Back from Shasta

Talli and I just got back from the Shasta area; Lake Shastina to be exact. We were up there visiting the parcel of land that Talli and I bought early last year. Here's a map, showing our location. We went to get an idea about what it's like to live there and what the people are like. So, Talli interviewed as many people as possible. We got a really good feeling about the place from everyone we talked to and from everything we saw. The community is very environmentally aware. There is a large focus on organic including a few restaurants. The schools are good. The downsides are cold winters and the fact that the only high speed internet at Lake Shastina is by satellite. Oh, well. I can make that work. Now for the view. All I can say is, "Wow!" The first photo is the view from our lot. Talli and I could hardly bear to leave it, but what could we do? There's no house there, yet. One day... This was one of the organic restaurants that I was mentioning. We ended up there on accident. We were flipping through the menus at the McCloud Hotel Bed & Breakfast, where we spent the weekend and we found one for a Thai place. It sounded good, so we went there. It wasn't at the address listed on the menu. In it's place was Vivify: Organic Japanese Restaurant. It turns out that they opened their doors for the first time the prior day. My luck still holds. It was exactly the kind of restaurant that we would have chosen, if it was available. The restaurant is owned by a Japanese restauranteur whose restaurant in San Francisco was given the prestigious distinction of being in the top 100 restaurants in the Bay Area. It turns out that he sold his other restaurant to move to Mount Shasta, just so that we could have a great place to get sushi! Very well thought out on his part. On the way home from paradise, Talli persuaded me to stop at the Olive Pit. She'd seen the signs on our previous trips and wanted to see what all the hype was about. I have to say that they sure had a lot of different types of olives, among other things. I pointed Talli to the organic section and we were off. We managed to get some olives, sun dried tomatoes, stone ground mustard and clover blossom honey. Yes, they were all organic. Honey was one thing that we never found organic except online and boy was it expensive online. We got it for less than half the internet price. A big savings. The trip was amazing. I won't bore you all with all of the details, right now. I'll probably trickle them in over the next few days as my enthusiasm for the area bubbles over. If anyone wants a quiet, pristine, friendly place to move to; consider Siskiyou County. If you like to ski, you like nature, you like a quieter life than the city, then you'll like it there. Until tomorrow, this is David van Sunder, signing off.