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We're Finally Running Away for Real! Lake of the Springs Soroptimist RV Club CampoutJul 29, 2008
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Some of the SI group relazing after a hard day of eating...
| Saturday, July 26 – We’re Finally Running Away from Home Last Wednesday morning was hysterical. Here we were, Jim and I, almost stark naked at 2am in the morning, making the bed in the RV. We’d spent all of Tuesday (and Monday, for that matter) getting the RV ready – Jim with all the widgets and gadgets, me with food and clothing – and by Tuesday night we were both exhausted. We showered and got ready for bed, but found that neither one of us could sleep. So at 10:30pm we turned on the lights and read, figuring we’d get sleepy. Then off went the lights and we tried sleeping again – no luck. Back on with the lights. This went on until about 1:30am, when we finally gave up, got up and started working on getting the RV bedroom ready – hence the 1:30 am bed making escapade. Getting ready for a 5-6 month trip was more daunting than we thought. We were shooting to leave Thursday late morning to go up to Lake of the Springs, a campground in the foothills northeast of Marysville. We were meeting my Soroptimist RVing group there for a long weekend before we left. Wednesday was busier than snot, with me in Napa doing last minute errands (and making sure we had a full supply of our necessary drugs), and Jim working on getting the new DirecTV service installed. Thursday was not kind to us. Jim’s last project was to take apart the hydraulic pullers and pushers that move the slide outs… and that turned out to be a bigger project than he had anticipated. Thank goodness Ethan was available to crawl into the slide out underneath the coach to help – if it wasn’t for ET we’d never have left. I realized that I still had not gone through the house and figured out what I really needed from home for the trip, so I looked like a demented Energizer Bunny, going to and from the house and RV with one thing or another. Leaving was harder than I expected. Hugging ET one last time made us all teary eyed– he’s been so helpful to us this past week. And he’s taken over all the utilities and will be staying at the house while we’re gone. He’s looking forward to our friend Tony Powers coming for several months in October. The two of them can talk golf ‘til the cows come home. We also got to thinking about Michele and Mike and their families and Chris’ kids – we won’t see them all for quite some time. We’ll drop in to see Chris in Boise for a day or two…. I really didn’t think it would be so hard to leave. Finally left for the first stop on our odyssey at 4pm. We decided to go down Hwy 29. For those of you who know 29 know that southbound at 4pm on any given weekday is a mess: bumper to bumper and generally coming to a full stop about Oakville. Well, the full stop happened just past Rutherford. When Jim saw that, we made a quick change of plans and headed east on Hwy 128 past Berryessa and over to Interstate 505 that way. Jim, bless him, knew I’d be white knuckled on the narrow road past Nicholini Winery so went slow to stay in my comfort level. Driving on through the central valley we came to the conclusion that some farmers are growing fields of star thistles. That’s what the crops looked like. Don’t know if the heat and/or smoke had anything to do with it, but for sure it didn’t look like any kind of cash crop we’d ever seen. Got to Lake of the Springs about 7:30pm and the good news was our friends still had food for us!! Lake of the Springs is one of those Thousand Trails places, and I have to say it’s especially nice for families. They have a small lake with some boating, pool, lots of playground stuff, activities and the like. Lots of kids running around, which gave me hives, but the spaces are fairly big so there was enough space between campsites to keep me from being talked to by the park patrol people for yelling at kids too much. My Soroptimist friend Alice Reed has a super deluxe extra crispy membership at Thousand Trails, and 10 of us were able to stay there even though we weren’t members. Jim had a small crisis while there. It was 102 degrees and our air conditioning went out. I remember when we got our first RV I just went into panic mode every time something went wrong. And it went wrong a lot because we didn’t know anything about these big motor homes. But over the years, I’ve realized my wonderful husband can fix anything – and I mean anything!! Les and Patricia Walker were there, so Les, who also is a fixit guy, helped trouble shoot. They were able to figure it out. The only guy missing from the guy party was Rex Williams, Teri’s husband, who normally joins in the orgy of fixing things at these Soroptimist RV outings. Rex and Teri had to go home early, so he missed the fun of brainstorming the fix for the motor home. In the mean time, while not worried, I was melting in the heat. Sue Chambers, Alice and Bobbi Enderlin were feeling smug because their not so fancy but serviceable rigs all had their A/C going and were cool!! One of the fun things at this place is they have a pontoon boat that goes out into this lake several times a day and one can go out and swim mid-lake. Even if one is not swimming it is blissfully cool since the breeze off the water is wonderful. Tony and Linda McClimans came up (wonderful breakfast Sunday morning) and Tony joined Sue and Bobbi and me for an outing on the pontoon boat – they all swam and I just napped on the boat! Katherine Buckman and Susan Gott were up for a few days, but left Saturday so they missed that day’s swimming. Sue, Alice and Jim and I stayed on through Sunday night – thank you Alice . We are taking a quick run home on Tuesday. Then we’re off “for real!” |
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