We were on the road again today, continuing our southbound quest for warmth. The Waiiaka RV Park was great but it is still freezing at night, sucking up propane as we keep the frozen stuff on the outside. We took a short jog over to I-5 and headed south on a good, smooth, two-lane each way road past Mount Shasta and on through the Siskiyou Range. The highway is pretty curvy and there’s a lot of climbing and descending but it passes through gorgeous territory, part of it along the Sacramento River running in a rocky gorge next to the freeway.
Abruptly the curving and climbing and braking stopped and we crossed an arm of Lake Shasta on a new bridge. It is much less ugly than the old steel bridge that used to be there. Not more than 5 miles from there and about 100 miles from our lodgings last night, we pulled off the interstate into the rural area called Mountain Gate and into the cleverly named Mountain Gate RV Park. The park is located on a tree-covered slight incline to the east of I-5 and just out of earshot. There are full hookups in slender RV pull-thru spaces, cable TV plus rudimentary and glacially slow WiFi.
The good part is the daytime temperature today was in the high 70’s and the nighttime temperature is forecast at 50, quite a bit warmer than the daytime high in Sunriver five days ago or Yreka last night. Our timing happened to be superb – PG&E, the regional electrical utility and ratepayer impoverisher, had just restored power to the park after a two-day outage when PG&E shut down the grid in rural areas to guard against electrical fires. It is coincidental that just a few days previously, PG&E had lost an appeal to a judgement requiring them to help pay for the fire damages caused by their electrical lines that burned out the city of Paradise and incinerated some 80 slow runners. We went to Paradise this spring and, sure enough, it was completely destroyed with the exception of about half a dozen unaffected buildings. In big real estate developments in the burn, the tallest structures remaining were the burned-out hulks of automobiles.