Another Trip to Gridley
2016-10-31, Day 1, Home to Gridley via SR99, I-5: 120 miles
It seemed appropriate somehow to visit my sis and brother-in-law in Gridley on Halloween because it’s just scary how old we’re all getting. Lavonne and I loaded up Cecil the Diesel that Halloween morning and headed north to Gridley.
As always, I wore myself out washing the coach in preparation for the trip. It’s just what I do; I can’t head out with a dirty ride. I had fueled up the day I returned from the last trip so the tank was full and ready to roll.
My smiling Trail Buddy lives for the destination…
…while I live for the journey. I was wishing that Gridley was 500 miles farther!
Click for captions and larger photos.
We’d finally been getting some rain in our parched valley, and the chances for more rain during the trip, especially the evening in Gridley, were pretty good.
Driving through Sacramento.
Our drive was unremarkable, just as we like. The traffic, even through Sacramento, moved along just fine. Once we turned north on SR99 near Woodland, we were off the beaten path and on a country highway. The highway is nothing like the country drives we’ve experienced this year in Nebraska and other wonderfully less populated places we’d visited, but it was an improvement over our home traffic.
These rice silos are the skyscrapers in rice country.
The huge rice crop had been harvested.
It was Halloween and this crop of dried corn seemed an appropriate photo.
Click on any photo to enlarge and read captions.
We stopped at the Safeway market in Gridley for lunch. We ordered fried chicken, taters, salad and some rolls and enjoyed a lunch that we almost never allow ourselves. After lunch we drove the few miles out of town to Gale and John’s place, backed into the driveway and made ourselves at home.
It was good to see them again and we sat around the living room visiting and catching up with all the news. After a few minutes I headed back out to the coach to set it up for the night, dropping the jacks, powering out the slides and hooking up to their electricity.
After our first round of chit-chat, John headed to town for some grocery items they needed. I joined him and enjoyed the drive around Gridley, a town I lived in over 50 years ago as a young man. I recently watched the movie Thirteen Days about the Cuban missile crisis and in that movie there is a brief clip of people cleaning out grocery shelves in panic as they feared the worst. I worked in a local supermarket in Gridley during that time, and I clearly remember the rush of customers during that very fearful time and how they seemed to buy every canned item we had.
Cecil the Diesel set up for the stay at Gale and John’s.
We spent the evening over a dinner of Papa Murphy’s pizza which we bake ourselves. It was very good as was the salad we enjoyed. Naturally they had cake and ice cream, too, and I left nothing untouched. I brought the laptop into the house along with my hotspot so that I could get online in their internet-free home. They are not online and they don’t care to be. (Maybe they’re smarter than most of us!) I showed them videos of my recent visit to my son’s in Oceanside and my adventurous flight in an old WWII fighter trainer (the story is here).
The old folks visiting together once again.
Our visit was warm and we always have a good time together. A bit before 2000 I bid Gale and John a good-night and headed back to the coach for the evening. Lavonne joined me a little while later. We listened to the soothing sound of rain on the roof of the coach much of the evening, a sound we hear clearly in the motorhome and we really enjoy it.
I took a rather leisurely shower considering that it was an RV shower as I had only the one night to use water and didn’t have to conserve water as much as I usually do. I also edited photos and wrote some of this travelogue. For the night’s entertainment I whipped up a couple vodka tonics, and then went online to find a documentary to watch. I found a very interesting one of something over an hour about the development of Ford’s flathead V-8 which was a big deal back in 1932. I enjoyed about half of it or so. To me, that sort of thing is very interesting. But it was time for bed before the story was over and I’d finish it another time. We were in bed around 2230 and slept very well out there in the country.
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Day 2, Tuesday, Gridley to home via SR99, I-5: 129 miles
I was up around 0530 and Lavonne joined me a bit later. It was a cool and damp morning, but the rain stopped before we went to bed the night before. We fired up the heater to stay comfy. Indeed, it was November 1.
Around 0800 we walked to the house and joined Gale and John for our morning visit. It wasn’t long before talk turned to breakfast, and we decided a Mickey D’s breakfast would be just the thing. John and I drove into town and brought home a sack full of delicious junk food.
After breakfast we continued our visit ‘til it was time to convert our cozy home into a comfy highway cruiser and head for home. We bid Gale and John farewell ‘til our next visit, probably after Thanksgiving, thanked them for their hospitality, then boarded the coach. We pulled out of their driveway about 1000.
The back roads near Gridley. If I’m gonna get lost, this is the place to do it.
Somehow, I got lost on a back road en route to highway 99. After a few miles of wandering the back roads near Gridley we pulled onto the highway and headed south. But with scenery like this, we didn’t complain.
The drive was cloudy but we didn’t see a drop of rain.
Harvested rice paddies with water draw waterfowl by the thousands!
After all my complaining about ugly, brown Kalifornistan, this was a welcome sight!
Along I-5 below Sacramento we encountered this old timer.
