Adventures on the Road – Coarsegold to Sparks

Our stay for the Yosemite visits was in Coarsegold, California. In those blogs I alluded to the fact that it was a long distance from the park. If we ever find our way back here, I might look for a closer spot, but at least we didn’t have to worry about the road being open for the year.

This stop was at an Escapees (SKP) Co-op Park. We’ve been members of Escapees because they handle our mail, and have stayed at their flagship park in Livingston, Texas. This was the first Co-op park we’d stayed in. Members buy into the park and own their site. They are responsible for maintaining it and contributing to the greater good of the park. There is no outside technical maintenance. When members are away, they can release their site into a pool so the park can rent it out. That is how we were able to stay.

We opted for a tour of the park in a golf cart, and Brian was our guide as part of his contribution to it. The first owners, he told us, were called Pioneers, and they built the park on the bare bones of the newly-purchased land. Aside from initial Escapees assistance, the park was built completely on the talents of the new owners.

This large stained-glass piece hangs over the clubhouse. It was conceptualized by an expert original owner who enlisted a team of women, who initially had no experience in stained-glasscrafting, to assist him.

A stagecoach is the park’s logo because a stagecoach road ran through here. In a brilliant move, more land was purchased than was needed for sites because of fear of nearby development down the road. The park is very private and there are not even any signs outside of it to tell you that you are here. An entire portion of the park has been left to nature. Brian showed us the original stagecoach road. It is now a walking path that leads to the Coarsegold River, shown at the top of this post.

The stagecoach road leads to to the river, and there are more walking paths beyond it. Once Brian showed this to us, I was easily able to get my daily steps in on walks through this beautiful natural area.

We considered and discussed, not seriously, over the long Memorial weekend if we would want to buy into this park. In the end, we decided that we didn’t like the idea of maintaining a site. We’re retired and live in an RV, why would we possibly want to mow grass?? For volunteer work for the park, neither of us are talented in technical or grounds maintenance, although Brian’s tour gig in the golf cart didn’t look too bad to me – or working in the office. The killer, though, is that the entire park is on a steep Sierra Nevada hill. The clubhouse is at the bottom, our site was at the back, and that made for some steep walking anytime we went back and forth. The tree-covered hill made for a lot of beautiful views and very private sites, but long term? No thank you. There’s a waiting list to buy in, anyway.

So we moved on, north and a little west. The roadway treated us for miles to gorgeous blooming oleander in the median, huge bushes sometimes seven or eight feet tall, spilling into each other in a riot of pink, red and occasional white.

We used our Harvest Host membership for a one-night stay at Jessie’s Grove Winery in Lodi, California. Here, we shared a table, a glass of wine and a late-afternoon charcuterie plate with a tuxedo cat.

She was so cute that we couldn’t help giving her a couple nibbles of cheese, whereupon she curled up for a nap on the far corner of the table.

This was a ranch, begun in 1868 by one Joseph Spenker who planted the first vines, and the winery is still owned by his descendants. Some of their Zinfandel grapes are among the oldest in the state. There are old olive trees in the front and flowers everywhere. The winery comes with more than one tuxedo cat, and two horses out in the pasture.

This was a very photogenic farm and I took way too many pictures for an overnight stay. There were no other RV’ers here for the night, and once they shut down at 6 PM for the day we had the place to ourselves. We took an evening walk through grapevine-lined paths.

All was quiet in the morning as well. I took another walk through a path in the oak tree woods with nut shells under my feet before we headed out.

Cal had a tough driving day, owing to road construction and heavy traffic and a turn in error (Garmin’s fault) in Sacramento. There was more traffic and reduced lanes going over the Donner Pass, at 7200 feet. Over through Truckee, and we were now in Nevada. I gazed longingly northward as we drove east, because I would really like to explore northern California. We’ll have to do that another time.

The road led us to Sparks, Nevada and Sparks Marina RV on the east side of Reno. Funny thing, there is no marina here. We could walk down the road to a small lake, but there’s no marina there either.

From behind where I took this picture, there is a developed community with walking paths which open up into an interesting retail area. The lake, which used to be a quarry, has a walking path all the way around it. I’m impressed with the city planning that went into this little corner of town.

The far side of the lake has a park which was very busy on a Sunday morning. They did a great job putting in a new memorial for those who have lost their lives in the service of our country.

Although our RV park had its shortcomings, there was one thing interesting about it: all of the sites are covered with bright green Astroturf.

It wasn’t what I had envisioned for a stay in this part of the country. That didn’t matter much, though. As it turned out, we didn’t spend a lot of time here, as you’ll see in the next post.

Next time: Lake Tahoe