California - Part 1

In our quest to follow warmer weather, we made our way south from the Portland/Vancouver area and got into California on November 11th.

* Weed, CA - One night there just to split up a long drive. And no, we didn't partake in the town's namesake.

* Corning, CA - 6 nights at Rolling Hills Casino Resort. It was surpringly quiet here even though it was right off the freeway and next to a truck stop. We were back far enough from the road, though, so road noise was not an issue. We didn't even gamble! One meal in the casino restaurant was enough to get the experience of walking around for us.

* Gilroy, CA - 14 nights at Gilroy Garlic USA RV Park . Gilroy is the garlic capital of the world, apparently. You could smell garlic certain nights, which was interesting. This location was close to a Lowe's and we took advantage of being close to some building supplies. We completed the big project of converting the bunk bed area into a working desk/office for Chad. (Again, we will post the details in a separate post on that project. Spoiler: we did an awesome job!)

We celebrated our first Thanksgiving away from our kids. Carter and Chloe were together at our "home base house" in Ogden, UT and we all connected over FaceTime. We had the Thanksgiving Day Parade playing in our respective backgrounds while we ate breakfast together. It was an almost 2 hour visit! Who knows if it will be a new tradition, but we all agreed that it worked and it wasn't too bad. Let's call that a win.

Chad and I did a condensed Thanksgiving meal for the two of us. We picked up some pre-made items and cooked everything in shifts, but we did it! You CAN make it work in an RV. Our rig has a stove/cooktop with two induction burners and a combination microwave that doubles/triples as a convection oven/air fryer. I have been pleasantly surprised at cooking with this setup. In this case, it required some definite time management / order-of-operation planning, but we knocked it out. We also used the two covers that go over the sink in order to have more counter space. It was a bit of a three ring circus, but our stomachs didn't complain in the end.

The next stop in our journey is Paso Robles, CA.