July 20, 2013 - Saturday

We hooked up the camper and left around 10 AM. Our first stop on our way to Yosemite was Hook and Ladder Winery in Sonoma County. I went along as a wine lover and fireman's wife, but it wasn't quite as intriguing as Horseshoe Winery or something of the sorts ;-) However, I was pleasantly surprised. The wine was absolutely delicious and the building was pretty cool. The vineyard was beautiful and well maintained. The owner, Cecil, was a San Francisco firefighter for 16 years. If you've been to The Ott House, it was similar in the sense that it had fire company t-shirts and patches around the tasting room. Chris left a Loudon County t-shirt for them to hang up and we got a firefighter's discount. This was our first winery of the day, so I know what I was tasting was not tainted by 2, 3, or 4 other wineries' grapes-I can't wait to uncork the bottle I bought for myself. They had a wine named after the station he worked at and a Tillerman wine, too.

Yosemite was our destination and it only took us about 4 and a 1/2 hours. We stopped for lunch along the way at a "Jack in the Box." The food was average fast food and it was on the other side of Oakland-luckily. We arrived in Coarsegold, California around 5 PM. Along the way, we saw many fruit farms and acres and acres of pistachio trees. The KOA was not the nicest we'd been to, but it would do the trick. Luckily, we had signed up for full hook-ups here-it was nice to have water, sewer and electric. The temperature was 102 at 5 PM, the ground was dusty and dry and the sun was scorching; we were thankful for AC.

We set our camper up and realized a tire on the camper was leaking air. As I helped guide Chris(Tahoe/camper) up on blocks, I noticed where the leak was. You could hear the air leaking out and I saw a broken razor blade sticking out-a darn slice. There wasn't any good way to repair it, so Chris decided we would grab pizza out(no fires here-bone dry) and look for a tire place/hardware store. As I have mentioned before, it is great that Chris is so handy. We went to a parts place and got a bottle jack and a couple other supplies we needed. They recommended a tire place just up the road. We would have to wait until Monday.

Round Table Pizza hit the spot. The server reminded me a little of McLovin'(Superbad reference) but he was very nice and mentioned one of his associates at his other job was from PA-pretty cool. We went back to the campground, Chris worked on getting the bikes up on the roof rack and I took the laundry to get some of that cleaned and out of the way. Chris came up to tell me, he could not get the bike rack on and we'd have to improvise. I had to wait over a half hour for the laundry to be done-there was only enough room for one out of two loads. I was content with waiting because I can't keep my nose out of my novel. None of the dryers opened up because they each take an hour and two were out of order. I gave up and took the wet laundry back to our site. The inside of our camper ended up looking like a series of clotheslines overnight. Chris tied the bikes onto the roof with rope. I wasn't worried because with the contraption he constructed, no one would actually take the time to untie the bikes to steal them. Another creation that worked perfectly well that only Chris could come up with!