Into Southern California

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We have had a great time for the nine days we stayed in Petaluma but we need to continue south. We have reserved a spot at the Oceanside Elks Lodge and have six days to get there at just under 600 miles. Unfortunately I was coming down with some sort of bug. My symptoms were not terrible - mainly just tired, but having it occur right during a string of back to back driving days was not going to be fun. Plus those driving days were going to be in some of the heavier traffic zones in California. The trick we had was how to most easily avoid the traffic in San Francisco and Los Angeles. We also have Thanksgiving Day coming up in this timeframe. We had put some thought into these facts as we tried to plan our trip. We hoped that leaving on a Sunday from Petaluma would make for lighter traffic as we head around San Francisco. Four hundred and fifty miles will get us to the northern fringe of LA. We will often try to use weekend days when we travel near large cities, but we suspect the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend might be a poor choice so we plan to drive thru LA on the Saturday with the hopes most people will be out of town visiting family.

There are a fair number of Elks Lodges along US 101 as we head south. We identify three of them that will be about 150 miles apart. To avoid the massive traffic that seems never ending going down 101 over the Golden Gate Bridge, we pick a route that skirts well east of Oakland and pick up US 101 near San Jose. Our first stop will be the Elks Lodge in Salinas. When we first approach, we are concerned whether they will have a spot with hookups. There are lots of RVs in the lot. Fortunately it turns out they offer storage for rigs, so many of them are simply parked in the middle of the gravel parking lot. We scope out a spot for a one night stay. Even though the lodge is right across the street from the Salinas airport, we don't really notice any noise problems. Maybe this airport isn't very busy?

The next day we hit the road for another 150 mile drive to the Santa Maria Elks Lodge. They have a nice facility with 30 amp and water sites to the northwest of the building and full hookup 50 amp sites to the southeast of the building. We found an open spot with water and electric which will be fine for our one night stay. The next morning we have a little time to kill before we head out, so we go into town to get a couple geocaches. One of them is at a museum that shouldn't be open this early so we expect an easy grab. Turns out the museum is right next door to a lawn bowling facility. There were at least a dozen people just starting to play. The cache was just a few feet from where these people were standing so it would be impossible to look inconspicuous while searching on the other side of a 3 foot fence. To overcome the muggles, I take the approach of talking to them. I honestly had never heard of lawn bowling, so it was pretty easy for me to play dumb and ask about it. They explained the game which sounds somewhat like bocce but the balls they roll are not perfectly round. After a few minutes of conversation, they continued on with their game and I was able to make the find without raising suspicion.

Another 150 miles got us into Simi Valley. The Elks Lodge there has 8 full hookup 50 amp sites. The lodge wasn't open when we pulled in and the campground looked full. Before unhooking the car, we walked over to find there was one open spot hiding behind a lemon tree. We quickly got parked to make sure nobody else snuck in ahead of us. One of the neighbors came over to caution us about the ants in the nearby lemon tree. He had parked his truck close enough that his mirror had contacted a branch. When he come out the next morning, his mirror was covered in a mass of ants. We made sure our slide didn't contact the branches, but that wasn't enough to completely escape their desire to explore. It wasn't long before I saw them marching up the power cable into the rig. We used ant spray on all three attachments to the water/sewer/electric but that didn't completely stop them. For the 4 nights we stayed there, we would find a stray ant or two wandering around the floor of our rig. When the lodge opened and we went to register and pay, we discovered they were having lasagna for dinner that evening. It's always nice when we can get a good meal on a travel day.

The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library is in Simi Valley and we would have liked to have checked it out. We have never been to a presidential library but we hear they can be entertaining. Unfortunately I was pretty out of it our first full day. I can usually ignore sickness symptoms when needed - like driving for the last 3 days, but once I don't need to ignore them, I succumb. With Thanksgiving being the next day, the Reagan Library would be closed so we will need to save this for some future stop. Chris went out and got all the fixings for Thanksgiving dinner. She had a plan to use the Instant Pot to cook a small turkey, stuffing and sweet potatoes. It turned out even the small turkey she got was the only thing that would fit. So all the other items got cooked separately. The nice thing about the Instant Pot is how quickly it cooks things. Our 6 pound turkey took 30 minutes.

