So I took 2 days off and had a 5 day weekend. CDMCC and I drove down to Mt. Shasta. The drive wasn’t too bad. It took ~8hrs, though being the driver, it felt a LOT shorter than driving from Berkeley to Monterey Park, which usually takes about 6hrs. We stayed at a place called Fowler’s Campground which has been ‘the place’ for the past 4 years. I went there 2 years ago, but was in Europe last year, so I missed it.
On our drive down, we saw the scariest accident ever. It was like straight out of a movie. A big rig crashes into a SUV (CDMCC thinks it’s a Lincoln Navigator) and the SUV literally flips multiple times. I counted 3, but it was already flipping by the time I saw it. This was on the I-5, about 50miles north of WA’s southern border. It was also during a left curve so we were facing directly into it. There was lumber all over the place and there was big rig that took multiple lanes, so I assumed it was the big rig that hit it.
Some interesting statistics from my Civic’s gasoline mileage:
32.2MPG
38.7MPG
34.8MPG
36.3MPG
I almost broke 40! Darn! I was so close too! I think my Civic’s is suppose to have 30MPG on city roads and 36MPG on freeways. Most of you probably know that Oregon doesn’t have any sales tax, but one interesting fact about Oregon is that all gas stations are full service. You won’t find one that allows self service. However, even with full service, the price per gallon was $2.87. Wow… Gasoline in CA was expensive! I’m not sure if it was because I pumped in the middle of nowhere, but it was priced at $3.31/gallon. This is referring to 87 octane. Price of 87 octane here in Washington is ~$2.97/gallon. Another interesting thing that came up was that we thought how sweet it would be to live in Oregon, but to work in Washington. No state income tax for work and no sales tax for stuff you purchase.
So the remainder of the drive was pretty calm. We arrived at the campsite around 1am and we woke Liam and ChewyDenise up. The rest of the crew showed up the next day which included Lorie and Jeani. Lorie’s roommate Gretchen and her brother Karl also came. We had loads of fun, doing stuff like cooking on top of the campfire, playing card games (asshole, the fool, kings, casino, war, golf, pyramid, race horse, and a couple others I don’t remember on the top of my head), swimming and jumping off waterfalls, sunbathing, making smores, chopping firewood, etc. SFHalcyon ended joining us a day later. We were totally not expecting him to show up, but he did arrive after hiking up Mt. Shasta.
I’ve uploaded all my pictures and videos to: 2006 July 4th Camping Trip. I’ll let the pictures and videos tell the rest of the story. Here are some selected pictures and videos I wanted to share. The videos may take some time to load since I didn’t bother re-encode them into a streamable format. You always have the option to download the video (link beneath the video player) and watch it locally.
Pictures:
Videos:
I will say that the water was a lot colder this year due to the extra snow and the water current was a lot stronger. I somehow managed to scratched myself and sprained my ankle due to the strong current. This was on top of the many bug bites I already received.
All in all, it was a really fun trip. We left around 8:30am on July 4th and we get back around 4:30pm. I was really tired, so I took a shower and went to sleep pretty early, missing all the fireworks.