8-6-2016 MEADOW VISTA, CA

It is out of character for us to stay but one night at a park but Hawthorne is familiar to us and has been explored to some extent.  It is a convenient stopping point though, so as not to drive too far in a day.  We tend to keep our travel legs in the 300 mile range or ideally, a little less.  So we pulled in, left the Jeep in hook-up mode and turned off the key, warmed up dinner and settled down for the night.

B2 at Whiskey Flats

There are millions more stars here than other places in the universe!  Staring upward in the dark of night is a beautiful, magical, mystical experience.  How can it be that the silvery smudge that is the Milky Way is made up of trillions upon trillions of individual heavenly bodies?  This is mind-boggling, even to a person such as me who has LBP (Low Boggle Point).  In a short time, I saw four shooting stars, three that started on the top and shot down to the edge and one that shot from one edge all the way over the top and down to the other edge.  Simply fantastic and amazing!

Besides the beauty in the sky, there is the peaceful, quiet drive through the ranchland where wild burros, horses and cattle meander.  Walker Lake, north of Hawthorne, is not what it was but it is still immense.  In prehistoric times, Walker Lake was one small part of Pleistocene Lahontan Lake which covered most of Nevada.  Over the millenia, the waters receded (Global warming, don’tchaknow.) but Walker Lake remains, fairly secure as a “terminal lake” because it does not feed any other streams or rivers.  It is home to about 360,000 cutthroat trout which would be endangered if we lived up here!

This leg of the trip involves traveling through the Donner Pass, home of Chuck Roast, Steak Diane and Quiche Lorraine and finger food, among many other delicacies.  B2 is performing like a champ and now we are on the downslope, on approach to Meadow Vista, home town of our friends of 45 years, Fritz and Pal.  Over the next few days, fun and shenanigans are anticipated, many of them probably legal.

Our friends’ home is in a quiet wooded area, except for the roosters who like to awaken everyone at dawn with persistent crowing and the goats who answer them.  In this idyllic setting, a mamma deer and her two Bambis live close by and wander about unafraid. 

Future venison on the hoof!  Yum!

Mamma is graceful, like poetry in motion, but the white-spotted babies scamper around and play like puppies.

Fritz and Pal had a lot of great activities lined up for us including hours of playtime on the pickleball court.  At first, I didn’t play because of wrist and shoulder pain but ultimately, it is impossible to stay away.  Play through the pain, right?  The pickleball folks here are really friendly and fun and accepted Rob and me into the group as if they had known us forever.   Happily, they had arranged to have a picnic at the Rod and Gun Club which sits in a pretty park on Lake Combie.  Everyone brought their coolers filled with sandwiches and cold beer, a big fat, sweet, juicy watermelon (Can’t have a picnic without a watermelon!) and kayaks! 

Lake Combie

So if pickleball isn’t enough exercise there is always an afternoon of kayaking!  We were fortunate that friends loaned us kayaks for a couple of days and paddling around in the blue water surrounded by the tall pines was tranquilizing and nearly hypnotic.  Once is one time too few, of course, and so the following day, there was more pickleball and kayaking, this time on Lake Rollins.  There are ducks, geese, cormorants and ospreys and I searched the trees for eagles which live here but they were elusive.  We were gourmeted and beered up and exercised for three days and it was quite a grand time.

Lake Rollins

Worrisome was the problem B2 had with the 20 amp electrical supply line at the house.  Ultimately, we found that no power was getting through to run the refrigerator, our only goal.  Troubleshooting one idea at a time, at last we figured it out.  The beast simply did not like such a long cord, so we shortened and rerouted it and bazinga, power!  “Resistence is not futile, it’s voltage divided by current.”