On The Road To Portland (Part 1)

We reluctantly left San Diego after spending two awesome weeks there. Our original plans had included visiting Joshua Tree National Park next, but we soon found out that all the campgrounds in the vicinity were booked solid because of Spring Break. We spent an extra day on the beach instead...bummer. :o) Sunday morning I woke up with the crack of dawn because we were spending that day RIDING ROLLER COASTERS!! We drove three hours north from San Diego to Santa Clarita, to Six Flags Magic Mountain and then spent the next eight hours running around the park like school children, trying to ride as many coasters as we could.

Six Flags Magic Mountain!!

We ended up riding on all the Maximum Thrill coasters and several Moderate Thrills, a total of 14 rides in all. (WTF...it was a slow day too! Eight hours and only 14 rides?!?). We got a great deal on the admission tickets by buying them online here. We hadn't been to a roller coaster park in over five years and decided that it was best to get back in the game by riding on the very front of the first coaster we encountered. It turns out we picked the tallest one in the park..and FECK it was scary! Sky and I were cussing ourselves the whole way up, trying to figure out what in the world made us think that this was fun. BUT THEN, then we rounded the hump, paused at the very top for effect, and then dropped into thin air...for like 30 seconds! EPIC. (Can you tell we love roller coasters?) That was the Goliath ride, with a 255 foot drop, my second most favorite ride in the park.

The Goliath Ride...notice the huge drop in the middle of the picture! 

An awesome day of roller coaster riding!

My most favorite was the X2 which strapped us into seats that rotated 360 degrees. What this means is that our seats were constantly spinning upside down and right side up, WHILE we were going around sharp turns and down steep drops. That was possibly the scariest ride I've ever been on. My third most favorite was the Superman, which blasted out of the loading zone at 100 miles an hour, BACKWARDS, up a steep mountain, where at the very top it paused before dropping us back down the same track going equally fast, face first. Sky really liked the Tatsu, where the seats tilted forward so that riders hovered over the ground in "flying" position. We did the Lex Luther Drop of Doom (the world's tallest vertical drop ride!) after dark, and that was horribly scary. The seats kept rising further and further and I seriously thought we'd fly off of the top of the building before we came to a stop. Then we dropped with zero gravity into the darkness. Its amazing that we had voices left at the end of the day because we screamed our butts off all day long. IT WAS AWESOME!

That evening we had no energy to get back on the road after the park closed, so we drove to the Wal-Mart in Santa Clarita and parked there for the night. The following day we continued our trek on I-5. The road was hillier and a whole lot less scenic than we expected. If you are driving north through California and have the option of route and a little bit of extra time, take highway 101, or better yet, Route 1! I guess I had expected Interstate 5 to be above par for a major roadway, I guess because it went through California, the Golden State! But nope...it was just as boring as the other interstates we've been on all over the US. Every once in a while we'd pass orange groves, hay fields and sheep farms, but overall it was mostly flat, dry barren fields. That evening we overnighted in another Wal-Mart parking lot in Los Banos.

Driving on I-5 in SoCal

Oranges grove off of I-5

Sheep farms off of I-5

Unending fields on I-5 in SoCal

The sunshine and temperatures slowly deteriorated the further north we drove. By the time we reached Redding, the temperature had dropped from the lovely 70s we'd had in SoCal to a cold and dreary 45 degrees. We booked two nights in Redding at a local RV park. Wednesday we unhitched the truck and leashed up the pups and went hiking at Whiskeytown Lake, just 10 miles west of Redding. The lake was cloaked in fog when we arrived, but we managed to get a peek at it from the visitors center. The ranger suggested we hike the 3 mile hike up to Papoose Pass and then catch a shorter 2 mile hike back, and that's exactly what we did.

Whiskeytown Lake

Brandy Creek

Hiking to Papoose Pass at Whiskeytown Lake

Chloe and Sammy were excited to be back in cooler temperatures and in a real forest with grass. The last month had been hard on their poor paws with the desert dry sand and cactus needles. That evening we spent some time driving around the town of Redding, but there was not much to see outside of the Sundial Bridge. I'm thinking Redding and its surrounding area is less a town destination and more a year-round outdoors attraction. Sky read that there was great mountain biking to be found here...we'll be back!

Sundial Bridge in Redding

Sacramento River views in Redding

Next we drove I-5 to the Oregon border!!! More on that in Part 2 of this entry!

To see more pictures of the drive on I-5 in SoCal, click here and more pictures of Redding, click here.

Happy I-5 California driving!

M.