Through the smoke, and into clear blue skies...

Most of you will have heard of the devastation of the town of Paradise, California. We were supposed to be going right by there, but the main highway was closed due to the fires. So we altered our route to head across the mountains to Reno, Nevada.

But the winds were blowing the smoke right through our path. My thinking was that we should be able to drive through the smoke, and hopefully get far enough east to get out of it. We had enough smokey skies in British Columbia this past summer!

We had set off as soon as we woke up yesterday morning. Better to use the engine heat to warm things up than wasting propane.

Sunrise at 6:50am or so.

I actually like getting an hour's driving in early in the morning. There's hardly anybody on the roads.

We stopped at the Home Depot in Red Bluff to use their free wifi and have some breakfast. Then we headed east and up into the mountains again.

Yep, things are pretty dry around here! 

Seeing some forest fire smoke in the sky up ahead.

It's too bad, because the scenery and views in this area would have been really pretty.

Smoke.

But as expected, things cleared up quite a bit as we got up over 4,000 ft in altitude, and by the time we arrived in the town of Chester (pop 2,100 and altitude 4,600 ft), we had nothing but clear blue skies.

We pulled into their little municipal airport and I went into the office and asked if we could spend the night in their parking lot. The guy says "sure, we have lots of space"!

We needed to get some exercise, so I looked on my maps.me app to see if it showed any trails. Sure enough, there was one right at the end of the airport road that would take us through to another road that would bring us back through town.

Out for a walk.

The map had showed part of the path going right into the lake, but the lake was at least half a mile away. However, as we walked the path, it became a bit marshy in spots, and eventually we came to this...

We made it through without getting our feet wet!

It was a little overgrown in spots.

And, the ground was getting wetter, and wetter. That row of trees showing in the photo above should have been where we connected back to a road, so that's where we were trying to go. I ended up taking a little short cut, and stepped right into a half a foot of water, totally soaking my feet. I couldn't see the water through the growth!

Then, we made it to that row of trees, to find that it was an old abandoned farm. The guy finally realized he built it on a swamp!

Abandoned farm.

So then we had only to go about 100 yards, but it was through a pretty wet area. We both ended up with totally soaked feet! But, we were laughing about it... other than the fact that the water was pretty darned cold!

We walked back through town, with our feet squishing the whole way.

Helicopter fighting fires.

Yesterday's drive, 121 miles (200 kms).

Today, we're heading to Reno, Nevada. Never been there before. We're going to be driveway camping at Danielle's place... she was one of the people on our Feb 2016 Mexico RV Caravan.

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