Petaluma, California

Good afternoon, my friends. Sheesh. What a day! It isn't that we drove so far, but the weather was just terrible on our way to Petaluma. Now we're here, and our new Starlink system has some kind of problem. The resident engineer is working on it now. Thankfully, I have a good cell signal at the moment, and so I can check in with you via my personal hotspot until he figures out what's wrong with it. He thinks "something has died." If that's the case, I'm not sure how we'll deal with it on the road. Fortunately, the resident engineer really likes his Starlink television capability, and so I know he'll be motivated to get it working. It's all up in the air as I'm writing, but I'll say that the two weeks in Escondido (down the road a couple of days) might be helpful in that regard.

But let's talk about today's drive, shall we? We hated to disturb Sadie. She looked so comfortable when we took off this morning.

There wasn't much opportunity for pictures because of the rain. All our windows were rain-spattered, and so I was either waiting for dry opportunities or aiming my shots out the windshield as the windshield wipers cleared away the raindrops. Nevertheless, I captured a few barns.
 

Some of them had advertising, and this is often the case.

This one was kind of an interesting shape.

Some appeared to be close to falling in on themselves.

We drove through more of the redwoods. These areas are very dark because of the canopy overhead.

As we crossed the highest elevations, we got into some pretty heavy snowfall with worryingly cold temperatures. It hit 33°F at one point.

It was pretty, but we weren't happy about this at all.

A snowplow pulled out in front of us and cleared the road as we drove along. It seemed a good idea to follow behind him.

Eventually, we moved to a lower elevation, and we were out of the snow altogether. Phew!

We stopped at a gas station that had a good price on diesel. As Mike topped off our tank, I noticed this blooming shrub. It was raining, and so I didn't try to get a closer look at it.

Eventually, we moved into Mendocino County where we saw acres and acres of grapevines. This is California's wine country. Also, check out those blooming trees in the image below.

We were happy to arrive at our final destination in Petaluma. We're here for two nights, and the forecast is looking better for tomorrow. We're not expecting sunshine, but we might at least have a day without rain. Wouldn't that be a welcome change?

Sadly, we were driving on some rough roads today, and a bit of our trim shook loose from one of the slides. This was an easy fix, and Mike already has it back in place.

 

While he was working on that, I walked across the street and captured these flowers. I've been participating in an Instagram challenge called "a month in floral." I like these picture challenges, but I can get worn out trying to keep up with a daily prompt. A month in floral will go for the entire month of March, and so I've been posting pictures of any flowers I see. Here's today's post:

So, there's no resolution on the Starlink yet, but he's still looking at it. Fingers crossed we can get it going because it sure was nice to have high speed internet at our beck and call. I'm confident he'll get it going. He has a gift that way. For now, you'll have to check back for the exciting conclusion tomorrow. Hopefully, I'll have some good pictures of the lighthouse to show you.