Destination number: 95/175/33
Our first stop on our way back north to Yreka was the city of Chico. Chico is the home base for the North Valley Animal Disaster Group that is based in Butte County. The drive to Chico was just about right at 500 miles. I figured best case scenario with LA Traffic and the Grapevine that the best I could hope for is a 10 hour drive. I also knew my limit was about 12 hours behind the wheel. Luckily I split the difference and arrived into Chico after about 11 hours behind the wheel. 😀 We left the Golden Shores RV park at 6:00 AM and rolled into Chico at just about 5 PM.
As always, Remi was a rock star for the road trip. She can sleep 23 hours out of the day as long as I am around for her to keep an eye on. We arrived at the storage yard for the vast majority of NVADG's rolling stock. They let Remi and I boondock there for the week before my first week of training. This is a great place to boondock. Typically, there is a dedicated gate for the yard that opens onto a street at the airport. However the gate is stuck closed and I had to use an emergency gate to come and go. That emergency gate takes me through the parking lot for a business and I don't think they appreciated me driving through their yard with either the Motorhome or a vehicle (the Jeep) that they didn't recognize. I was kind of getting the "Stink Eye" from them about traveling through their lot, so I was trying really hard to only leave the yard after they had all gone home for the day, but some of them didn't leave until 7:00 PM, so that made runs to the grocery store, the Amazon locker and what-have-you a little difficult to do.
As a result, even though the board of directors for NVADG approved me staying there for two weeks, I decided to cut the stay short and go to a near-by Thousand Trails park that was only an hour and a half south of the yard. Plus, at the Thousand trails we have full hookups! :-) But, that location is for next weeks blog. Getting back to my experience at the Chico location, one night I somehow left something on in the car over night, and the next day the battery on the Jeep was dead. I had to resort to getting an Uber to take me to a Autozone to get a battery charger, but I got the Jeep running again. Whew!
Chico is the home of University California at Chico. The Chico airport is also a former Army Air Corps base from World War II. So, over the decades, the town of Chico has thrived around those two entities. And while the Chico air field is no longer a military installation, they have plenty of fire-fighting aircraft here. Wildland fires happen frequently in Butte County. As a result, the Chico Airport is the most centrally located airport to support those air operations.
They do have a small but very cool aviation museum here at the Chico airport. I've seen the signs for it every time I stay here at the airport, but I finally made time Friday after work to go check out the museum. They have a number of cool static displays of various types and vintages of aircraft. Most interesting to me is the Bell helicopter that was used in the TV series M*A*S*H. The biggest bummer was I couldn't get close enough to really check it out. There was an F-15 Eagle as well as numerous aircraft from the 1960's and 1970's. The part I enjoyed the most was being able to sit in the cockpit section of a P-2 Neptune anti-submarine aircraft. Given security provisions now days in commercial aircraft, I don't think I have sat in the Pilot's seat of an airplane since the 1980's in a Cessna 152.Also, I loved seeing the old guard shack from when this was the Chico Army Air Field too! 😎
The museum is tiny compared to the Pima Air and Space museum, but the care and craftsman ship of what they applied to this museum is just as wonderful as what was done at Pima. While Pima, the only way to do that museum justice is to spend the whole day there. This museum can be done in no less than 2 hours, and spending 3 hours here might be optimal, especially if you have little kids... little ones would love it!
On Saturday the 23rd, this was my first day for the main reason we stopped in the Chico area... to attend NVADG training. Saturdays training was Large Animal Evacuation Training at the Large Animal Evacuation coordinators home. She has a beautifully manicured property which denotes her desire to avoid wildland fires near her home. At this training we got some great tips on being effective at the task of Evacuation. We also went through a physical fitness test to ensure that we are physically prepared to perform the duties that we might be called upon to do. We then also received training in how to approach and greet a horse, put a bridal on a horse, as well as how to load and unload horses from a trailer. We also got fitted for our PPE equipment.
On Sunday the 24th, many of us met up at Camalot, an equestrian facility in south Butte county where we spent part of the day learning about operations of the Large animal shelter and then the other part of the day, we had a work party to work on getting the barn areas cleaned up and prepared incase they needed to be used for evacuation operations from areas consumed by wildland fires.
In the next installment, Remi and I will be at Lake of the Springs in an area called Oregon House which is in the Sierra foothills north east of Sacramento. Until then, here is the video for this last weeks adventures.
Safe travels all!
Eric and Remi too!
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