Thus begins our summer experiment. We are heading out with basically no reservations and a lot of open time on the calendar. Richard is working a flexible schedule, meaning, he will work as much as possible, providing we have adequate service for him to log on and check in. When we’re somewhere really fun, he’ll take vacation days. Weekends are free. We have a rough idea of going north, maybe as far as Glacier National Park, but we aren’t committed to that, nor are we counting on that. The idea is to be totally flexible and roll with what comes. Translation: we don’t really know how to plan for this kind of traveling so we’re going to be uncomfortable from time to time and see if it’s worth it.
We do have reservations for the first weekend leg of the journey and that is in Ashland. It would be fairly silly to expect to get a place on the weekend and I planned well in advance with show tickets to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and a reservation with hookups. We decided to go ahead and get a head start by leaving Thursday and stopping somewhere along the way. Richard found us a spot at Antlers RV campground right on the north finger of Shasta Lake. This is logistically a great location to stop, however, the campground is really packed to maximize the number of sites. No complaints here, but I’m not sure it would be a destination we’d want to use to hang out at the lake.
Along the way, we stopped for lunch by taking an exit off I5 for the Sacramento Wildlife Refuge. That turned out to be really fun. There is a 7 mile auto loop you can do (it’s dusty) and even in the “off season” we spotted some Great Blue Herons, Great Egrets, Jack Rabbits, and deer. This is exactly the type of thing we wanted to open ourselves up to with no hard plans or ambitious daily destinations. Onward!
Total miles from home: 236.2 (with side detour), 16.5 mpg, 6 hours 9 min. Fair service for ATT, but Verizon had trouble connecting LTE.
