Quite a Pleasant Day, Weatherwise

We had a good sleep in this morning. No more rushing down to get away from cold rainy weather. It's pretty pleasant here in the San Joaquin Valley. First thing this morning, I got the bright idea of searching the internet for how to get our GPS lady to come back to us. And sure enough, I found all I had to do is press the on/off button for 10 seconds, and that resets the GPS. And we have our Australian lady back with us!

 

The Walmart we are at here in Red Bluff, CA is one of the nicest ones we've seen. It has rather pleasant architecture, and a mostly brick facade. And out front there is a really magnificent old Oak tree, which is obviously very much older that the store, and they have taken a good chunk out of the parking lot to keep it there. There's a pretty nice motorcycle parked out front too :)

 

We didn't get away until about 10:30am, and just travelled about 180 miles down to Stockton. Now the area between Sacramento and Stockton is not our favorite. Normally you would take Interstate 5 down through Sacramento and either Interstate 5 or Route 99 south of there, both of which are terrible bumpy high traffic roads along here. We decided to get off Interstate 5 onto 405 and then take several country roads to bypass Sacramento, and came back to the Interstate just 5 or 10 miles from Stockton. This way we missed all this high volume traffic and got a good look at the farming country along the way. The trade off was an extra 15 or 20 minutes onto the trip.

 

We ended up at River Point Landing Marine Resort (N37 58 34.5, W122 22 40.9), a private campground operated by a big marina on the San Joaquin River. And here is Doreen enjoying an afternoon snack of Cheez-its (not available in Canada!), our favorites.

 

Now I never knew the San Joaquin River existed before today. It is large, and very large freighters like this one in this not very good picture travel up as far as Stockton from the San Francisco Bay Area.

 

There was quite a nice sunset tonight.

 

And the moon is big and bright tonight. Full moon is not until tomorrow morning, but it looks pretty big and round in this picture I took a few minutes ago. In fact, the moon is slightly larger tonight than average because it is at perigee in its orbit, meaning it is closest to the earth tonight, and therefore it's referred to as a supermoon. The full moon tomorrow is also referred to as a Blue Moon (like the saying once in a blue moon). All that means is that there are two full moons within one month (Jan 1st, and Jan 31 in this case). This isn't so rare as the saying indicates, however, as it happens about every two and a half years. If you want to see the lunar eclipse though, you have to get up really early tomorrow morning here in North America. And even then, you'll only see part of it on the east coast, as the sun will rise and spoil it all.