We waited around the RV park in Redding till the office opened at 8:00 this morning.  They were serving continental breakfast.  I was really touched by something I witnessed there.  An elderly man was sitting at a table with his cup of coffee and a cinnamon roll when a man sat down with him and asked how his wife was doing.  He said she had bronchitis.  They were sitting there visiting when a woman came in with a big shopping bag.  She said she’d heard the man’s wife was sick and she’d made some homemade chicken noodle soup for them.  We really liked the Mountain Gate RV Park.

By the time we hit the road after getting the RV ready and getting gas, it was about 10:15.  We had checked road conditions for I-5 ahead of time and the weather report said they were expecting high winds, but at Sacramento we turned off I-5 and headed down 99.  I guess we were enough further inland that we really didn’t have any problems with wind.

When I was in Oregon, my younger sister, Lauryn, turned me on to Spotify.  It’s a free download where if you can think of the title of a song or an artist that you haven’t heard in a while (or even current things) you can add it to your own playlist.  The last few days I’ve had it in mind to make a travel playlist.  I started out with Willie Nelson singing On the Road Again.  Mark and I have always sung that to each other at the beginning of road trips.  We love hitting the road together.  I added Roll On, Columbia, Roll On to represent the start of our trip in Oregon.  It also happens to be a song Woody Guthrie wrote for Bonneville Power Administration when they were building the Bonneville Dam, and since Mark and I met at BPA, it seems appropriate.  I’ve looked up songs for California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, ending with I’m Proud to Be an Okie From Muskogee, which is just a little northwest of where our next job is.

I continued reading The Lord God Made Them All by James Herriot to Mark today, but fairly early tomorrow we’ll be finished with that book.  Our trip today was relatively uneventful after we left Mountain Gate.  I had made reservations for this evening in Tulare, CA at the Sun and Fun RV Park.  Tulare is about half way between Fresno and Bakersfield on Highway 99.  We arrived here around 5:30.  To our surprise, the office is only open in the morning and there was no paperwork waiting for us.  We didn’t know exactly what to do, so we finally just drove through the park and found a pull-through spot to park in.  Mark isn’t at all impressed with this place, although it’s supposedly a Good Sam park like the one we stayed in last night.  As I told him, we’re only here for one night, so we can put up with the noise of the highway and the train going by this once.  We won’t be recommending it to anyone, but I don’t think Tulane has a lot of options for us.

I just realized today is Sunday.  I’m going to listen to a podcast of my pastor at Saratoga Federated Church now.