Downieville, Clampett Style

We spent three days up at Downieville this past weekend. We loaded it all up and took off Thursday night. And true to our nature, we arrived at a little after midnight and set up our tents in a full moon.

When we were kids, we went on a lot of road trips. Our vacations were never luxurious. They were the outdoorsy, backpacky, camp type, waterskiing, houseboating, biking type, loading up the car type things. After a while my mom stopped coming to the camping type ones. She got tired of the whole tent and dirt thing.

But we kept doing them anyway. Dad was always willing to pack up and go and usually it was with a bunch of other families whose mom's had gotten sick of the camp style vacations as well.

Just the dads and the kids and camping and budweiser and "the Eagles" and chaos. I still sing that song, Desperado to myself every time I go camping.
Back then, our station wagon didn't have a big safari type rack on top like we have on our truck now. But that didn't stop my dad. He'd tie it all up on top anyway, Clampett style. And then we'd take off.
And on just about every single trip - on the way up to Tahoe or Yosemite or Nevada City, something would fall off the roof onto the freeway.

And we'd all sit quietly in the station wagon and watch our dad, running along the side of the freeway gathering our tent poles and freeze dried food and pillows, muttering to himself. And then we'd have to sit with whatever had fallen, in our laps, for the rest of the way.

And then we'd get finally make it up to the camp spot and it would be 11pm, and dad would put up the tent in the dark. And it'd take an hour because back then, well, you remember - all those tent poles you had and none of them came attached like nowadays.

All all the other dads would stand around and heckle my dad and eventually they'd pitch in and help.
Nothing fell off our roof on our trip. And it only took about 15 minutes to get our tents up in the dark. We work like ninjas.

And I rode Downieville for my first time. And fell in love with it. 20 miles of almost ALL downhill with a rare climb is like art. It was one of those perfect rides, where you ride almost all of it, creek crossings and baby heads and bridges and cliffs and all. And you smile hard while you ride it.