We paid a premium to move our trailer to a site with electricity. It’s been cold enough here to run our propane heater often during the night, which uses expensive propane and drains batteries, so we have to run a generator much of the day to keep up. With electricity, we can run a small electric heater and keep the lights on instead of using battery lanterns, which make it feel like a cave in our trailer.
More about caves later.
The site with electricity is $36 a night, compared with $23 a night for a no-hookups site. This puts camping here at the cost of a private RV park with full hookups, not that there’s any comparison. I’m assuming the parks are having to cover their actual costs because of budget cuts, but you don’t have to multiply $36 by very few days to figure out that it adds up fast. And no WIFI.
We’ve more or less settled into a happy routine. Up about 7:30 to walk the dogs and make coffee. A few hours of reading or studying Spanish for me during the day. Mary is busy on sewing projects she’s brought along and also reading a great deal. We spend a lot of time walking the dogs, a little time with maintaining camp and cooking and eating. Every couple of days, we go for a longer hike. And evenings we listen to an hour or two of Anna Karenina, which we have on audio book.
I don’t think I would have ever read this otherwise, but as a story it’s quite engaging, and at this rate we still have a few weeks of Anna to go. I think we’ll make this a regular part of the trip with more audio books to come. We could do an all-Russian vacation but probably won’t.
Today we took an exquisite hike of about four miles to the Boundary Cave, a talus cave that connects the west and east sides of the park. The hike up was on one of the most lovely trails I’ve ever enjoyed, heavily wooded with lots of rocks covered with moss and lichen and views of the pinnacles through the canopy. I’m not exactly sure what a “glade” is, but I’m pretty sure this would be a glade.
A talus cave, I learned, is formed when earthquakes dislodge huge rocks from the peaks and pile them up in ravines. Since they don’t fit together like a puzzle, the open spaces get partially filled in but leave passages. Bats, of course, love it. We made it to the cave entrance, which was set in a magnificent rock formation, but unfortunately forgot to bring a flashlight so we couldn’t explore further. We might go up again before we leave.
Weather is still cold at night, and we’ve had a little rain, but daytimes are still generally beautifully sunny and relatively warm in the mid-50s. On a trip into town, I got online at a Starbucks and among other things checked the weather back in Klamath Falls.
Ha!
Tomorrow we’re going into Hollister to provision up again, get online, have a Mexican lunch, and explore the site of the 1950s biker takeover that inspired the movie “The Wild One.” If you don’t know the story, it was actually a rather minor incident, with a motorcycle gang buying a lot of beer and getting drunk, fighting, and breaking a few windows over the weekend. Somehow, though, Life Magazine got a reporter and photographer in. There wasn’t a lot of excitement left when they got there, so they got a few of the bikers to stage fake fights and sit drunkenly on their bikes. (Not all Harleys, btw. Brando rode a Triumph in the movie.) The article made outlaw bikers familiar and somehow fascinating to enough people to keep the myth and legends going long after Hunter S. Thompson’s The Hell’s Angles: A Wild and Terrible Saga.
The movie followed the article, and the age of outlaw bikers was born. The dark and brooding Brando didn’t make a very convincing outlaw, but Lee Marvin is actually scary.
What we’ve seen of Hollister so far suggests it’s a nice little town with great strip malls. Tomorrow we go looking for the real downtown deal.
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