Kinetic Parade

This weekend in Arcata they have the Kinetic Grand Championship

 Parade. They are human powered machines that have to go on land, sand and water. On Saturday it was the land part. They start in the Arcata town square. At noon the horn blows and they make two laps around the square. Then they open the starting gate at one end and off they go to Samoa, CA. They travel 42 miles total.

 

  Lava rocks and fire came out of the top.

You can see the floats on the bottom of this one.

This is a funny one "The Organ Trail".

A cool Bike.    

And you see a lot of funny people.

More funny people.

Big tractor tires work good on this one.

He's got a 23 pitch prop on the back. 

Four people power this big shark.

The band.

We had a good time watching the show and all the colorful people at the parade. It was a nice day.

It has been a little cool here, in the 60's. We talked to a bartender in town, she said that in the winter the high is 60 and in the summer it's 65 and when it hits 70 the town people go crazy. We didn't know the weather on the coast is NOT like Florida. So we have been rethinking our idea of traveling along the coast. It's all part of being flexible and making plans that are cast in jello. 

 

 

Live Happy and Always Go Big.







170 Miles 5 hours later

We left Red Bluff and had 170 miles to go to get to Arcata, CA. We took California route 299. It was thru the mountains, where you climb to 3000 feet three different times. We had to stop for construction 5 or 6 times, down to one lane. It took us 5 hours to get there. 

Going down the hill and trying to slow down for this turn. It's a ton of fun.



We were up above the clouds.

 The before and

the after.

Check out the beautiful flowers along California roads. It's like that for hundreds of miles. 



 We stopped at the Lesson Steakhouse. A pretty cool place. See the ceiling fan. It was really cool, all run by one motor.

 Oh, we had the snail races going on at our site. Then we had them for Escargots later. :)

 Had to do some more maintenance on the RV. They put the cheapest draw slides in them. So I went to Home Depot and got some good ones. It takes a lot of tools to install them.

 And a lot of head scratching. It only took 3 hours.

Now we are in Mad River RV Park. It's not a bad park but a lot of people are living here in older RVs that never will be on the road again. But we have a nice big back-in lot. With lots of room to park all our stuff on it.

Heidi sent me a text asking if we are going to the Kinetic Parade in Arcata. So we looked it up and yes we are going to go on Saturday. Because on Sunday we have too many things to do. We have to watch the Indy 500, then the Coca Cola 600 and it's Peggy's birthday!

 

 

Live Happy and Always Go Big.

 



Yosemite!

OMG I think we were just at the most beautiful place on earth. Yosemite National Park! 

 Bridalveil Falls it drops 620 feet.

 This all makes the truck look pretty small.

 These are some of the many beautiful falls.

We did see some climbers. Some of them were up 5 or 6 thousand feet!

 I guess you need a long rope to climb some of these cliffs.

 My GPS kept telling about a 12 foot clearance on the road, here it is. I'm not sure how high the truck is, but it was close.

Here is another one of those hang overs.

 

It's hard to see, but we drove thru this low hanging rock too.

It was about a 75 mile drive from Chowchilla and another really fun drive on a winding, twisty, up and down narrow road.

Sometimes it's even a single lane. This was a detour on the way. The old road had a rock slide completely covering the road. It must have been closed for a long time to put in two bridges to get around it.

 

 

Live Happy and Always Go Big.

 

 

 



Sequoia National Park

We moved to Visalia, CA and stayed at Country Manor RV Park. It was right in the middle of the city. It was a nice little park. We had the only drive thru site. The best part about staying here was it was close to Sequoia National Park. We made the trip into the park on Friday. It was a beautiful day.

Peggy at this really cool sign made back in the 1930's. We had to drive on this little road, from 340 feet above sea level to over 6200 feet.

Looking down on the road. We are way above the road below.

This is as close to snow as we want to get.

 Then we found the BIG TREES!

 275 feet to the top.





 They make the Big Truck look pretty Small.

 Check out this really cool rock. We are still in the rock mode.

 Here is a really cool Yucca plant.

 A little hummer behind me. 



Peggy. It was a cool park. We can mark that one off the list!

So on to the next park. We have moved to Chowchilla, CA. We can access Yosemite National Park from here.

We are at the Lakes RV & Golf Resort. We are planning to golf later this week. You get to golf for FREE!

 

 

Live Happy and Always Go Big.

 



Finally on the Move Agian

We were stuck in Bakersfield, CA waiting for parts to fix one of our slides. It took a month! Things do not move fast in the RV world. We even had to stay at Camping World one night. 

 We had the truck parked on the other side of the RV for the night. It took them two days to fix the slide.

After they got if fixed we went to Crest RV Park, just down the street from Camping World. This was a great park. It had a Bar and Restaurant in it. We ate there that night and it was great.

 So we have moved 80 miles north. It was a tough drive, NOT. We are now in Visalia, CA the gateway to Sequoia National Park. We are planning to go there tomorrow.

 

When we were in Orange Grove RV Park if I could have found five more of these guys we would of had Escargots in garlic butter on the BGE!

  We did smoke a turkey one day.

We are still on the Bar, Restaurant tour. We had dinner at Goose Loonies one afternoon in Bakersfield.  The food was good.

It's nice to be back on the move again. We have a lot of places to see yet this year.

The weather has been great. Today it was 96 and sunny.

Oh, one good thing was that I was having problems with the MaxxFans in the RV. So I emailed the company. Mike emailed me right back. I was stunned! Then I emailed him the part numbers and he sent me two of them for FREE. Now that is a good company in the RV business.

 

Throw-Back Picture of The Blog.



Cliff , Biff and me.

 

Live Happy and Always Go Big.