We're hittin' the road!
Mile 0 at 2:52 AM. The car was loaded and we were finally on our way! Since it was pretty late already we only drove a few hours before stopping just to get out of the city. We wanted to at least get past Bakersfield. Didn't really want to go through central California in the daytime because of the heat, but it turned out that we didn't have a choice. We were orginally aiming to get past Sacramento on the first leg. We took Interstate 5 all the way out of Orange County through the center of the state.

We stopped at a coffee house in Sacramento around 3:30 in the afternoon. It was as hot there as it was down in SoCal! Here's a picture from the road:

Redding
We checked into the Redding Motel 6 just after 10pm at mile 635. Not quite the mountain town we were expecting. Maybe because the elevation is 557. Guess we should have researched that better. It's hot here too! It's pretty late and we're very tired.

There wasn't much to ride up here as you can see. That's pretty much all there is to central Califonia. No, there's much more, but the idea was to get as far up north as we could before we started sightseeing. We didn't really expect to see much anyway. We've done that drive a couple times and it's mostly farm land. We had to stop three times to rest because we left so early in the morning, so the drive took longer than it should have. Sacramento seemed to be a pretty cool town.

We weren't sure what we would be doing in the morning. There were three choices and they were all in different directions. Mt. Shasta was about an hour north. Lassen Volcanic National Park was about an hour east. And Redwood National Park was three hours west on the coast. We were going to do that one for sure. Just had to wait and see how early we got up in the morning.