We still had offshore fog as we continued down the coast this morning. Just north of Eureka we turned east on Hwy 299 and stopped shortly after at a casino at Blue Lake. We had a marginal lunch at a snack bar and hit the slots. I was doing OK but Terry slowly went through his allowance and was reduced to watching me for a while. We decided to go and I cashed in a ticket for $55. I needed to use the restroom so I gave the $5 to Terry and had him gamble until I was done. When I came out of the restroom, I saw a machine that I wanted to play and put in my $10 bill. Quite a while later, I had given Terry another $20 to lose and I cashed in a $400 ticket!
We travelled Hwy 299 previously and neither of us remembered how crooked and up-and-down it is! It was after 6 by the time we hit the outskirts of Redding. We had stupidly forgotten to look up the address for the Elks lodge. I tried calling Barb and got no answer, then found a phone number for the Mt Shasta Elks. The bartender who answered the phone was not interested in doing anything to find a phone number for the Redding lodge. We drove around town looking for a service station and finally found a Safeway with diesel that we could get into. They had a phone book so I got the address and put it in the GPS.
A short drive later and we were setting up at the Elks. Terry went to the bar to pay while I started dinner. By the time Terry waited for the bartender to finish another task, dinner was almost done and the air conditioner had cooled down the rig a bit. We enjoyed a well-deserved drink with dinner and went to bed early.
Sept 8th – Sat – Redding
We have cable TV here so didn’t get up real early. After coffee & zucchini bread (!!), we went for a drive and ended up at the Win River Casino of course. There was an entire strip of parking slots filled with motorcycles and every other person in the casino was wearing motorcycle gear of some sort or carrying a helmet. The casino was not nice to us so we gave up some of my winnings.
We stopped at a Costco for a couple of items and lunch. There were a lot of samples today so I was ready for an ice cream bar covered with chocolate & almonds – oink!! The we walked around Big Lots (eat your heart out, Lauri) and found items that we didn’t even know we needed.
Back at the rig, we relaxed for a while and then went to the bar. There were 2 empty stools but they weren’t together so we sat at a table. In just a few minutes we said to heck with that, pulled over another stool and squeezed in between people at the bar. We had a great time chatting with a couple – Dave & Tracy – who live in Redding. There was a wedding going on outside and in the dining room – a perfect setting and weather for the event.
Then it was dinner, TV and computer stuff before hitting the sack.
Sept 9th – Sun – to Pine Grove CA
We are heading to Pine Grove to visit “Mesa” friends Neal & Judi. Larry & Julie are already there and staying for a week. Terry enjoyed the ease of driving on I5 even though it is hard to obey the 55 MPH limit for vehicles towing anything. We quickly entered the Sacramento Valley which is so huge, flat and fertile. There are miles & miles of olive orchards (groves?) and we saw many trucks going the opposite way with double bulk boxes of what we could only guess were tomatoes. I can’t believe that tomatoes could be carried in bulk without getting squished. I took advantage of the time to call Marg while we were driving.
We were sucked into another casino at Calusa which is a few miles off I5. I turned out to be a good stop however as we both won money right away, gave some of it back, ate lunch and still came out $200 ahead. We won the money on the same machines as the one I played at Blue Lake.
I am so thankful for Wanda as it seemed like a convoluted way through Sacramento to end up going east on Hwy 16. Unfortunately, we had selected the Jackson Rancheria Casino in the GPS instead of the RV park associated with the casino. There was road construction where we turned off for the casino and in trying to avoid cones, we missed a sign (parallel to the road) for the RV park and headed up a hill to the casino. There was a lot of construction there as well so we followed a sign for tour busses which went to the back side of the casino. Terry stopped and I went up the road to see if we could turn around. Some security personnel were having a break and said we could come up the road and circle around “the generators”. Another security guy met us back at the truck and said he would go down to stop anyone from coming up until we got out. As we were circling the generators, 3 employees very excitedly told us that a tour bus was coming up the road and we couldn’t go down. We told them the plan, went down the hill, had to back up once to make a left turn and not hit a construction sign, guessed our way past a couple of possible turns and then arrived at the well marked entrance to the RV park about a mile from the casino. Turns out we should have gone to the other end of the road first.
This nice, well tended park has you dump tanks before you park – with an employee to help you - and gives you special black tank solution to protect their septic system. We were still quite frazzled when we parked so we set up, phoned Neal to say we needed to decompress and sat in the shade with a drink and our neighbors who are from Redding.
We only have about 6 miles to Neal & Judi’s place in a mobile home park. They have a 2 bedroom, 2 bath home that they have renovated & decorated beautifully. The master bedroom can be called a master suite with a huge walk-in closet & attached bath. Judy is a great cook and hostess. We had a lovely evening and came home about 10:30.
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