Life on the Interstate

After checking with the weather, we realized that, yet again, hot weather would plague us. All of us were aware that it would be hot Saturday for Salem (92, when the average for this time of year was 82), but the temps were going to get worse. Our options were to dash for the cool of the coast, of just make the dash toward home. We decided to do the latter.

We said goodbye to our gracious hosts and headed south in I-5.

Traffic wasn't horrible, but given the vasts stretches of highways without anyone around we'd gotten accustomed to, it was a bother. It's astounding how often people see a "big car," speed up to pass it, only to realize they are going faster than they want to, so they hit the brakes. We heave heavy sighs.

We're talking REEEEEEally narrow

We came upon some road work, where they smooshed the 3 lanes of traffic into one. The backup was horrible, so much so that we took a detour that would cut out a chunk of the "black" wait lines on G-maps. Russ mapped out a longer detour, only to find the on-ramp closed from the construction. He even found forest roads (reeeeeally narrow dirt roads) that looked like a promising throughway. Eventually, however, we gave up, turned back, accepting the smaller detour.

Mt. Shasta in the distance amid t-storms

And wouldn't you know it! I recognized a motorcyclist and a truck -- they were right next to us before we started. We lost no time at all. We had to have dilly-dallied for nearly 45 minutes. Instead of being in traffic, we had an adventure and discovered the cute town of Mt. Shasta.

Once we neared Sacramento (having driven for over 9 hours) I waved my white flag, and asked for somewhere to park and sleep. He found Cache Creek Casino, off highway 16, kind of in the middle of nowhere. We drove through 20 miles of fields and crops, all the while I'm thinking what the heck kind of casino is out here?

GREAT GOOGLY-MOOGLY! This place rivals those on the strip, AND they're building additional hotel space for 500 more rooms. We were flabbergasted. And the best part? We're the only RV here. The place is full of cars and people, and we're out on a deer-filled field all by ourselves.

Note: LTE in the nowheres of Canada is waaaay better than the US. Just sayin'.