Saturday Summary - Week 29 - California Coastlines, European Kitchens & the Space Between
- Karen Kuhl
- 5 days ago
- 8 min read
Loomis, CA (70’s) → Garden Valley, CA (80’s) → Folsom Lake, CA (70’s) → Butte Valley, CA (80’s) → Lewiston, CA (80’s) → Klamath, CA (80’s) Simultaneously Felde, Germany (70’s)
Where We Stayed
Cracker Barrel — Loomis, CA (Friday)
Barmhaus Brewing, Garden Valley, CA (Saturday)
Beals Point Campground, Folsom Lake, CA (Sunday)
Healing Vibrations — Harvest Host, Butte Valley, CA (Monday)
One Thing Ranch — Harvest Host, Lewiston, CA (Tuesday)
Kamp Klamath RV Park, Klamath, CA (Wednesday–Saturday)
Camvio Visits: Three's a Pattern
It's funny how things come in waves on this trip. We visited Don's co-workers, Steven and Jorge, back-to-back in Texas, then Jennifer and Amir back-to-back in California/Arizona, and now we were back at it, meeting up with Vanessa and Travis in quick succession.
We met Vanessa at a Cracker Barrel, which we had planned to stay at the night before. It turns out that particular location wasn't friendly to RV overnights. If they don't feel safe with us parking there, I don't feel safe staying there. Cracker Barrel is one of those chains I have a tolerate/hate relationship with. It's a free parking option on the road, but their track record of discrimination accusations doesn't make it my first choice. Still, we had a lovely dinner with Vanessa, and that's what mattered. There's something really interesting about getting to know the people Don works with face-to-face. In a fully remote company, you miss the little nuances that only come through in person. This trip has given him the chance to build genuine one-on-one connections with most of his team, and I love watching that happen.
With the overnight plan fallen through, Don and I did what we've gotten very comfortable doing: we went back to the drawing board fast. Harvest Hosts, campgrounds, rest stops, Cracker Barrels, anything that could take a same-day request. And as the universe would have it, another Cracker Barrel near Sacramento fit best for the night.
Driving later in the day, we missed most of the scenery, but the silhouettes told us we were passing through enormous stands of evergreens. And then: Donner Pass.
"Donner Pass is a 7,056-foot-high mountain pass in the northern Sierra Nevada… The pass gets its name from the ill-fated Donner Party who overwintered there in 1846." — Wikipedia
The climb from the east was sharp, but once we crested the peak, it was like the bus drove itself. The longest, most graceful descent we've experienced on the whole trip (although some grades reached 6–8%), and we barely touched the gas. We considered stopping at the Donner Pass rest stop for the night, but the thought came a little too late. One more small delight from that stretch: Loomis, CA shares its name with Don's long-time friend Dave Loomis. The road finds ways to nod at you. Meeting Travis turned out to require a little improvisation, too. The small Loomis downtown was hosting a very popular car show that day, and parking a bus anywhere near there was not in the cards. We ended up at the coolest spot: a brewery that was also an art gallery, a café, and a plant nursery, all at once, filled with families and people loading up on spring garden plants in the sunshine. Honestly, one of the more unexpectedly beautiful places we've stumbled into. Getting to see Travis in person was a real treat and we connected in a way that working remote doesn't lend itself to easily.
Folsom: The One We Almost Didn't Have
Don and I both thought the other had made campground reservations for our two nights in the Sacramento area. Neither of us had. That's how we ended up discovering Barmhaus Brewing, tucked away in the Sierra Nevada mountains, exactly the kind of hidden gem Harvest Host exists to uncover. They were quiet that evening, the guitarist playing was fun to chat with, and the setting was genuinely special. I, for my part, had too much to drink and also skipped dinner. It was not my finest night.
The morning brought us to Beals Point Campground on Folsom Lake, where I spent the day recovering and relaxing. Don and Hanna are both fans of Johnny Cash's Folsom Prison Blues, and being in that town gave the song a whole new dimension. Folsom Prison is right there. The town even has a Johnny Cash Trail, and the local bridge is designed to look like prison lookout towers, which made for a great photo. Prison reform is a subject I've thought about a lot. During my time at the Cayuga County Tourism Office in Auburn, NY (home to one of the oldest state prisons in the country and one of the two original US prison systems), I had many conversations about it while working alongside the Cayuga Museum and the Seward House Museum. The same questions debated in Seward's era are still debated today. It has become deeply entangled with economics and who profits from incarceration, and I find painful parallels to the way the US K-12 education system operates. None of this is what we came to Folsom for, but history has a way of following you down the road.
As for Cash himself:
"He always identified with the underdog. He identified with the prisoners because many of them had served their sentences and had been rehabilitated in some cases, but were still kept there the rest of their lives. He felt a great empathy with those people." — BBC News
Cash performed at prisons all over the US for nearly 30 years, always unpaid. That matters.
Goodbyes, Airports & Going Separate Ways
Very early Monday morning (3 am, to catch a 6 am flight), we woke up to head to the airport. Don dropped me off at the Sacramento airport so I could fly to join my mother for a trip to Europe. There's something genuinely surreal about being in the middle of a year-long road trip and stepping off the bus into an international terminal. Everything I needed was already on the bus. Packing was simple. But watching the bus pull away, knowing Don would be out there exploring while I was somewhere entirely different, until we reunited in Washington State, that's a strange and wonderful feeling.
