The rain and forecast in Oregon encouraged us to move south quickly. We wandered about a bit in upscale Ashland, home of the famed Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Our next destination was picked from the map, a national forest campground next to a giant man-made lake. What we found was a relatively small lake with lots of houseboats looking for room — a victim of the California drought–and sunshine!! Lassen National Park beckoned in the distance but the closer and higher we got, the more snow there was. Luckily there was another empty NF campground along Hat Creek with views of the snow-covered Lassen Volcano and a nearby cave to explore. It was our first genuinely cold night. From there we moved down central California, towards a rendezvous with our neice Erin in Sacramento. An unexpected find was the Sacramento National Wildlife Preserve, where the sheet quantity and variety of birds was hard to fathom or explain. A dedicated effort to engineer this preserve along the migratory flight paths has led to an incomparable opportunity to get close to birds and other wildlife.
Betsy and Eddie's Van Life 