Lake Skinner Recreation Area

We only drove about 200 miles yesterday, but it seemed like way more. We avoided going through Los Angeles, Pasadena, Long Beach, and that whole constellation of cities near Los Angeles, but we still had to get south through the Riverside area. Good grief...the drivers here are absolutely crazy. 😨

And, honestly, the atmosphere in those areas feels pressured and intense. Or maybe it was our white knuckles giving us that impression. In any case, we made it...alive...which is something of a miracle. We're here for a full week now, and one of the couples in our four-couple group is here already. We're camping side by side, and so I think we're going to have fun this week. Hopefully, we won't get kicked out of the park.

We have a very weak cell signal, but I think with patience and persistence, I'm going to be able to do this. Before we left Bakersfield yesterday, I took a picture of the catio. It is sporting a new (very expensive) cover this year. We'd had the older one for over ten years. It was made of rip-stop nylon, and it served us well. When it started splitting on all sides, it was time to replace it.

Mike took it to a place where they make boat covers, and that sort of thing. They were able to make a new one. This one is made of canvas, and so it's more waterproof than the last. The kitties don't seem to care one way or the other, but they sure do like their catio. With the new "more waterproof" feature, we can have it outside when it's raining, and the comfy cat quilt inside stays mostly dry.

Our drive started off pretty enough. I love these old rolling hills in the Kern County area of California.

After about an hour, we started seeing the first of many Joshua trees, even though we were more than 200 miles from Joshua Tree National Park.

On the east side of Tehachapi, the wind turbines were pretty against the backdrop of snow covered hills. There is a lot of wind energy being generated in this area, and high profile vehicles (that would be us) are warned about big wind gusts. We had no problems yesterday.

Beyond, we came across this mining operation. Checking in with The Google, I learned this is Golden Queen Mining's Soledad Mountain Project. Golden Queen produces both gold and silver metals from Soledad Mountain and is one of the last remaining gold mines in the state of California. 

The mine was first operational back in the early 1900’s, but gold and silver production was brought to a halt during World War II.  Low gold prices after the war kept the mine closed.  In recent years rising gold prices led to the push to reopen the mine.  Golden Queen received their state operating permits in 2014 and work on the infrastructure of the mine began.  Today the Mine utilizes  conventional open-pit mining methods, cyanide heap leach and Merrill-Crowe processes to recover gold and silver from crushed, agglomerated ore.  In addition to gold and silver, Golden Queen also produces aggregate material as a byproduct of mining processes.

The birds below just made me smile. Bird on a wire, anyone?

After another hour or so, we reached Lake Skinner Recreation Area...yeah, that was the best I could do with the sign, which was on Mike's side.

Here's a better one. We were paid in full, we thought, and so we were chagrined when the woman at the gate asked us if we had any pets with us. "Two cats," I piped up. We always claim the cats. I didn't use to but then someone told me they liked to know if there was some kind of emergency. That made sense, and so I always answer when asked. Little did I know they were going to charge us an additional $28 for that...$2 per cat per day (7 days). Well. That certainly soured us on the place before we ever got through the gate. The cats don't even come out of the RV in a place like this, so what possible cost is there to the park? Whatever. We paid it and groused appropriately.

We walked the short distance to the lake after greeting our friends. It's a pretty lake. This is a source of drinking water for the community. Because of that, there's no swimming allowed. Boats are okay, which seems weird. They're okay with boat exhaust, apparently, but not with our filthy bodies. And I say again...whatever.

The sites are nice and level and we have full hook-ups. You can bet we'll feel no guilt whatsoever at burning their electricity.

So, the cell phone signal is very weak here. I managed to get pictures uploaded, and that's encouraging. I can't say I'll blog every day while we're here. Sometimes I don't have enough frustration tolerance in my personal tank to get it done. If I can, I will. I'm confident we'll have signal at the next place, and so I'll catch up on anything important ("important" being a relative term) I might leave out here. And all of that to say my blogging might be hit or miss the next couple of days. I doubt there will be time for sewing while we're here, but I'll be keeping up with my hand-stitching.