Here are a few views of our Getaway cabin, on the edge of Lake Minden:
It's a nice size for the two of us, they say it sleeps 6, that might be a bit crowded. It has a loft with two twin mattresses, queen bed in the bedroom, and foldout sofa. It has all the comforts of home. The lake is 1.5 miles to walk around, here is a bird we saw the first morning:
No road trip is complete without geocaching, we snagged a total of 70 finds, including a trip to the GPS Adventure Maze at Turtle Bay in Redding. Lots of agriculture and orchards around. We don't cache much in the summer in Arizona because it's so hot here but we found they don't cache much in the summer up there because it's spider season. More than once we almost walked into the giant web of these ginormous spiders:
Monday, we went to Capitol Park to visit the California Firefighters' Memorial:
Not wanting to spend too much time in Sacramento, where they boycott Arizona, we grabbed a few geocaches in the park and headed to Woodland. On a recommendation from a friend, we went to a geocache where a guy has transformed his HOUSE and conducts tours of his memorabilia strewn backyard on the weekends.
Tuesday we headed to Redding to meet my geocaching buddy, Dawnie, for the first time.
We spent the afternoon visiting. In the evening, we took a stroll on the River Trail and found a few more geocaches. It was very dark by the time we got back to the car. We stayed over at Dawnie's and went to Turtle Bay for the GPS Adventure Maze. http://www.turtlebay.org/
Tom had fun too...
We strolled through the gardens and saw the Sundial Bridge then we headed back to Dawnie's so the plumber could install her new hot water heater. (yay! hot water!)
Wednesday we headed back to the cabin. Thursday, we geocached most of the day, then met my friend, Laurie from high school, and her husband Greg, for dinner. More geocaching after dinner. Time to start packing up to head home.
We decided to take two days to drive home and stop in Tehachapi as the halfway point and visit Grandma Honey. She looks great!
We also took the opportunity to see the Tehachapi Train Loop (and snag an Earthcache geocache). We were fortunate to see TWO trains within 10 minutes of each other right after arriving at the historical markers. For the second train, we had time to get to a better viewing area on a dirt road and up a hill. Here is the northbound train starting around the loop. The tunnel just below the engines is where it will pass under itself.
Here is comes around the hill, you can see the boxcars from the same train at the bottom as the engines are about to pass...
The lead engines are entering the tunnel and the pusher engines in the middle are about to pass over the tunnel...
The pusher engines at the end of the train come into view (at the bottom of the picture) while the train is crossing over itself...
Now the mid-train pusher engines are entering the tunnel as the end pusher engines (just behind the tree) are passing over the tunnel.
This was pretty awesome to watch, glad we timed it just right to see two trains.Home on Saturday. It was a very good trip.
