Albany to Susanville

Saturday morning we woke to more drizzle, but at least we didn't have to break camp in the rain. The most difficult chore was coiling the 30A extension cord in the cold.

On the road at 9:15, the decision made to head south, the drive was quite pleasant. The rain had almost disappeared, just the occasional drizzle. We pulled off at Grant's Pass to fuel up at Fred Meyer's shortly after noon and an hour later stopped for lunch at the last Oregon rest area.


Soon were grinding up the hills toward California. We were delighted to see all the road condition warming sign unactivated and soon we were rolling down the far side of the Syskiou pass. Weather was much better, we could even see the very top of Mount Shasta without it's usual cloud cover. We noted though that there was very little snow on the peak, it seem to be much less that in previous years.

At the city of Shasta we turned left onto highway 89. This was where we had had a mechanical issue some years ago with a faulty oil sensor. Gillian thought that we should plan to overnight at the RV park we had stayed at that time but Art hoped to get as far as Susanville tonight; we were in the mountains and it would be cold at night. We were trying to remember the place we had broken down and the RV Park just a few kilometres further on but somehow we sailed right on past! Looked like Art was going to get his way this time! He still felt fresh for the extra two hours or so of driving it would entail and at 6:20 we pulled into the Walmart lot in Susanville. Like many Walmarts they welcome RV Overnighters and this one even had marked RV parking places.

Art was keen to try the new batteries so the inverter was energised and the controller set searching for the ShawDirect satellite. The idiot box was soon entertaining us. We left it on for several hours, until after the  10:00 PM news on CHEK TV, our home TV station. The batteries lived up to expectations; voltage dropped a little of course but not much. We could never have done this with the previous ones. The big draws are the TV (We'll pay attention to current draw when we get a new one) and the furnace fan motor.