Finally Camping After a 1st Birthday & Mom in Hospital

We made it up to Truckee yesterday...here for four days (on our second day right now), and then headed to Golden Coach RV Resort in Cromberg, 15 miles outside of Quincy.  More on the camping later...first...

Addie had her first birthday in mid-July.  Mom, who had been fighting another UTI attended it and had a very good time.  Also there was Marcia, Michael & Anna (parents of baby), Shelley (my first wife and mother of my children), and my daughter Stephanie, who had a birthday just a couple days later.  I have many pictures of the day, but the parents are very 'shy' about letting close-up pictures out on the Internet due to hackers who use such photos to do nasty dirty things to them.  We all had a great time, and watching her eat her first watermelon, which was in place of a birthday cake (sugar is not yet one of the foods she has had yet...once you go down that path there is no end to it, says my son.)  She finally held it, took a bite, then made Michael take a bite of his...they have these games they play.  Looking at pictures of her dad at year one, Addie is a spitting image of him. 

The very next morning the Assisted Living Home could not get mom out of bed, or even very alert.  They called an ambulance which took her to Sutter Hospital.  Test after test, looking for signs of stroke, heart, cancer...it all came down to her having a UTI.  Click on this Google Search "UTI Delirium" and you can see how a UTI can make an elderly person very 'out-of-it', to say the least.  They put her on a IV drip for antibiotic and when the culture came back that it was a E. coli variety of a UTI.  A person's body contains  E. coli bacteria that normally live in the intestines of healthy people ... most types of E. coli are harmless.  When they get into the urinary tract, well that can hurt anyone, and can kill an elderly person.  Five or six days later and she went back to the group home.  Seems each UTI puts a dent into her memory, so her dementia is getting worse with each one, and with each month that passes by.  She is 93, pretty much the last of her generation.

So, here we are up at Granite Flat, one of our favorite campgrounds close to Sacramento.  Good Verizon for the aircard (only two bars, but we are seeing speeds in the 10-20 Mbps range, good enough for our needs.)  We liked it better when it was all 'first come first serve', but that changed a few years ago.  First about 2/3rds of the park was by reservation...now all of it is.  However, 'if' you come in on lets say a Monday, and find a spot which has no reservation until Friday, you can pay for two nights, then go online and pay for the later two nights...which is what we did.  $11 a night with the America the Beautiful Lifetime Senior Pass.  We are closer to the highway 89, but the noise never seems to bother us much, especially at night when there is very little traffic.

One of the things we wanted to do was to get away from the Valley heat.  It is 84 here near Truckee, it is 97 in Citrus Heights.  Our low tonight will be around 46, Citrus Heights will be around 65.  Since we have been out this year, the weather could not have been better for the month of June...then July came and Citrus Heights hit a high of 109 and 105 or over about 4 other times.  A few nights got down to the low to mid 70's, and we had to sleep with the A/C going all night.  One thing about RVing, the AC is very loud and it can be hard to get a good nights sleep with it circulating on and off all night.  

A few times in the past we spent a bit of our summer in Quincy at Pioneer Park.  They were full for the number of weeks we wanted to stay.  But Golden Coach RV Park, just 15 miles to the east in Cromberg, is about 800 feet higher than elevation than Quincy and 1,200 feet lower than Truckee.  So Cromberg will be a bit cooler than Quincy, a bit hotter than Truckee, but way cooler than the Sacramento Valley.  And they have a monthly price of $625, and she (the owner) prorated the rest of our stay through Labor Day at the same rate, just under $20 per night for our stay.  And it is full service, which means electricity, water, sewer, along with showers and pay to use laundry.  "IF" we need to run our A/C, it won't be needed at night because the lows will be around 50 degrees.  And as Verizon goes, the owner said they put a new tower right across the street from!  Verizon is great, AT&T is not...so we will be in Internet fast zone for sure!

Our original goal was to go up to Southwest Oregon to spend 6 weeks or so at Huntley Park.  The same day mom went into the hospital, a fire started just outside Agnes and this fire has grown to over 22,000 acres and is only 3% contained.  The fire is now 5 miles from Huntley Park, but we axed the idea of going there when it was 14 miles away and only 4,000 acres.  So plan "B" is what we are doing, and we feel we are going to like Golden Coach RV Park as we did Pioneer Park in Quincy.

Could not resist few more picture of Addie...she is opening up her first book delivery of her book subscription that her proud grandpa (me) and Marcia provided for her birthday, along with a kid friendly book case, one in which she can sit on as she gets older, for these and other books she will get.

Grandma Shelley and Great Grandma Dorothy.

Very proud Aunty Stephanie. (Addie is looking at a book that was already in her collection. The girl loves books, she is going to go a long way, such a smart child.)

And this girl here celebrated her third anniversary being adopted into our home on July 4th.  She loves to growl at all the people that she hears and sees passing by our campsite..but so far, no barking.  She is a good little girl for sure.