Two Days to Sacramento

Great Husband was monitoring our gas mileage during our Friday tow, and taking delight in seeing mpg at something like 17.5 as we towed through Seattle on I-5. Even though it was fun to see the Space Needle and Mount Ranier as we passed through, we were really anxious to get away from the city and away from traffic.

Somewhere along the way, Great Husband remembered that he needed to start checking the lug nuts, as recommended by Rease during our training. The lug wrench which came with the Ford Flex did not fit the camper lug nuts, so we spent an inefficient day searching for auto parts stores along our route. It was amazing that a big Sears store could be so efficiently hidden! We never did find that one. Even when we found a full-fledged auto parts store, they didn’t have what we needed, and all this fruitless search was a frustrating waste of time. At last we arrived at our Friday night campsite, Valley of the Rogue State Park in Oregon, once again after dark and in the rain. We repeated the ease of the first night, again having a pull-through site, and no challenges to getting set up and quickly to bed.

We had another day of driving ahead of us to get to Sacramento by Saturday afternoon, where we planned to pick up our oldest son, who would be flying in from Kansas City to camp with us. Since he is 6’6”, I’m going to call him Tall Son in these posts. Sounds rather Native American, doesn’t it?

We continued south on I-5 into California, and enjoyed the beautiful mountains and orchard country. MPG were ranging from 13.5 up to 18.5, depending on the terrain. Great Husband was thrilled to be able to tow so well. We also loved the ease of pulling off at a rest stop and make a simple lunch in the camper. By now we were also proudly giving our first tours of the beautiful little Escape and passing out the promotional cards which Tammy had given us.

We connected with Tall Son at the Sacramento airport, did our grocery shopping at a Walmart that was amazingly understocked*, and set up the camper again without disconnecting, this time at one of those big gravel parking lots (Cal Expo RV Park) that are good enough for an overnight if you don’t look out the window much. Even so, there was a big dog show going on there, and we enjoyed watching the contestants and their humans. But we were getting really excited for our first REAL destination – Yosemite National Park.

*By understocked, I mean that Hubby got the last two potatoes in the joint, and I had to ask an employee to go get pork chops off of the delivery truck!