Moon over the Central Valley

It's six p.m. and to the west the skh is faintly pink above the cloud back that tops the Diablo Range. In the east over Fresno an immense, bright full moon follows us south. We just found a Spanish language station at 88.7 FM that's playing some really cool music: a kind of Mexican reggae tune, followed by another in a mix of Spanish and English.

Yesterday we arrived at the Hersey House B&B in Ashland about 7 p.m. and walked downtown for dinner. I'd asked the host for a dining recommendation. She said Ashland has lots of restaurants and they're all good. I was immediately on guard. We passed a couple places that were closed (January is not high season in Ashland, which lives on the summertime theatre productions.) Others didn't look so attractive. But we finally happened on the Standing Stone Brewery, which turned out to be a higher-end brew pub. We split a garlic chicken pizza which had a crust so good they could have buttered it and sold it just like that.

At the B&B our room proved to be noisy (right on the street) but the inkeeper said she was going to soundproof it. Otherwise things were fine. Breakfast was good and filling. The scones were especially tasty and Pamela bought a cookbook from the hosteler.

The freeway south from Ashland climbs immediately toward the Siskiyou Pass, the highest point on Interstate 5 at 4310 feet. There was snow on the hills but not a bit of precip as we crossed. In fact the weather all day has been great--hazy but mostly not overcast.

Bit of drama: the check engine light came on north of Sacramento, and we lost about 45 minutes driving into Woodland to buy an OBD II code reader. The problem turned out to be low voltage to an oxygen sensor, which we don't really care about. And now we have the code reader. All to the good: it was on sale.

So we have 134 miles to go before we sleep. We're stopping at McDonald's to cram some stuff down for the final run to Bakersfield. The Buck Owens CD is at the ready.