Day 40
Friday 3rd August.
The morning staff are even surlier so I am not too horrified when the black water pipe comes away while I am dumping. We hardly ever use the onboard toilet and woudnt have if their bathroom had been open so it was poetic and in a way natural to see it all lying there in the sunshine. A quick stop at Walmart for catnip and a 45 second lifestory from a passing rv man. You get used to this and we have learned to open conversations ourselves. I learn about his father’s death and his sister’s miraculous recovery from lifelong stupidity after heart surgery and get a recipe for polishing fibreglass. An easy run down to Reno has us deciding to get at least as far as Grass Valley, sister city of the famous Bodmin, Cornwall, England. The last gasp of Interstate 80 took us high into the mountains again over the roughest road we had travelled in 4500 miles. We jangled and jarred past Lake Tahoe with all the cupboard doors banging until mercifully turning off towards the west and a run downhill. The road by now was heavily treed on either side and very picturesque. We climbed and descended (climbing means crunching down through gears balancing somewhere between lowest and second trying to keep the revs down at 22 mph, pulling over when possible to let the angry calvacade take a risky shot at passing. Descending means hanging on at 60 mph, bucketing and swaying, trying to anticipate the hairpin bends while the fridge, cooker and gong try to overtake us. Lisa prefers it when I take photos going uphill) several times through the Sierra Nevada but arrived at Grass Valley and I went in search of a pasty. It wasnt too good (broccoli?) but we met a friendly dentist. Having come this far we puit the pedal down and trucked on through to Willits - our destination on the Pacific coast where George and Ellen live. We lost the petrol cap somewhere on the way and the sun was in our eyes for the last 2 hours but we finally arrived, hot and grimy but jubilant at having crossed this Great Country Of Theirs. George was out of course. He’s in England for a month but Ellen was lovely and kindly gave us her bed. Slept soundly.