Our campsite on Slaughterhouse IslandOur travel website has evolved over the years as the kids have grown and left (well, sort of, as they kind of keep reappearing again on many of our trips), and Herb and I have found various new means to travel and enjoy this beautiful county, and even other countries.

So, instead of just being a website for RV travel across the U.S., it has morphed into a repository for trips we have taken that might be of interest to fellow travel enthusiasts - whether they be by boat, motorcycle, backpack, or our 4Runner, and whether they be domestic or international.

My primary motivation for adding a trip to our website is for us to have a way of remembering the details of where we have been, as well as having a place to store the beautiful photos that Herb takes. Our memories are not getting any better as we age, so it’s a great resource for us to go back to. I am constantly saying to Herb when he asks me a question about a particular place, “I don’t know, but I know a good website that does!”

I picture us in our latter years, re-reading the tales of our many travels together and saying, “Wow, that was quite a ride.” If anyone else benefits from what we have to share that is just icing on the cake.

So now that I am done waxing philosophically, this trip is a boat camping one, our first in California. It’s not the first boat trip I have snuck onto the website. I posted our moving of the boat across the country from New Jersey to Lake Mead in 2016 and our boating trip of a lifetime on Lake Powell in 2018.

Since bringing it home to California, we have been struggling a bit as to where to use it. The West Coast is beautiful, but it just doesn’t have the nooks and crannies that the New England Coast has. We have used it a few times in nearby Lake Sonoma, but we were looking for something a little bigger.

The nearest and best thing we could find was Shasta Lake, about 4 hours north of us near the town of Redding. While not Lake Powell or Lake Mead, it’s a pretty big lake - in fact, its California’s largest reservoir and has over 365 miles of shoreline (when at full capacity), with dozens of coves to explore and camp in.

Lake Tahoe is bigger, and certainly very tempting, but our old two-stroke Yamaha engine is prohibited from sullying its pristine waters.

Shasta Lake levels were high this year, thanks to a winter of heavy snow, so it definitely was an opportune time for us to take an exploratory trip. When Tommy got wind of our trip and the possibility of water skiing again, he asked if he and his fiancee Erin could join for the weekend - see I told you they keep reappearing. I responded with a very enthusiastic “yes!”