Lake Oroville

Subtitle: Not a Hotel Room

We took our son up to Chico this weekend and decided that an up and back makes for a long day. We also are pretty much done with hotel rooms. So camping!

As it turned out, this weekend was the second in a row of quite a bit of rain for poor, parched California. We didn’t care. We bailed last weekend on a trip to Doran Beach because of severe weather alerts and high surf warnings. I think that one was a good call actually. But this weekend was just regular old rain. No problem.

After depositing him in his extremely young guys with instruments and questionable cleanliness standards pad, we headed to Lake Oroville State Recreation Area. I’d made reservations, but the place was all but empty. Except the site I had reserved. Someone was there, looking quite at home when we pulled in around 3 or 4 in the afternoon. We decided to let them be and we pulled into another site. A nicer one actually.

We are not used to being wet.

It’s a good thing I’m ok at backing the Alto now, but even with a fairly quick unhitching process, we were both, let’s say, anxious, to get inside out of the rain. I also didn’t like the idea that someone else might show up demanding the site that we had unreservedly pulled into. (That was a ridiculous worry)  So we kicked back with the heater on and music playing while I wrote a report and listened to the steady sound of rain for the rest of the evening.

Dinner that night was quite elegant. Richard prepared Coq au Vin and we brought some French bread and a ready to server Caesar salad. It worked beautifully in the Shuttle Chef, even after 8 hours of thermally sitting by itself in Dory while we drove. I’m not 100% sure I liked the vin part of it, but it may have been either too much for the amount of food, or the wrong kind of wine. Are you supposed to use Cabernet for this dish? I’m not gonna complain about a hot fancy meal while camping though, and it was plenty yummy enough. I’m just not sure we’ll try that exact recipe again.

We were bummed that the CO alarm went off after showering and we couldn’t get it to stop without taking out the fuse. We were using the Caframo fan on high speed to try to keep condensation down, but it got overpowered by the moisture in the air combined with the steam from the hot water. We turned on the heat pump for a while and that seemed to help. In general though, the alarm is excellent at alerting us to ambient moisture. I’m not sure if it has actually ever alerted us to Carbon Monoxide. To be safe, we left the fan running and the windows cracked and woke up alive in the morning.

Sadly, my Vudu iPad app seems to like refreshing via wifi periodically and it would not play any of our downloaded “Breaking Bad” episodes. Bah. Technology.

Last thing to report is that the wool mattress topper with a sub layer of thin foam is a big success and we woke up with iPhones reporting it was 11am. Now, Daylight Savings Time had just kicked in, so it was “really” 10. But, a very sound night’s sleep was a good thing.

We would both be interested in visiting this campground again, not in the rain. It looked like the lake was very close by and there seemed to be some nice bike rides around there. For this trip, it was far better than a hotel room, and life is always good in Dory. Back to one in the nest, and we will certainly miss the semi launched one. Life goes on….

Total miles to Chico: 165.5, 19.7 mpg (it was reading over 20 all the way North because we had a huge tail wind), 3 hours, 38 minutes (including time being lost because offspring does not know his address)

Total miles home from Lake Oroville: 139.7, 13.7 (tail wind turned into a headwind), 3 hours, 14 minutes

Site: 28, which was nicer than the reserved 27 anyway. 26 would be nice too. Very little cell service, but enough to receive texts.