Day 14

We began the day knowing that this would be the last day of our road trip to and from Wichita. As we left the state of Nevada behind, we entered California and I would have known it if I had been blindfolded. The road surface was horribly rough. On this particular section of Interstate I'm always concerned about damage being done to our motorhome because of the beating it takes from the road.

As we proceeded uphill we came to a fast slowdown. I speculated that there might have been an accident ahead. As it turned out, the small traffic jam was due to two lanes of traffic being squeezed down to one lane. This was done to get by a construction zone. Just at the entrance to the construction area there was a very large boat with a oversized load sign on it. The boat and trailer were sitting in a wide pullout as traffic passed by in only one lane.

We were fortunate to get by this wide load before it proceeded down the road

After passing the big boat, it looked as if the lane markers had been moved over as preparation for the "oversized load" that would be coming through. Even though there were two lanes open for the boat, the traffic was supposed to stay single file in the far right lane. Again, I'm glad we were able to get ahead of a slow moving wide load.

The construction zone that we were in showed the thickness of the new pavement being put down. This zone was shorter than many construction areas we traversed in other states. The longest road construction zone was 15 miles long somewhere in Nebraska or Wyoming.

Barrel-barriers appear to have been moved to the left to make room for big boat

New road construction is way overdue on this section of I-80

The trip down the western slope of the Sierras was routine with the exhaust brake doing a great job at maintaining a speed for our motorhome. Things began to get a little hectic as we approached Sacramento. We had entered Sacramento just at the end of the Friday morning rush hour. I drove on I-80 to the junction with I-5 where we turned south toward state highway 12. This is a very familiar route for us, so the time passed quickly until I was turning off on highway 12 to refuel before stopping for the day.

After refueling at the Lodi Flying J, we were on our way to the last stop of this trip. California State Highway 12 is a narrow two-lane — one lane each way — that has a someway uneven surface. Sometimes it is almost like we are in a boat riding the swells of the ocean instead of the swells of the asphalt roadway. Not far from the turnoff for the campground, a small fire was burning on the side of the road. This area is a bad place for a ground fire because some areas in the California Delta have a lot of peat in the soil and peat can burn. There have been peat fires that smolder underground for months because it is so hard to extinguish a subsurface fire.

Shortly after passing the fire we turned off of the highway and drove down a very narrow road that ultimately would have us driving on top of a Delta levee with a long dropoff to a field on one side and a shorter drop to the water on the other side.

This is a bad place for a fire as the soil in this area can burn for a long time

We would end out trek at the Delta Bay Marina and RV Resort to attend a gathering of RVs with our club. It was nice to get settled into our campsite that was shaded very well by fruitless-mulberry trees. Again we ended another RV Fun Trip.

It was nice to have plenty of shade in our last campsite of the trip

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