From Sea to Shining Sea

Yay! We made it to the campground just south of San Francisco in Pacifica, CA and our site overlooks the Pacific Ocean. We've now made it across the whole country from sea-to-sea having left Danbury at the end of July. California has a special place in our hearts. Ellyn lived here from '57 to '60, '65 to '69 and '73 to '78. Geoff was stationed in California while he was in the Navy and then sent by IBM to here for one year in '77 to '78 when the two of us met and married. We'll be seeing lots of family and friends, here, as well as lots of beautiful places.

Despite Pacifica being known for its fog and overcast, it's a beautiful sunny day, today. We're resting a bit this afternoon before we meet Ellyn's sister, Laura and husband, Jay, for dinner.

We'll post photos of Pacifica and our visit to the Bay Area in a later post. First, here's some from ofur first stop in CA which was Truckee where we stayed in Granite Flat Campground right on the Truckee River which was only about 10miles from incredibly beautiful Lake Tahoe. We spent two days there and had fun biking in a couple locations and taking short hikes. We had our first sighting of the huge California trees.

Here's some photos:

This is a huge tree...you have to look very closely to see markings on the photo pointing to 5ft 3in. ellyn standing next to it....not sure how many times larger the tree is but no doubt that it's tall.



The two of us at an overlook of Lake Tahoe.



Our RV backed onto the beautiful Truckee River which is the only outlet from Lake Tahoe.



Photos of each of us as we walked around the various Lake Tahoe paths.

Make Mine 14 AWG

Although the Great Wall of China can not really be seen from space, there is a man-made object in Northern Utah which can. It is the Kennecott Copper Mine near Herriman, UT. As we approached from the east, I commented on the hills we could see as being the “largest landfill project” I had ever seen. I did not realize they were tailing piles from the mine until Ellyn said they were from the copper mine. I was astonished. (I would have been less so if I had studied up on where we were going but I like to be surprised)

So 20 miles or so later, we arrived at the entry gate and paid our $5.00 entry fee and the drove the 8 miles and 873 ft. up to the visitor center. We looked around at the exhibits in the center to learn as much as we could about mining, refining, and smelting copper. An amazing by-product of the process is a large enough quantity of gold and silver to pay for the operation. Wow! They have been mining this particular vein of copper for 110 years and have plans for possibly mining it from underground after surface mining is no longer feasible, in another 5 or 10 years.

Like the Grand Canyon, the scale is almost impossible to grasp by looking into the pit, except for the machinery moving around in there. It can be deceiving until one of the dump trucks comes close enough to see how large they are, like when they are near a recognizable object, such as a pickup truck. Then the mind starts to boggle. (photo on left: In left lane, the tiny dot of a vehicle is a pickup truck followed by a "small" mine dump truck. In the right lane is the "large" mine dump truck. As you can see, it could carry many of the pick-up trucks! Now, that's huge!) As we were getting out of our RV, we noticed a car nearby with people pointing and taking pictures of us. So we walked over to talk to them. It turned out they were tourists from Israel. They were going to meet some friends and go to Yellowstone, Brice, Zion, and some of the other western parks. It was funny that they thought our little RV was big enough to take pictures. With the car in tow it is 50 ft. but they had just looked at 100 foot long dump trucks and 30 billion cubic feet of hole. I guess this was just too real to pass up.