August 27: the laptop died--
the blue screen of death tried over and over to convince Mark to give up--no laptop, no website updates, no TLA work on our trip, while we mail it to Sony and hope they can rebirth it. . .but Mark wouldn't give up, and so. . .we still get to do this website. Yea!

Here are pictures from our pre-trip trip to Truckee, CA (mid-August)

Katie snoozed behind me

We saw our first retro rv on I-80 Truckee-bound; it was a Santa Fe trailor.

another great old rv at the park in Truckee

this looked so tiny beside the big modern RVs

Packing & Leaving
September 1
We got the RV back from the dealer today, then we rushed to pack so we could hit the road. They had it extra long (right up until this morning) to fix a persistent air conditioning problem, and the A/C now works great. Every problem has now been addressed, aside from our ripped carpet (that will be replaced after our trip). It seemed like there were a lot of issues (more than we had with our new house), but one of the guys at Village RV told us to expect that. Let's hope we found them all.

We got on the road at 1:44pm, and as soon as we hit the highway, we were stuck in a traffic jam. We were so excited it was fine that we were only going 5 mph. At least we were going 5mph on Vacation! Turned out to be a really bad bigrig fire. The smoke was gone but we saw the wreckage--the trailor had burned so hot that it crumpled and the walls and ceiling were largely gone. I've never seen a big trailor like that destroyed so thoroughly.

The rest of our drive went smoothly and was beautiful all the way to the coast. Katie fell asleep, Mark drove, and I started reading the gripping nonfiction book "And I Alone Survived" about a woman who walks out of the Sierra Nevada after a plane crash.

Mark noticed our gasoline is disappearing faster now that we are towing the car. We got about 10mpg without the car.

Here are pictures from our packing and leaving (September 1)

Here is our extended bedroom, back when it could extend...

All packed up

Leaving home

Mark driving away from Rocklin