Heading into the storm

We are at the Sho-Ka-Wa casino, in Hopland (map).

We just needed a place to spend the night, and, as we get closer to the bay area, options are few and far between. The Wal-Marts, for example, in Ukiah and Rohnert Park do not allow overnight stays, and on-street or on-highway options are non-existent.

It's a tiny little casino, off the beaten path, but there is plenty of parking, and we even found the food in their tiny little restaurant to be perfectly acceptable. (The restaurant was open to the casino floor, however, which made it a bit smoky, and noisy, for our tastes. Tribal lands are the last bastion of indoor smoking in the state of California.)

As a bonus, the casino gave us a bunch of credit when we signed up for their players' club cards, which we did as a matter of course to get a discount in the restaurant. We each got $20, and I got an additional $15 because my birthday is this month. They wisely have their system set up so that one can not cash out the free credit, but we were able to parlay the $55 in funny money into $33 in real cash at a pair of video poker machines. That was more than we spent on our discounted dinner, with wine, in the restaurant.

Today we have about a three hour slog into the bay area. We will need to be on the road by around 11 to make sure we miss rush hour this afternoon. And, while we've been mostly dry the last few days, we are apparently driving into a giant storm system that has been, and will continue to be, drenching the state from San Francisco all the way to Los Angeles.