Bakersfield, California

Good evening, my friends. It has been a long, long day of driving today. Please allow me to explain. (Don't let my use of the word "please" there give you the idea you have any choice about this. I'm explaining.)

In my last post, I told you we had a short day ahead of us, and that we could spend a leisurely morning before taking off for San Juan Batista. I had time to take the first stitches on Grandpa's Bridges.

When I was ready to quit, Mike was outside making final preparations to pull out for our day's drive. I was inside putting things away and preparing the inside for driving when Mike came in to make his Houston-we-have-a-problem announcement. We had a broken leaf spring on the passenger side of the RV, and we were dead in the water until it was repaired. Oy boy. No RV trip is complete without something going wrong. 

So, Mike is good at taking care of mechanical problems. He made some calls and located the part we needed just about 8 miles away. He came back with the part and went to work replacing the broken spring with a new one. He had it finished by mid-afternoon, but then took some time to grease some stuff. All-in-all, he spent most of the day on RV maintenance and repairs.

This bothered the kitties not one iota. Smitty spent the day watching the neighboring cows from his catio.

Sadie built a little quilt nest beside me, and helped me do some more stitching.

By the time I quit for the day, I had it this far along.

We ended up spending an extra night at the Petaluma KOA and canceled our reservation at San Juan Batista. We ended up having to do two days' driving in a single day. Fortunately, both days were relatively short, and today's drive ended up at 322 miles. We've driven that far many times, and so it wasn't overly burdensome...just long. 

It's not a particularly scenic drive between Petaluma and Bakersfield. Mustard is blooming in many of the fields...

and along the roadsides.

It wasn't even a very good day for barns, although I did capture this one.

We crossed over this bridge...

which took us across the San Pablo Bay.

It's good to see how green California is this trip. If you've been following the weather this winter, then you probably know that California has seen a lot of rain. It shows.

We drove many miles through fruit and nut trees. The apricot trees are in bloom right now.

The almond trees have finished blooming, and were dropping their petals on the ground. It looked as if snow had fallen.

The only other picture I have for you today is this mosaic seen at a rest stop. I had to hold my camera over my head, and I regret missing the edge of it. You can see it in the upper right and left corners of the image below. My quilting friends will appreciate this.

As I write this post, we're checked into an overnight spot in Bakersfield, and we'll make our way to Escondido tomorrow. 

We have two weeks in Escondido. Hopefully, we'll be able to get the Starlink up and running again from there. We finally received a response from Starlink with a list of trouble-shooting items for Mike to go through. He'd already done all of them and reported the same when he contacted them originally. However, they requested certain pictures, and those have now been supplied. Now, we're waiting again. Having received at least one response, I now feel as if I can stop gnashing my teeth about the Starlink. The original response took two days. I expect the next one will take that long as well. Let's just hope two weeks in Escondido will be enough time to get it taken care of.

So that's all I have for you from this stretch of road. We have leftovers on the menu for tonight, and I'm looking forward to putting my feet up and relaxing for a while. Our drive tomorrow will be significantly shorter. It'll be good to stay put for a bit before moving east again.