Don's Week Solo
Don is not, it turns out, a detailed correspondent. But reading between the lines of his messages, his week had its own quiet rhythm, a few Harvest Host overnights, some beautiful northern California trails, and the gradual, welcome arrival of staying put for a few days.
After dropping me at the airport, he pushed on early rather than wait around. His first stop was Healing Vibrations in Butte Valley, a sound healing Harvest Host that, under different circumstances, he would have experienced fully. With work obligations, the Sound Journey wasn't in the cards this time, but just being there sounds like it was its own kind of reset. Matt, the owner of Healing Vibrations was a wonderful host and Don and Matt enjoyed a chat upon his arrival. The next day was another early drive for a night at One Thing Ranch in Lewiston, a llama farm, we've stayed at two on this trip. Those are always interesting neighbors. Don got a tour of the farm that evening, got to meet the Llamas, the goats, the chickens and a few barn cats. One of whom was very friendly and enjoyed being carried around by Don on much of the farm tour.
The highlight of the solo stretch occurred on a workday at Lake Redding Park, right on the Sacramento River in Redding, CA. A fish hatchery truck pulled up while he was sitting there busy working. Don jumped out of the bus just as the bus backed up to the river, and released a load of root stock salmon and trout. Don got talking with a former Fish and Game employee nearby, who explained what was happening: these are spawning salmon being released to reestablish a breeding population, getting them to come back to this stretch of river and spawn here going forward. A good thing for the river, even if the journey out of the back of a truck looked a little rough for fish of that size.
After Lake Redding Don pushed on over lunch to get to Kamp Klamath in the Northwest corner of California and didn't have to move again for 4 nights. The relief in Don's text was obvious "We are stable for a few days, which will be wonderful." After nearly three days of moving, I know how calming it feels to stay put. Good campground WiFi was the other victory, a genuine luxury when you're working remotely from the road. A wonderful reset after a few days of early morning drives. At the camp he also spent time on some trails in what he describes as Selva Negra of the North, clouds rolling through the trees, a path that looked strikingly like the trails back in Nicaragua that we both love. Lucky walking next to a river, mist in the pines, we both had wonderful scenery.
Karen's Week in Germany
My journey from California to my great-aunt's door in Germany took about 26 hours, door to door, with maybe three hours of sleep, and that was probably more than Mausi got.
Sitting in the kitchen next to Tante Herta (my great-aunt) is beyond surreal. She looks more and more like my grandmother now. She was such a significant person in my childhood; those summers I spent here connecting to German farm life, German language, German food, German smells. I was about 8 years old the first time, and I kept coming back every summer or every other summer until I was 18.
That's a long stretch of formative years, and so many of those hours were spent sitting in this very kitchen. It's been about 10 years since my last visit, and time has clearly passed: for my great-aunt, for my cousins, and for my mother and me. Two yummy memories of my German summers arrived almost immediately: Strawberry Flan and Spaghetti Ice. They had the flan waiting for us when we arrived. We headed out for Spaghetti Ice on Thursday. Smell and taste are the fastest roads back to a place you love. Spaghetti Ice is an Italo-German ice cream dish made to resemble a plate of spaghetti; vanilla ice cream extruded through a modified Spätzle press, topped to look like pasta with sauce. It tastes exactly like I remembered.
My two cousins, Angela and Regina, are both Tante Herta's primary caretakers, and spending time in each of their homes has been one of the real gifts of this visit. The love and attention they give her is something to witness.
Angela lives next door, in the part of the house that (when we were young and visiting) used to be part of the attached barn. She regularly checks in on Tante Herta, and one of my favorite small moments of this trip has been watching Angela lean back in her chair at breakfast just to peek through and see if Tante Herta was already in her spot in the kitchen. That closeness, that quiet checking-in while still respecting each other's space, is something really special. She and Peter have Liza, Tante Herta's only grandchild, who is studying economics. We were lucky she was on a school break and could spend time with us. When we first saw her, my mother and I couldn't quite believe how much time had passed. She certainly wasn't the little girl we both remembered. Angela is a night emergency room nurse and worked two of the nights we were visiting, which is why we spent our first three nights at her house before moving on to Regina's.
Regina's house is about fifteen minutes from Tante Herta's. Regina is the family historian, and her home (like Mausi’s) is a museum of memories and mementos. She can tell you the story behind every single thing. She has collected photographs, objects, and pieces of family history; she shared them all generously. She is also a painter, and her artwork is all around the house. What moved me most were her abstract pieces; emotional works she created when her beloved cats passed. She also has a garden that would make Becky absolutely lose her mind with joy; they are soul sisters who have never met, connected through their love of growing things. The climate here is remarkably similar to upstate New York. I recognized so many of the same trees and flowers, and I found myself thinking that these two would have so much to say to each other over a garden walk.
It has been, in a word, a lot; in the best possible way. A lot of memories, a lot of food, a lot of time sitting around tables with people I love and don't see nearly enough.
Next week: Don finishes the California coast, and Karen soaks up more of Germany and Scotland before the Seattle reunion.
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