A short vacation at Clear Lake

I thought Clear Lake might be an interesting short-stay vacation spot. I’ve been there a couple of times, but Karen never has. The last time I was there was on a bike tour, riding around the lake on a 100°+ day. March seemed like the temperature would be more comfortable.

I rented a “beachfront” two-bedroom house. It’s true there were no houses between ours and the beach, but there was a road, and the beach was crappy and filled with private docks. The house was older and a patchwork of renovations. The bedroom was downstairs via a narrow, crazy-steep stairway. But, it was super clean and we were comfortable.

We rode our bikes from Nice to Kelseyville and back—34 miles. Kelseyville had a nice place for coffee.

Another day we drove back to Robert Lewis Stevenson State Park for some hiking and geocaching. I had my eye on this area for some time because it had a nice string of caches and seemed like it would have great overlooks of the surrounding countryside. I was surprised the trail was pretty rocky and rugged. I guess because it was a state park I was expecting a wide, well-graded trail. And the caches were hard to get to and find—lots of poison oak. One of the first caches I looked for had me up against a large rock (over my head) where I was startled (yelped and jumped back) by a rattlesnake right at eye level and far too close. Perhaps that encounter colored my view, but we didn’t particularly enjoy the trail.

We did a much more enjoyable hike on the Red Bud trail to Cache Creek. Everything was still very green with a profusion of wildflowers. A herd of elk wanders the area, but we did not see any. I found a few caches too.

Before driving home on our last day, I drove out Bartlett Springs road getting a few caches. I particularly wanted to get a cache at Bartlett Springs and explore a bit of the old resort ruins. Unfortunately, I stepped out of the truck and walked over to view the area and confronted a drunk guy with two large dogs still carrying a loaded six-pack. I decided to treat him as not trustable, so left. It bugged me to have driven out 10 miles on a curvy dirt road and not get the cache I wanted.

Links:
—Clear Lake 2015 photo gallery