Chico, California

  

California is about 8 different states rolled into one. We drove through three of them on the way out. The starting point was San Francisco where I was to drop off my beloved at the airport.

This is what it looks like on drunk Canadian Siri when you cross the Golden Gate Bridge. You know what else? You have to pay money to go south. You know what doesn't work to pay for the bridge? Fast Pass. Well played Golden Gate Bridge, the check is in the mail...

After a tearful goodbye, I went to the cell phone parking lot. If ever a place was designed to make you pray for the day when we develop transporters like on Star Trek, it is San Francisco International Airport.

But I got to see these lovely ladies!

And Jorge, who declined to be photographed. Maureen was supposed to work, but she ended up getting the day off to make the trade off. I would be given Annika and she would get, well, really nothing in return. The good news is that I was getting Annika!

Mo and I took a selfie, which shall be kept small for...well, it will just be kept small. It ain't my best work!

After the second tearful goodbye of the day, it was off to Chico, California! 

If you have read any comments on this blog, you are familiar with Lady Chardonnay. But you have yet to meet her mother - Mama Chardonnay! But we'll just call her Susan. She isn't the drinker her little girl is. Heh heh heh...

Susan was kind enough to have us stay with her between San Francisco and Elko. It is a 500 mile leg and just too much to do in an afternoon. We were SO GLAD we stopped. 

The best thing about the visit was getting to know Susan better. It is clear where Lady Char gets her joie de vivre!

We went in the pool and splashed around and admired the landscaping. Which I did not photograph in true second-half-of-the-trip fashion.

Susan showed us her prize possession - a VW micro-bus that Annika was quick to claim she was ready to drive. Lady Char's son, L'il Martini claims that the bus will one day be his. But he is going to have to marry Annika to get it. (I will admit this has been my plan all along...)

Dinner was at la Hacienda - a place with salad dressing so good that if you type "hacienda Chico" into google up will come "la hacienda chico ca salad dressing recipe". This is LC's favorite restaurant of her youth and she adores the dressing. Guess who brought a bottle of the stuff home to her? Yes, it was us. And since it had to be refrigerated, we basically had to treat it like a human heart we were transporting for a transplant. There was a daily icing of the cooler (although by this time we were just living on nuts, iced tea, Starbucks and the kindness of others) and some discussion along the lines of how sick she could potentially get if we waited until morning to get ice. 

One thing I forgot to mention was that while we were in the pool, Susan told a story about crossing the desert to Elko with LC in an overheating car in the dead of night that scared the living daylights out of us!

Annika and I decided that it was imperative that we get up at 3:30 am to be on the road by 4 so that we could be in Elko by noon or we would DIE!!!

And we were. 

And we did not die. 

However we did a few hours of driving in the dark which I realized was my first nighttime driving of the whole trip! Annika is a very comforting person to have around. While I drove, she opened the moon roof and laid back and looked at the stars. She saw a shooting star, which is an excellent omen,

When drunk Canadian Siri told us to turn off the main road onto what looked like a gravel path leading to the home of a serial killer, Annika assured me, "We probably won't both be murdered here..." We were not.

And then, inexplicably, we were in the mountains! How did this happen?? We were in the freaking FOREST! And then we turned a corner to a scenic overlook and saw this -

You can't really tell, but it is a sheer drop that goes on forever and it was breathtaking. 

We drove a little further and the car was getting winded so I knew we were making some elevation. Nonetheless, I was rather surprised when we stopped at a rest area and saw this.

We were at about 7000 feet. The highest elevation of the trip so far. And Chico is 197' above sea level, so we made this elevation FAST!

It seems like as fast as we went from the bay to the farmland to the murderous dirt road to the mountains, we hit the desert! We were in Nevada and it looked very Nevada-ish.

I took a picture in Winnemucca because it is the hometown of one of my favorite fictional heroines. Anyone care to hazard a guess? I will reveal all in my next post from beautiful Elko, Nevada!