Living in the Sierra Foothills.

Week 2 of our petsit was happily free from the drama of the first week. We've worked out where we are, equipped our nest to suit us, and worked on a few ideas for how to spend our time for the next 12-13 weeks.


Location: We're in ranch country, half an hour east of Sacramento. Grocery shopping is easiest in Cameron Park. Clothes and housewares we can get in Placerville, major shopping is available in Flosom, thoughwe have not checked this out as yet. None of these places requires more than a 20-minute drive. For exercise, we can go down the driveway and walk for 30-40 minutes without leaving our non-county-maintained back road. A scenic walk/hike probably requires going north to the American River again, but we have also parked the pick-up on a side road and walked around various upscale neighbourhoods. In many cases each house is surrounded by 5-10 acres of land. Houses range from ordinary-looking bungalows to sprawling ranch styles and every sort of pretentious design you could imagine, from colonial to tudor to mediterranean to alpine lodge. As we search for places to walk, we are constantly reminded how fortunate we are at home to have access to so much crown land.

Nest building: It's funny to discover what you can't live without. I looked around half a dozen stores before finding the right kind of plastic dish scrubber. One big need was for a barbecue. Three months in a place with decent weather was too long to go without access to a grill. We were trying to decide whether to go propane or charcoal. Which would be safer and create less mess? Charcoal is a nuisance to work with, but propane canisters are environmentally wasteful. At the end of our stay, would we donate the BBQ to a thrift store or just leave it? We dropped into a thrift store one day to look for something else (port glasses), and I found an outdoor electric barbeque complete with lava rocks for $5.50. We were allowed to test it to prove that it worked. Then the woman at the cash noticed it had a yellow sticker so was half price. Oh yes, we were given 10 days to return it if it didn't work out okay.

Things to do: We are enjoying the geocaching and have taken our doggie friend Jessie along a couple of times. She enjoys the concept -- a short drive along a country road, followed by sniffing under rocks and fallen trees to find hidden treasure. One night a week we take dance lessons -- East Coast Swing -- in Folsom. On Tuesday mornings we will be volunteering at the Placerville library, doing unskilled chores. We attended an RV seminar one day and then an RV show in Vallejo (saw waters of the Pacific Ocean, but not a real ocean view). We've given some thought to the idea of buying an RV here and it might be a reasonable way to go. If we bought one in the next month, we could bring it to the house and spend some time equipping it with basic supplies. Finding a storage facility should be fairly straightforward. The cost of flying here would not be a lot more than flying to somewhere other prime spots for buying RVs, i.e Florida or Arizona. We could depart this area in the fall to drive south, spending time in Nevada, Arizona , New Mexico, Texas. Later on we could decide whether to continue to Mexico. Jim belives he has figured out how to register and insure an RV in the U.S.