Tulelake, CA 8-5-08

Wow, August already….Sunday we had a nice farewell visit with Aunt Millie and Uncle Marty and left with produce from the garden. As we hit Sutherlin our friend Lou called on the radio…they were earlier than we expected. Lou and Vickie stopped on their way through to a family reunion up on the coast in Newport. We had a nice time catching up and had a great dinner at a local Mexican restaurant and then it was back to our place to sit on the patio and have some of Larry’s peach cobbler that he had baked that morning. They were hitting the road Monday morning.

WE had planned to hit the road Monday too, but we decided to stay another day…we just didn’t feel like leaving yet, so we just relaxed and did bits and pieces of getting ready to go.

This morning we were on the road at 9:17. The mission today was to get into a California DMV and get my drivers license renewed…pain in the butt…I had to do it this time in person at an office. So we headed south on I-5 to Central Point and wound around, picked up 140 east over the Cascades and through Klamath Falls. The smoke haze was bad all along I-5, you couldn’t really see much of the surrounding area or the mountains. Once we got up into the mountains it cleared up. We were lucky enough to see a bald eagle again, well I saw it…Larry was driving and it kept going out of his line of sight.

We stopped and stretched our legs alongside Klamath Lake…the air hummed with the sounds of the bug clouds zooming all over the place…at least they didn’t bite and weren’t concerned with us. The water was busy with little fish and full of this green stuff…I suspect it might be that spirulina stuff that they harvest up here or algae, there was lots of it.

Klamath Falls has really grown over the years, like so many places, but it still doesn’t appeal to us much. We took 39 south from K Falls which becomes 139 in California and found Tulelake’s DMV office. Larry had discovered online that it is only open two and a half days the first and third week of the month, we hit one of those days. It was staffed with one woman and there were about 5 people ahead of us…we were in there about 45 minutes but we got our stuff done…Yay!

A few blocks through town and we found the Fairgrounds here in Tulelake and that is where we are for tonight. We got in here at 3:00 and had traveled 214 miles. The RV area is lovely, all green lawn and we have full hookups and the birds are the noisiest things we have heard so far. With our Passport America discount it is $13.

Tomorrow we head for Fallon. We need to check on the house after being gone for two months…we’ll probably need a grenade to get all the supermarket adds out of our mailbox and even though Larry sprayed weed killer just before we left we have tumbleweeds above the bottoms of our windows in the backyard and where we park the trailer and along the fence that we need to take care of. Don’t know how long we’ll be there before we head out again.

Just a side note, we got fuel in Central Point and Larry was telling me that it was the same place we had gotten fuel a couple years ago and he was lamenting with another customer the horrible price of diesel. Well, I flipped through my notebook and weirdly I came across a page where I had made note of the date and price, it was 4/19/05, so it was three years ago and it was $2.61.9 and today it was $4.59.9. Wow.