that if it snowed more we would get stuck in there so back through town to one of the two RV parks on the west side of Fallon. We pulled in after nine and after some jockeying back and forth in the slippery snow we found a place to light for the night where we could plug in our heaters and heat up a couple of frozen microwave dinners.

Its so cold Larry isn’t sure we will be able to empty the tanks in the morning and he is worried we won’t be able to back the trailer up the snowy slope into our backyard. I’ll let him worry, I have faith in his Superman abilities, and after all we made it over all the snowy passes with ease. We traveled 466 miles today, stopped for fuel twice, for lunch once in Red Bluff and at rest areas a few times.

Larry thought if we got an early start in the morning we could make it to Phoenix, Arizona by bedtime and it would be a lot warmer than it is here or in the Phoenix that we left from this morning!

The last two pictures are of Lake Shasta from the Pit River Bridge that is undergoing construction. The Lake is the lowest I've ever seen. It was dark when we went over the Sierras so no pictures.