Sacramento On Labor Day

9/2/13 It is an overcast and occasionally rainy day here in Sacramento on this Labor Day. We drove down here from Oregon a few days ago and have been staying on the lot of our friends, Ron & Carol Leonard. Until today, it was hot here. I suspect it will be that way again, starting tomorrow. Of course, we have been having Happy Hours and dinners with Ron & Carol. Here is a picture of us with them last evening on their backyard deck:

The main reason we are here is to get ready to leave our RV here, and drive our car up to South Lake Tahoe on Friday. My daughter, Laura, is getting married to Dennis Calvin on Saturday at Nevada Beach. We have rented a big house for the weekend and all the other kids and grandkids will be staying with us, as well as our friends, Mike & Marilyn Harrison. It will be a mini family reunion. Happily, the weather forecast is for 79-80 degree days and no rain - perfect! Here in Sacramento it is supposed to be 104! We are glad we will be up there and not down here. Prior to arriving here, we spent 3 days staying in Cottage Grove, OR at the home of cruise friends, Kay & Hank Habenick. They have a lot right on the Row River outside of town and there is a very scenic covered bridge right at the road near their property:

Besides enjoying the walking trails near there, we also shared my birthday with them. They are wine club members at the King Estates Winery which is quite an extensive and beautiful property not far from Cottage Grove. In the early afternoon, we went there and did some wine tasting (delicious). Here we are in the tasting room:

Then we sat out on the patio, which overlooks the hills covered with greenery and vines and which reminds Hank of Tuscany, in order to enjoy a gourmet lunch. We all had something different and everything was outstanding.

Our last blog post was from Winchester Bay, where we were not having much success catching crab. Turns out we never did catch very many, but we got a few from the dock and enjoyed eating them. This is the first time we have ever been there where we were not catching so many crab that we had to can some. Sorry to the friends who have enjoyed some of our canned crab in the past. The salmon run was incredible and we managed to get some advantage from that even though we weren't fishing. Some of the RoVing Rods showed up and were camped not far from us so we had nice Happy Hours and one potluck with them. Some of the guys caught some nice salmon and Dick & Marcia Sumner gave us a very nice king salmon fillet, and Chuck Goehring gave us some of his salmon which he had already canned. We also got some carcasses from the cleaning stations and used them for crab bait, so that saved us a lot of money. Here are a few pictures so you can see the size of the fish.

Most of the fishermen were catching their limit each day (the limit is 2 fish per license). Here is a scene at the cleaning station:

Some of the guys at the cleaning station also gave us some salmon fillets, which was awesome because they didn't even know us! Towards the end of the month we got tired of the lack of crab and the cold, rainy, windy weather so we left and drove inland to Kay & Hank's. My next post will no doubt be full of wedding pictures and family reunion pictures and anecdotes. Elaine and I will be driving down to Park Sierra next week to spend a few weeks before all the planned Fall travels start. We have to have some medical checkups and do some final travel planning. Will tell you about all that later.