Last night we chatted with some folks who told us they had been evacuated from an area where the fire danger from California’s current spate of fires was high, namely our next scheduled destination. We started the process of rejiggering our travel agenda because it seemed the route south was ablaze.
We called our next RV campground, the TT facility called Russian River, but nobody answered the phone because it is Sunday. We got the owner of our current campground, Richardson Grove RV, to allow us to extend because we were going to be gone today. We got out the maps and started checking out our options, all of them grim. Going east from the Humboldt County area over to I-5, the next available route south, is difficult. Either CA-199 or CA-299 are the only choices and they are both harrowing drives for large vehicles. Our remaining option was to go north about 200 miles to Coos County, OR, to take OR-42 to I-5 where we could go south. It is about 550 miles out-of-the-way.
Strangely, we got a call from the management at Russian River this morning who confirmed that they were closed due to fire hazard. However, by midday, the same folks called back and told us that a district manager had told them to open the campground so, again, we intend to go south down US-101. We’ll see how it turns out. There are not really any campgrounds in the Marin County / San Francisco / Silicon Valley area so we need to stop at Russian River before embarking on our feared passage through the Bay Area. We really do not enjoy passing through this area but there’s no other way if traveling on the coast.