Mosquito Lake
For the weekend I thought I would drive up to Lake Tahoe, so when my plane landed at SFO on Friday night I drove perhaps just a little further than sensible and ended up renting a room in a little motel in Placerville. I had a lucky break at check-in for my flight since my "arrive early at the airport" strategy paid dividends and I got onto a flight two hours earlier, as well as getting whisked through some "TSA Pre-check" line that I've never seen before and they put me in the exit row, between a couple of interesting people! Win^4! The guy on my left recommended stopping for the night at Placerville, saying that the drive to Tahoe gets interesting about there.
In fact I didn't enjoy Lake Tahoe as much as I'd hoped: too many cars and no place to park. Even though I made it to Emerald Bay by 9:00am it was just too packed, so I carried on after a few photos.
Nothing else obviously presented itself to me as somewhere I should stop, so I ended up going right round the lake and was back in South Lake Tahoe for lunch. It was also way too hot, so I decided to drive back towards the bay area and settled on Highway 4, through Stanislaus Forest Park, which turned out to be a gorgeous drive across several passes, through some nice forest and past some lovely lakes, including this one. I'd been hoping to take some photos of waterfalls, and I found a couple of small ones, but there just didn't seem to be enough water around for them to be worth it.
And the sun was baking. Everywhere seemed to be around 35-38C! Walking around Angels Camp seemed to me as hot as I'd ever felt anywhere in Mexico or Spain. Right up at the top of the pass the water level at Mosquito Lake seemed normal, but lower down everything was very dry and on the road to Sonora I crossed a huge reservoir which must have been close to 50m below it's normal levels.
Today I saw another reservoir up Stephen's Canyon which was also very low, and ten minutes later I was driving through Palo Alto and seeing green lawns almost everywhere. Suspicious, given all those other places where everything is dry...
Also, if you discover yourself on a toll bridge, in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, with only a credit card to pay with, it turns out the guy in the booth just waves you through anyway because otherwise you're going to slow down the whole ten-or-so cars behind you. Rental car companies should really come to some kind of arrangement with the toll operators so the toll could just be added onto the rental car bill.