Golden opportunities

Placerville, CA – We’ve made ano-ther move, as we have done multi-ple times this trip, but today’s was significant. After head-ing west, more or less, ever since January 9 when we left Ottawa, today we made the turn to travel east.

Planning this leg of the journey will be an interesting exercise, because we will have to take a lot of factors into consideration. We always try to limit the distance to under 250 miles per move so fatigue doesn’t set in. We are now heading toward mountains, and that means high altitudes, and that can mean freezing temperatures overnight.

An overnight freeze could damage the RV plumbing unless we drain the pipes and detach our water hose.  We also have heaters for the holding tanks, and of course the furnace keeps our tootsies cosy but also mitigates against the plumbing issue. We just have to watch the weather and altitude with each change of venue.

Our trip today brought us along Highway 116 through Vallejo, on the shore of the northernmost bay near San Francisco. From there we headed northeast on Interstate 80, past fertile fields of grapevines and cattle farms.  The sun was shining and the air was beautifully clear, although as the day progressed great billowing clouds began to form to the east. 

We drove through the state capital, Sacramento, shortly before arriving at our destination. This city was a major distribution centre during the Gold Rush of the late 1840s, where railroads, stagecoaches and roads intersected and fortunes were made.

Gold was first discovered right around here.  Placer (pronounced “plasser”) gold was found as nuggets of various sizes mixed into soil, and the main way it was collected was by panning in streams. This town was called Dry Diggin’s at first, because miners here would truck shovelfuls of dry soil to a place where they could run it through water to sift out the gold.

The other nickname for Placerville was Hanging Town, because numerous outlaws were dispatched here at the end of a noose.  When the town started to be more settled, citizens thought it might be better to rename it. The town is at the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Before settling in at the KOA here, we went into Shingles Springs, the small village nearby, in search of fuel for the RV.  The cashier at the gas station gave me a free bottle of chilled water after I paid for the fuel.  We then turned in to the Honda dealer across the road, because we needed a new wiper blade for the car’s back window wiper. They had a caddy there where you could help yourself to free popcorn, so I filled a small bag to munch on.

On signing in at the RV park, our host offered us a free container of instant hash brown potatoes, and a small gift bag with candies and a garbage bag. We did rather well today; maybe we should have tried panning for gold too!