Day 3 Feb 18 Saturday

Happy Birthday Mikaela.

Sheila has gone down to the pool for one last swim.  After raining all night it is now slightly overcast with the sun coming out. We seem to have a small amount of water on the dashboard, I wiped it up.  I think that with all the freeze & thaw that a seal on the front windshield may have loosened or separated, time will tell.   Finally out 7 Feathers at 11:30 @ 44469 mi. South on I5 to a Pilot station to get gas before hitting Calif. In at 12:55 @ 44536, finished gassing up by 1:10 and then went to a parking spot at the station to have lunch—(Sheila had gotten a Subway sandwich).  We finished lunch & were on I-5 south by 1:40 with .Sheila driving.  She went up & over the Siskiyou summit @ 2:15 & into Calif. at 2:25, and on down hill in Calif & she pulled into a rest area to change drivers at 3:15. We had been headed for the Walmart in Willows & Nancy’s Airport Café.  Sheila thought that as it is a Saturday that the Elks in Red Bluff might be having a dance or something so we headed there, but their RV lot was full & overflowing with people parking rigs in the car parking lot and more cars arriving. There was nowhere I could get our 50 plus feet of RV & car out of the way and so we left as even more cars poured into the lot. Then we saw a sign for the Rolling Hills Casino 9 miles down the road and it said they have an RV Park so let’s check it out.  Well, we got to the registration building where it said $28.00 for a night, and it also said ‘Lot full’.  There were RV’s parked in amongst the big rigs but I thought Wal-Mart would be nicer and we could have a great dinner at Nancy’s Airport Café.  So down the Hwy for another 27 miles and we tried to pull into Wal-Mart at 6:30 at 44765 miles but the entrances were blocked off and the parking lot looked strangely empty even though lights were on. There was no water now but they looked like they had been flooded!  Enroute down we saw Rest Areas closed with a lot of water over roadways and some side roads closed and areas with very large pools of water surrounding trees.  I think it must be from the Sacramento River or very heavy rain but I am not sure.  Anytime we went past a river that we could see from the road it was full & fast and had overflowed its banks.

Then we went across the street to Nancy’s Café where we saw lots of large puddles in the parking lot and the entrance door had a ring of sandbags in front of it.  I went in and you could see on the floor by the outside wall a 2 to 3 foot strip of brown dirt.  They had a crew sandbagging to keep any more water out.  As it was now dark we decided we weren’t going anywhere else—3 tries was enough!  Besides, there was nothing for many miles where we could overnight. So-o, even if more water comes up during the night we are high & could drive through a foot or more easily. A girl from Nancy’s Café  was out in the dark clearing debris from the wire fence that was near us, she said it was the Sacramento River that had flooded and they had had 15 inches in the parking lot!  We had a delicious dinner in the RV, (thank goodness Sheila had shopped yesterday) and we’re going to watch a movie on DVD but we couldn’t figure out how to play it!  Sheila said she wasn’t surprised, since nothing else went right today!

229 miles, on the road 6 hrs 15 min