We put in a long day of driving yesterday but it was worth it to get out of the gray and gloomy Pacific Northwest. We were beginning to grow moss on our webbed toes.
After filling our diesel tank at the Shell station in Sutherlin, at $3.79 a gallon, we got on Interstate 5 and pointed the nose of our Winnebago south. Before long we were climbing into the Siskiyou Mountains, and the next 100 miles or more were a series of uphill and downhill grades (mostly uphill, it seemed).
And to add to the fun, it rained most of the way to the California border, 136 miles away. Sometimes it just a sprinkle, and other times it poured. We don’t usually travel in bad weather but we really, really needed to get someplace where the sky was blue!
A couple of miles from the state line we topped out at Siskiyou Summit, the highest point on Interstate 5, at 4,310 feet. Then we began rolling downhill to California.
It wasn’t long before we began to see Mount Shasta dominating the landscape with its majestic height of14,179 feet. Mount Shasta has four overlapping volcanic cones and is a dramatic sight that is popular with artists and photographers.
This is as close as I ever need to get to snow.
I was a little apprehensive about getting anywhere near Mount Shasta because for years I swore it was cursed. Or maybe I was the one who was cursed. I was driving past it once, back in the late 1970s, in a brand new Datsun with less than 1,000 miles on the odometer and the engine blew just as I came parallel with the mountain. A year or two later I was tooling down Interstate 5 near the mountain in a late model Audi Fox and in the same area, the radiator seemed to explode, losing all of its fluid in a couple of minutes. Another time, I was flying south with my friend Harry Mayowe in his single engine Cessna when we lost all electrical power as we approached the mountain. We set the airplane down at the closest small airfield and before Harry shut the engine down everything was working again. An aircraft mechanic spent three hours looking for a problem and could not find a thing wrong. The rest of our flight was uneventful. And last but not least, when my first wife and I were moving back to Arizona from Washington, I was driving my Dodge pickup pulling a big U-Haul trailer and she was in our van with our two kids, pulling my Triumph sports car. We had just put four new tires on the van when we left Aberdeen and again, as we were passing Mount Shasta, the right rear tire of the van exploded off the rim. It got real squirrely, but she was able to get it off the road and get stopped safely. Coincidence? Probably so, but just in case, I held tight to the steering wheel and hurried past. Nothing bad happened this trip, so maybe the curse is broken. 
198 miles after we left Sutherlin, we left the interstate behind us and took State Route 89 east, eventually picking up State Route 44 into Susanville. Several people had recommended this route as an alternative to going further south and taking Interstate 80 across the Sierra Nevada mountains. It was an excellent two lane road with wide shoulders much of the way and frequent pullouts to allow traffic to get past us.
There were a few eighteen wheelers and an occasional RV, but overall traffic was light.
At one point we passed an area that had been ravaged by a forest fire, black skeletons of trees sticking up into the sky.
We thought we might overnight at the Elks lodge or WalMart in Susanville, but we got there about 4:30 and really didn’t feel like stopping so we kept on rolling. We picked up U.S. Highway 395 and followed it south to Reno, Nevada and considered overnighting at one of the many casinos there, but traffic was hectic and everybody was speeding around like they were going to a fire someplace. We quickly decided that all we wanted to do was get out of that madhouse. Another 30 miles or so west on Interstate 80 brought us to Fernley, where we filled the fuel tank again, then stopped at a WalMart for the night, with 445 miles behind us. Yes, that’s a long day, but we have blue sky and it’s warm, and that makes it worth it to us!
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Great pictures as usual Miss Terry. I was inspired by the story yesterday of the WWII vets that walked past barricades to see the WWII Memorial yesterday in spite of the fact that it was closed and they weren’t supposed to see it. According to news reports, police looked on as they viewed the memorial. Maybe we need a gathering of RVer’s to enter a National Park that is closed because it is nonessential. Since these parks belong to the people and they are deemed to be nonessential by Congress, the NPS police should seem to be nonessential and should have been furloughed also. Such a move by a few thousand Rver’s who packed out there own trash and followed Park and RV rules thus not creating a nuisance would send a dual message. The parks are not non essential and that we do not need Congress to use the property owned by the citizens of the US. On a totally different thought process why are lights, A/C, toilet facilities, gourmet cafaterias, preferred parking spaces, athletic facilities and all their other perks essential for people who do not do their job and have proven that they do not care about the American public. Bad Nick where are you?
“On a totally different thought process why are lights, A/C, toilet facilities, gourmet cafaterias, preferred parking spaces, athletic facilities and all their other perks essential for people who do not do their job and have proven that they do not care about the American public. Bad Nick where are you?”
A better question to me is why those people who are not doing their job still collect their own selfish $174,000 when they do not care about the 800,000 Americans now “furloughed” through no fault of their own and left in anxious misery about paying their bills and caring for their families while Congress grinds the government to a halt?
Nick,
What is on the driver side window? Looks like black wires in a pattern of sorts.
Arizona, specifically, Verde Valley TT is beautiful. Warm, sunny, and green for the area. Good luck getting here.
George, it’s an antenna for over the air TV. We bought it because our old crank up Winegard stopped working.
Good advice to take 89/44/395 heading south on I-5 to Reno from Oregon. Best way to go…we’ve even done it in winter (but only by keeping a close eye on the weather and road conditions).
Did you get a chance to do a short stop at Burney Falls State Park? Beautiful place!
Jim’s post above about RVers entering our national parks despite the closings got my imagination going:
Picture long lines of hundreds of RVs peacefully waiting at the entrances of several of the major national parks. We could do what we do best, put out our awnings, set out our chairs and some food and invite the authorities to join us in an impromptu rally.
In between meetings of the liars’ club and walking our dogs, we could pick up the litter alongside the road. And we could bribe the authorities with our nice clean bathrooms if they threatened to give us trouble.
Just my imagination working overtime. 🙂 🙂