Val and I spent her birthday/our Fourth of July weekend RV-camping at the Fallen Leaf Lake Campground near South Lake Tahoe. We arrived late Friday night, after having snagged a last-minute reservation earlier in the week.
We had left fairly late on Fri., and Val got pretty tired en route. She went back and got in bed about an hour-and-a-half before we got to our destination. She slept through the whole windy, steep ascent to Tahoe via Highway 50 and never got car sick (she’s prone to it), so the Minnie seemed to pass that test.
I’d installed the new Sportworks hitch-mounted bike rack for the trip, since we were planning on doing a ride or two while there. The rack worked great, although having anything on the hitch makes accessing the Minnie’s garage a bit of a pain. In any case, we went for a ride to the very pretty Angora Lakes. It’s a mostly gravel and fireroad bike ride, but it’s a steady climb the whole way. From the campground, it’s an 11-mile round-trip. The beautiful upper lake features a small beach and waterfall, as well as a place to dive into the lake from a bluff. We ate lunch at the upper lake, but limited our water exposure to wading, as the lake was ass-freezing cold.
Much to Val’s dismay, I wanted to head into town on Sat. night for a little poker action. Despite initial hesitation, she eventually agreed. Caesar’s Palace is a fairly RV-friendly place, with a backlot for RVs and trucks. We parked there, although I ended up playing at Harvey’s—the other places have closed their card rooms. I ended up tripling up at the 3/6 table, handily paying for the whole trip. :D
Sunday was a bit more relaxing. We hiked to Fallen Leaf Lake, only a short distance from the campsite. It features a small beach, suitable for lunching. The lake was a little choppy, but still had a few boats out on it. We built a fire Sun. evening and had peanut butter and jelly sandwiched and s’mores. A little TV, and we turned in.
The weather was outstanding for the whole weekend—blue skies, green mountains with white caps and deep blue lakes. The traffic coming back was only bad right in Tracy—otherwise we moved at the limit.
From an RV point-of-view, we had only one snag: since the campground didn’t have RV hookups, we spent the whole 3-day weekend on generator and battery power. Our house batteries don’t hold a charge, likely due to not having been charged while on the sales lot. We’re going to get them replaced when we go in for our detailing, but it was still a bit of a pain to have to fire up the generator for just about anything, when we should have been able to survive almost the whole weekend on batteries alone.
The drive to Tahoe is one that is pretty demanding on the RV—the climb to 7,500 feet is a steep one. Despite this (and the fact that we ran the generator a lot), we still managed just under 10 miles to the gallon. I’d expected that climb and the generator use to take us down to 7–8. Overall, we traveled about 450 miles and the gas cost about $110, making this the longest trip we’ve taken (both in distance and number of days). The Minnie performed very well. This was the best RV trip we’ve taken yet.
Oh, and here’s a shout out to the birthday girl—she always gets overshadowed by the holiday. :)