In the last blog I posted the many stops I had planned on the way down and back to Yosemite for our upcoming trip in April. When I was route planning, I was considering length of the day and how much driving Rob had to do each day. Sometimes we’re total road warriors when we travel, wanting to get the maximum hours and distance every day (especially when our nose is pointed back toward home). But we’ve learned that towing a trailer is tiring for us both and there’s really no reason to hurt ourselves when we travel.

So I had just looked at a map, set a distance about 4-500 miles each day, and found a spot near that distance to stop. Some were Harvest Hosts wineries, some State Parks, but all were nice places with a reservable spot.

What I hadn’t known and considered at that planning time is the lesson we learned in February when we drove to the California coast for our birthday week. The roads across the mountains in California are wicked hard driving, even without a 21′ travel trailer following along. Our trip from I-5 out to the coast was a totally brutal hours long marathon that seemed to be mountain pass after mountain pass. That winding white line in the pic above is the road we took. It’s 145 miles, which equates to 2 hours on the freeway. We didn’t believe Google Maps when our ETA was nearly 4 hours. But then we learned.

I also hadn’t known at planning time that we would join a wine club in Sonoma and have a set of wineries we wanted to explore and learn about while we were passing through. So today I changed up our trip a bit. There were two California State Parks I had booked west of I-5, one half way into the mountains on the way south, and the other all the way out at Bodega Bay on the way north. Now I knew we didn’t want to drive out to either one. They appear so deceptively close when you’re looking at the big picture of the California map, but when you zoom in and see all the very squiggly white lines, that changes the perspective completely.

We’re getting close to this trip, and everyone with an RV knows that it’s getting hard to get reservations in this covid era. But, once again, Harvest Hosts to the rescue! I found two lovely wineries within 20 miles of the freeway that had open spots to replace the California State Parks.

We’re not “required” to buy wine from the hosts, but they certainly expect us to and for good reason. I have always considered it “free” wine since we’re not paying to park the trailer overnight. One of the wineries we’re stopping at shows the least expensive bottle on their website at $40. That’s not really retirement budget priced wine, but if that’s how it happens to work out, it’s still cheaper than a cheesy private RV park right alongside I-5 listening to traffic noise all night. And no driving on white line roads across California mountains. Except the part between Sacramento and Yosemite, stay tuned for that report next month.