Raven's Roads
Living an interesting life: the travels and musings
of motorcycling author Linda R. Moore

Feb 25, 2008

New Hogan Reservoir Part 1

Filed in Blog, RVing

Part One, in which we are navigationally challenged

03 February 2008

Each month we pay for four weeks’ worth of space rental at a time, and in return receive electricity, high speed internet, satellite TV, a phone line and a place to call home. On the other hand, our home has wheels, and having the same view each month can get a bit old.

We made a reservation and thought about where to go.

I started sketching out an ambitious circular route taking us around the Bay Area, but after a bit of thought decided that no, I wasn’t into that. Slobbing around in a campground 30 miles east, however, would be perfect.

Our departure was leisurely. First we had to stash the bikes, then came back for the rig. We broke camp, realizing as we did that somewhere along the lines we have started to know what we were doing with our hookups and leaving routine. Translation: It took us less than an hour.

Then, we did what pretty much amounted to a month’s worth of food shopping and had lunch while parked in the big downtown lot. Suitably stocked, we got on the road, leaving Lodi through pretty lanes lined by trees.

Highway 12 runs east towards the Gold Country. First you roll through the wine country, then suddenly it seems to become more wild: the road cuts through cliffs and the hills start to swell. After a while it began to rain, and a fabulous huge rainbow skirted us for miles. I snapped pictures and enjoyed the view as the sky darkened to gunpowder blue and then brightened with an intense, golden sunset.

The road began to curve and slant, and I began to have my doubts as to where the campground was when highway 12 bottomed out in state highway 49, a road which I knew to go deep into the Gold Country. So Don pulled over in the little historic town of San Andreas and I peered at the map. Sure enough, we’d overshot by about ten miles. We did the lumbering RV equivalent of a u-turn and headed on back.

And…stopped. The entire road was blocked by a two-pickup collision. As the traffic paused, we parked up and waited in the dark as emergency vehicles swung by and oncoming traffic passed through in clumps. Almost all the light had gone by the time we finally made it past the blockage. Soon we were back at the small community of Valley Springs which was where we should have turned.

Trying to remember our way to a campground we hadn’t visited for ten years, in the dark, is not a good idea. About ten miles later we were in pitch-black country lanes, looking in bewilderment at housing developments that we were sure hadn’t existed the last time we were there. I peered at the map again, and we realized where the turn-off had been.

Back we went, almost all the way to Valley Springs, somewhere between a ten and twenty mile detour. We eventually pulled in at Acorn East around seven at night having taken maybe three hours and seventy miles to travel the thirty miles of road from Lodi to the campground.

It was dark there–pitch black. We found a pull-through site and parked. Cats emerged. We had arrived.

Did the navigational fun end there? Why no–it did not. We had unwittingly parked almost as far away from the entrance station as we could, and had to negotiate our way back there with a GPS. We walked away for a little while and then I spotted another RV.

“Oh look, another RV,” I said, and Don said, “Well, actually that’s ours.” It helps if you plug in the “entrance station” coordinate rather than the “where we parked” one.

Snorting with laughter, we made it on the second try, walking through a dark wooded campground with a vast sheet of stars smirking above us.

Part Two continues tomorrow.