We got up and out for Sacramento/Granite Bay/San Francisco pretty early the next day, so really just the usual 5:30AM. While driving through Nevada, we came across what could win the prize for funniest sign/place name. Shady Lady Ranch Brothel. Through this much of the trip here are the standings:
1) Shady Lady Ranch Brothel
2) BJ’s Cocktail Lounge
3) Elephant Butte… yes we have been liberally mispronouncing that word the whole trip for our enjoyment.
When we drove by there, we discovered they really weren’t messing around with the “shady” part. It was just a collection of trailer homes in the middle of a dry, barren desert with zero cloud cover or… shade. We held our breath as we drove through to avoid catching any and all diseases.
Our first planned stop on this trip was Yosemite. We were really looking forward to it and when we got close we began to see a terrifying sight… snow in May. It was obviously not fresh, but seeing a partially frozen lake in what was not a winter month caught us off guard a bit. Later on the road, something else caught us totally off guard with the closure of Tiago Pass or the eastern entrance to Yosemite. Bummer.
We were forced to ad-lib our way around the park and by the time would eventually get around to where we could go into the other entrance, it would be too late. We did still get to see some amazing landscape in the Sierra Nevada though. This part of driving also proved to be the ultimate test of my 120 horsepower compact car as we found ourselves going up a 26% grade. To say I was concerned would be the understatement of the year, at least until I saw someone driving a Toyota Prius in front of us. That was a pretty big boost of confidence seeing someone with an electric engine even attempting this feat.
After we got past the mountains, we were on our way to do some wine tasting in Murphy’s, California. Yes that is the name of the town, yes they have a decent collection of vineyards and no, basketball is not their biggest sport… It’s frog jumping. Taking a page from Mark Twain, the day we arrived, the frog jump finals were going on, although we did miss it by the time we rolled in. We did manage to taste a few different wines at a local vineyard, Chatham. All in all, we tried 2 whites and 3 reds before walking out with one of each. It was a pretty interesting experience and the woman serving us didn’t seem to mind me videotaping the whole thing. She also brought out some chocolates to go with the wines, two things I wouldn’t have imagined going well together but they did.
After we left the vineyard, we started off for my grandparents’ place in Granite Bay. We plugged the address into the GPS, but it was giving us some odd directions and kept predicting us arriving 3 hours later despite having us only travel a total of less than 90 miles. So we nixed the GPS for the time being and called my grandpa who (sorta) gave us directions. After finding our way into Sacramento (just getting into town past Arco Arena) I called my grandpa again for further directions only to discover… we were lost. After we got new directions, we looked at the GPS and behold it was right all along. The first time we got lost and the first time we had to change travel plans both happened on this one day of traveling. Needless to say, when we rode into a delicious dinner, drinks and hilarious stories I will not publish for the sake of my uncle Joe’s embarrassment, we were very relieved.
