A Little Shopping

Today we decided to do a little shopping at both Costco and Walmart so we headed over to Roseville, California. Wow…what a huge shopping area. I think you could spend months trying to visit every store! We stocked up a bit and wandered a bit at Costco, they already have Christmas stuff out. After that it was grocery shopping at Walmart and then home. Oh, we did stop at a Subway for a sandwich too. I have to say, we got a bit carried away shopping this time…I just barely managed to get everything in the refrigerator and we had to store some canned stuff in the outside storage compartment. Oh well, we did get it all in!

We relaxed the rest of the afternoon away and now we're watching Monday Night Football.

Since there was so much to see at the Coloma Gold Rush Live I decided to put together another video with clips I took yesterday. Hope you enjoy it.

Photos:
All taken yesterday at Colomo Gold Rush Live

Coloma Gold Rush Live

There is a little town just a mile or two down the road from the Ponderosa campground called Coloma. It’s where the gold rush in California started back in 1848. Every year at this time they hold a reenactment of gold rush days and we happened to be lucky enough to be here during this years event. They have people in period dress doing demonstrations and explaining how life was back in the day. They also have a few booths with goods you can purchase. The people doing the demonstrations are very knowledgeable and quite interesting. If you’re ever in the area it is definitely something to attend.

The rest of our day was the usual, watching some football, taking walks and just enjoying the beautiful day.

Photos:
Top: Miner’s cabin
Bottom: Gold panning demonstration
Video: all from Coloma Gold Rush Live

An Answer to a Question

I had a comment, rather a question, on yesterday’s post and thought I would answer in today’s post. The question came from Coal wondering about our power system…Coal saw the post that showed our battery bank and was curious. Since I know a few people that read my blog are not RV’ers I thought I’d take a minute and explain. Normally we plug in to the park’s external power and run off that, we have 30 amp service. However in an emergency or if we park somewhere there is no power hook-up the trailer is set up to run the lights and water pump off of batteries. We added to the one battery that came with the RV to run longer and we have a Honda generator to run anything that plugs in. The trailer also has propane for heat and cooking so we can handle not being hooked up to electricity for several days. The batteries are charged by being plugged in to electricity, but one of these days we’d like to get solar panels to charge the batteries. Hope that answers your question!

Today was windy but nice. We didn’t do much but go on a few walks, talk to a few of our neighbors and hang out at the trailer. On our early morning walk there was a guy out in the river with a small floating dredge, dredging for gold. Kinda interesting to watch.

On the video tonight Dave throws a rock out into the river trying to get Cheye to go out swimming. Cheye gets to the spot the rock went in and wanders a bit, sticking her head in the water trying to find the rock…she is such a funny dog.

Photos:
Top: The moon over the campground
Bottom: Dave & Cheye watching the guy dredging gold

Never Assume

I really should have done laundry one more time while we were at Lake of the Springs. I had at least one load of dirty clothes but because it was $1.75 to wash a load I decided to wait and do it here at Ponderosa. I, of course, was assuming they had a laundry room here. Wrong. I had downloaded the PDF map of the Ponderosa, and if I would have looked I would have noticed there was no laundry listed. Now I may have thought they just didn’t list it, but I probably would have done the load just in case. Oops. So today we had to pack up the laundry and drive in to Placerville (about 10 miles) and go to a Laundromat. We would have had to do laundry while we were here anyway, but since we have another week here I imagine we will have to go again. So yet another lesson learned: not all Thousand Trails parks have laundry rooms!

Beside our trip to Placerville we had a quiet day. It was cool today and a bit breezy. Not cold, but I did wear a sweatshirt whenever we took Cheye for a walk. A lot of threatening clouds blew over, but no rain. Since it is a holiday weekend the park is really filling up tonight. Even though the weather isn't quite as nice I think it’s gonna be hoppin’ this weekend!

Photos:
Tops: Dark clouds today
Bottom: The river
Video: slides from around the Ponderosa Campground

Picnic

This morning Dave suggested we pack up a picnic and take it down to the beach by the river. So we fixed a lunch, grabbed a couple books and the bag chairs and headed over to the beach. It was a really lovely way to spend a few hours today. It was sunny, warm and peaceful. We read and let Cheye go for a couple swims so we all had a nice time.

We ended up spending the rest of the afternoon driving down to Diamond Springs, CA. We’ve been wanting to get the pickup in for a check-up. We found a local diesel shop and decided to drive over to see if they would have an open appointment time and they do. So next Thursday we take the pickup in.

Tonight has been quiet. Dinner and watching a old movie on Cinemax. We are able to pickup the parks wi-fi here at the trailer so I had my internet browser open when I heard a “bing” noise, my friend Sandy saw me online and instant messaged me, so we chatted for a while. Kinda fun! The internet really does make the world a little smaller place doesn’t it.

Photos:
Top: our chairs at the beach
Middle: the trailer
Bottom: the river
Video: what we sat and looked at this morning…. :o)

Ponderosa

We traveled about 75 miles south to the Thousand Trails Ponderosa Preserve just out of Lotus, California. It’s a nice park, it is along a river, has a very nice store with a bit more of a café than we have seen at most of the Thousand Trails. It’s not a big park, no laundry room, but it has a pool, nice restrooms and friendly staff. There are a fair amount of trees but we were able to find a site that can get satellite signal.

After we arrived we decided to go for a walk. Cheye went for a swim in the river and then we explored a bit. We found the dog run, beach, dog beach and wandered through the store/café. Once we got back to the trailer we had lunch and then relaxed outside. On another walk before dinner a woman and her 2 children were on the beach by the river. They had caught some crawdads and were about to let them race to see which one made it back to the water first.

It was warm today, in the mid 80’s but it is cooling down considerably this evening. It’s been a fun day, I love full-timing. It’s really wonderful to be able to visit all of these different areas.

Photos: taken today in the campground.
Video: Short video of Cheye in for a swim in the river

Last Day at Lake of the Springs

Today is our last day here at Lake of the Springs. I know we will come back to this park, it is a definite favorite. We have had a fun time, great neighbors all in a beautiful park.

Dave started this morning by wiping down the pickup. He heard someone coming down the gravel road, looked up to say “hi” and there were 9 deer walking down the road including 3 bucks one a 5 or 6 point!

Around 9:00 a.m. we went to the coffee social and met some more nice people. They seem to have a fairly good turnout at the functions here. This time of year, when the park isn’t as full, that is pretty amazing. On our way back to the trailer we ran in to some of our neighbors and chatted quite a while, mostly about cruising which is a passion of ours.

The major part of our day was taken up by going in to the Post Office for mail plus cleaning and getting ready for our move tomorrow. We also took the trail that goes along the lake for a little ways. We saw an Otter and some White Egrets on our short hike. As you can tell we love seeing critters, so this was a nice way to end our stay here.

Photos:
Top: Trail by the lake
Middle: Bumper boats
Bottom: The lake