California for Christmas

The Banks and Peils joined us at Bruce's sisters (Susan) place in Visalia, CA ( an hour south of Fresno). This has been our plan for the last couple years. Nate and Robin drove, the Peils flew commercially and we flew our plane down.
The Willamette Valley (for those out of state this lies between the coastal range and the Cascade range in the western portion of Oregon) had patchy fog for taking off in but clear once we got up high.
The mountains were beautiful, the snowy Siskyou's north of Shasta Lake.This is Mt. Shasta.This is the California north coast range.Bruce is landing at Redding.And then the San Joaquin Valley fog for Becky's leg.We diverted to land in Hanford rather than Visalia due to fog. Air Traffic Control asked me my intentions for landing because he knew that fog was being reported and knew I am a VFR (visual flight rules rated, not instrument rated, which allows you to fly through clouds) so I told him that I would see if there were any holes in the layer near Lamoore and if there were not I'd head back north to a large hole above Fresno. I found my hole and descended near Lamoore and managed to stay high enough above terrain and avoid the fog for 15 minutes to land at Hanford, Visalia would have been another 10 mins. and the layer was dropping.

The day before Christmas dinner at Susan's. We failed in getting pictures of her tree and the menagerie of presents but lets just say with 14 adults, 3 teens and 3 children it was a flury of gift opening. I think Ivy liked her new car! Christmas day we arose to fog in the valley and then it burned off just enough to get out. By the forecasting it looked as though if we didn't get out on this day it would likely be the weekend and our schedule needed us home by Thurs. We took the eastern side of the valley to Oregon passing Mt. Lassen. We heard ahead of time of turbulence over Squaw Valley and tried to detour from there but still hit some.
We were aiming to land in Redding but it was pretty socked in so we diverted to Klamath Falls, OR further north and east of Redding. It was fivish or so coming into sight of K. Falls and our descent was really rough because of winds. We hit a wind shear that but us into negative g's, everything in the cockpit was floating! We (Bruce was flying) were able to keep the plane upright and shortly land. Phew! I love the earth!!
When we landed and parked (after everything was closed) there were no tie downs for our plane so it sat out all night in 30mph winds unsecured. We called the next morning to claim our plane and they said it had jumped around from where we had left it so they moved it into a huge hanger that housed many other planes. We were happy about that beings it snowed and iced the night before we took off for home. We had a great day and a half hanging out at our motel room until the weather broke.
Wed. morning looked like our window to make it across the Cascade Mountains and back to the Willamette Valley.
This is a view before take off looking north which was going to be our route. There was snow/ice on the runway but the plane did fine gripping it without sliding. I had a mile to taxi and test it out.
What should have been a 2 hour flight was a 4 hour one due to heavy head winds with ground speeds between 29 and 40 knots. All we saw over mountains was a vast thick blanket of clouds of which we stayed on top anywhere from 12,000 to 14,000 feet high (thank goodness there are oxygen tanks). I have never been so happy to finally break out and see the valley floor! We landed in Eugene for a break and Bruce flew us home from there.