Recent travels in Cookie, the motor home

Every year in August my husband’s family gathers at Lake Siskiyou near Mt. Shasta; it’s always the first weekend in August and we have made it almost every year since we started seeing each other. This year, with the loss of my mom, we really wanted to get away and take some time, so we decided to head out the weekend prior and visit some other places.

It started with deciding to attend Van’s brother’s birthday party on the 30th in Anderson, near Redding. We decided to leave on the Friday before so we could get up there, get settled and not be rushed to get to the party. It was probably about eleven on Friday morning that we got news that the party was cancelled due to illness - but not Covid. We decided to head out anyway in order to visit my in-laws at least. So we hit the road about noon on Friday, bringing along my nephew Anthony in order to give him a little summer vacation in his summer break.

If you remember that week at the end of July, we were having a heat wave and when we arrived in Cottonwood it was 111°! We went inside to the air conditioning and visited for a while. We had originally planned to stay there for a couple of days but with the heat being so awful we decided to head to the hills. We settled on Hat Creek and an RV park friends of ours recommended.

We arrived there just before dark, with enough light to find our site and get settled in. Finding our site was a bit difficult - most of the sites were marked but it turned out ours wasn’t. We got lucky when our neighbor came over and asked us what site we were looking for; apparently the people who had left that morning had the same site and the same trouble finding it.

We spent two nights at Hat Creek; the fishing was just OK - Van caught three that we had for breakfast on our last morning there. Anthony and I took bike rides around the park and found some trails at the rear, including the Pacific Crest Trail, which we rode on briefly where is skirted the park. I picked up a deck of cards and an Uno deck and he and I played a lot of Uno and a few games of War. We also found the horse shoe pits and played a couple of games there.

We left Hat Creek around 10:00 AM on Sunday morning and drove to Lassen National Park. We toured the visitor center and watched a film about the park, then we took the 35 mile drive through the park. We saw several of the sites along the way but the one thing we noticed was that after the fires in the area the park looked more like it had after the last eruption than it probably had in years. We had joked about climbing to the top but one look at it from the parking lot was enough to discourage any remnants of that idea. We wound our way down the back side, which was relatively lush, and then drove into the town of Chester to find some lunch. We also hit the grocery store and picked up more supplies for the next leg of our trip - Eagle Lake. I’ll write about that next time.