Today we left Delhi, near Merced, and headed east into the Sierras. The first two-thirds of the drive passes through extensive agricultural lands with seemingly millions of fruit and nut trees lining the roads. However, after the almost-town of Chinese Camp on CA-120, the road starts to wander around and over hills until it abruptly arrives at the bottom of Priest Grade. There are two roads up the grade. One of the roads (Old Priest Grade) has inclines up to 17% and is restricted to vehicles with a gross weight of less than 7,500 pounds. Since our truck and trailer collectively weigh 20,000 pounds, we chose the other road (New Priest Grade) which climbs at a steady 7% or 8% for 10 miles and follows a path that is quite serpentine. It is one lane each way. I hope the brakes work properly when we go back down in a week. If they don’t, there could be some trouser soiling.

Peggy has never been real happy riding shotgun when the view out the window is sky because she doesn’t want to look into the chasm that exists about 6 inches past the fog line. Quite a bit of this terrifying road does not have guardrails so I was careful to keep our fifty-one foot long truck & trailer between the center line and the edge of certain death. Peggy chose a better method – she ate a Xanax prior to our arrival at this E-ticket ride. She never twitched once on the ride up.

After considerable white-knuckling, we arrived at the top of the grade and continued on into Groveland, a tiny community with buildings erected immediately adjacent to the road making for driving caution to avoid running over oblivious tourists, most of them eating ice cream while meandering around town, suddenly stepping off the narrow boardwalks into the highway and malingering in imaginary crosswalks. Another 20 miles or so up the road, we turned into the Yosemite Lakes Thousand Trails Preserve.

We set the trailer up in a big grass field surrounded by towering pines. The south fork of the Tuolumne River passes by the edge of the RV spots. It is very pretty here, particularly when one realizes this is an RV park.