More California Fires, Auto Breakdown

Summer life in California is always full of fires.  It is such a large state, with 40-50% of the land full of forests.  Despite being out of the drought, fires are still a huge issue here.  California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection has over a $2 Billion Dollar budget.  The state of Arkansas only has a $5.3 Billion Dollar general-revenue budget.  Yesterday, while Citrus Heights hit 110 degrees, about 60 miles north the “Wall Fire”, which is along Chinese Wall Road five miles north of Bangor, Ca., was burning, engulfing 250-300 acres.  By midnight they upgraded the fire to 1,000 acres, and by morning it was estimated closer to 2,000 acres.  As of 2 hours ago from this posting, it is at 4,400 acres and is about 20% contained.  Thursday another fire was half way to San Francisco from Sacramento, but it was contained, for the most part, within 24 hours…but it too burned 2,700 acres.  This “Wall Fire”, however, is a real butte…seriously, it is in Butte County. 

With this heat lasting through the weekend, it looks like it will end by Wednesday…the day we are headed out of here.  In California you have two choices to cool of by…either head to the high country, or head to the coast…we are choosing the latter.  By Thursday we should be much cooler.  For 6-8 weeks we will be traveling along the coast, up into Oregon, perhaps into Washington.  We are leaving the tow car at my sister’s house.  Hope to find places that we like, camp for a few days…perhaps a week…then head on.  We have been along the coast a few times now, so we don’t need a car for day trips.  This will be different for us…just taking it one day at a time…cooler days we hope.

Took Bubba to PetSmart where I needed to buy a couple months of food…and he needed to have his nails cut again.  The PetSmart closest to us did not have the food last time, so I drove an extra mile to Roseville’s PetSmart this time (didn’t even check the one here in Citrus Heights…kind of like one of those ‘take that’ type of things).  On the way back I see these two cars on the road leading to the freeway…one hit the other from behind.  The guy who hit the couple in the car in front of him must be very unlucky…all of his airbags went off…yet it was just a minor hit to rear of the other car.  So not only will he get a ticket for hitting a car from behind, but also face a huge car repair bill which “might” total out his car “if” he has insurance on it.  Well, it was hard not to chuckle at this guys bad luck…why I do that is beyond me…I think since I have had my share of bad luck it is nice to see it is someone else and not me.  But I paid for it because I did not get halfway home and my battery light comes on.  3 miles from the freeway exit, another mile to my sister’s house, and luck was on my side this time because I made it. 

Turns out to be a serpentine belt, and our initial feelings are that it is only the serpentine belt…until we get it on tomorrow we won’t be sure.  Also need an air intake hose, which they had to order…hopefully we will have it running again sometime tomorrow (I have needed to replace this hose for a good year now).  So instead of doing laundry tomorrow, we (Arny and I) will be working on the HHR, and we (Marcia and I) will have to do laundry Tuesday morning in place of Marcia’s haircut that we had scheduled for that time period.  I’m taking dad to a Dr. Appointment Tuesday afternoon, so there is just not time to get Marcia's hair done...she is just going to go with longer hair for a few more months unless we find a place along our route that the motorhome can pull in at where she can get her hair cut at.  Still planning to leave on Wednesday for cooler pastures.  😉