We're in wine country --- finally

It seemed like we'd never get here what with our border crossing issues followed by our truck spindle issues followed by a wheel falling off. Oh - wait - I hadn't mentioned that last little detail had I?

Evidently the guys that put the front end back together on the micro-truck never got around to tightening the lug nuts on the curb side. Obviously I should have checked them but I thought I had more than 100 miles to do that in. I was wrong. There we were tooling down Coastal 101 minding our own business when I saw the by now familiar flashing lights in the rearview mirror. "Not again" was our instinctive response but no such luck. It wasn't quite as bad as the first time - this time the lug nuts just broke off and dropped the truck onto the rotor and we stopped relatively quickly so we likely could have salvaged the rotor. The Ford garage we got towed to was more worried about their own liability than they were about my chequebook so I agreed to replace the rotor. It took them 24 hours to round up some studs & nuts which is a sad commentary on the level of parts in the system now but they eventually got them and we got back on the road.

We didn't get on the road until late in the afternoon which meant we got to experience a bit of San Franscisco's rush hour and a full blown hit of San Jose rush hour. We're getting used to arriving at Thousand Trails parks in the dark and I must say we're also getting really good at finding satellite visible sites in the dark. It was blacker than the inside of a cow when we arrived here and the park is pretty heavily treed. It hasn't been particularly warm yet so I haven't taken any pictures but we're surrounded by tall oaks and some kind of evergreens. Nevertheless we were able to find a hole in the canopy in the dark and get set up. Yesterday we were visited by the camp turkeys but they didn't get close enough to the bus to be worthwhile taking their pictures. There appears to be a flock of about 25 wild turkeys that live here.

Now we'll settle in for a spell. We still need to get a wheel alignment done from the incident in Oregon. I want somebody to have a good look at the right side where it got dragged to make sure there isn't another disaster lurking there and I need to buy a pair of tires, having lost one to the broken spindle and another one when the wheel departed for parts unknown. I spent a while tramping around in the bush where it ran off but with no luck. Its amazing how quickly something as foreign as a tire and rim can blend into thick bushes. Several years ago we lost a wheel off the boat trailer that we bought from Bill Jones. We lost it west of the junction of #6 & #41 highways but east of Taylor's steel. I know exactly which bluff of trees it went into because I saw it leave the boat trailer. The bluff is less than an acre in size and it looks like you can see right through it but we never found the wheel. Down here I was searching on about a 45 degree incline with vicious thorns and some kind of short trees that the deer had beaten a path under but that I could barely claw my way through. Not surprisingly I didn't find anything.