With the quick cook time for Thanksgiving dinner, we were able to go out and enjoy a nice hike in the nearby Corriganville Park prior to dinner. This is a good sized park at nearly 250 acres. There are many trails. There were a fair number of people out enjoying the nice weather. It is also a big mountain biking destination. Had I been feeling better, I may have come back over to try some of the easier trails. The property used to be a movie set with several thousand movies, TV shows and commercials filmed there.

View from Corriganville Park

Corriganville Park with Ronald Reagan Freeway in Background

The "Famous" Gorilla Rock!

For our last full day, I felt the need to head into LA and explore a bit. Over the last twenty years of my career at Eastman Kodak, I made dozens of trips to the LA area. I even had the privilege of being in Burbank on January 17, 1994 to experience the Northridge earthquake. There were many things I would have liked to see, but we only had a day so we limited the destinations. A short drive down the 405 brought us to Mulholland Drive. The views along the drive are nice and it is interesting to see some of the multi million dollar homes hanging onto the hillside.

We had a few geocaches to look for along the way. One of the caches with lots of favorite points was at a park of sorts. Tree People is an organization that supports the LA community to plant and care for trees and generally promote water saving and green initiatives. They have a large park like setting with many buildings for training sessions and a large number of trails. I was still a bit under the weather but did manage to walk some of the trails, check out the buildings and displays and of course find the geocache.

View Along Mulholland Drive

Along the Trail at Tree People

After the drive we meandered around as we headed back to camp. A drive through Burbank brought back many memories. One of the facilities I worked at was located there. Lots had changed, however some of the things had stayed the same. It was fun to see the area again. We eventually got back to Simi Valley and started to get ready to leave the following morning as we head to our next destination for 16 nights in Oceanside - about two thirds of the way from LA to San Diego. The traffic heading south on I-405 was light by LA standards. It did seem like the lanes were just a bit narrower than most expressways and driving a rig this size wasn't the best experience.

We pulled into the Elks Lodge in Oceanside and went to the camp host's rig. We were told he was checking in another new arrival and to just wander around the 40 sites to find him. It didn't take long to spot him and as we came around the corner of another Dutch Star, we discovered he was checking in our friends Michael and Lorraine. We had met them at the FMCA rally in Chandler Arizona last March being neighbors in the big boondocking lot. We reconnected a couple weeks later at the Escapade in Tucson and then again when we both joined at the Willcox Elks Lodge. We had kept in touch and I knew they were in the San Diego area. They had even said they would catch up with us in Oceanside once they knew our travel plans would bring us this way. I expected it meant we would get together for dinner or drinks. I hadn't realized they were going to be just a few sites down from us. What a great surprise. We needed to wait a bit for the people currently in our spot to get out, but we didn't need to wait long and we got setup without issue.

Our first day trip took us just 5 miles to the east. Mission San Luis Rey was founded in the late 1700's and the present church was built in 1811. We timed our visit so we could go on one of the behind the scenes tours. The tickets are $12 per person but does give a much better sense of the history than just wandering around and reading some of the signs. Plus the tour group gets to enter areas closed to the general public or even those that pay to enter the mission's museum.

Church at Mission San Luis Rey 

Many Arches at Mission

The grounds around the buildings are very well maintained. The church and other buildings have been enlarged and changed over the last two centuries. The church itself is in excellent condition both inside and out. Franciscan Friars are still present and even run a school of theology at the mission. The adjoining cemetery was used in the filming of the 1950's TV series "Zorro" and still displays the skull and crossbones over the cemetery entrance added for the filming. Inside the mission grounds is the "oldest pepper tree in California" planted in the 1830's. It is definitely a gnarly looking old tree.

Old Pepper Tree

More Arches Inside Courtyard

Inside Church at Mission

Skull and Crossbones at Cemetery Entrance

There were a handful of items we have been wanting to get from Amazon but we haven't really been at a place long enough to order them. On Cyber Monday, we put in our order. We likely could have had the packages delivered to the Elks Lodge but an even easier and safer spot was another one of those Amazon Lockers. There was one inside the convenient store at a gas station only about a mile from the lodge. Of course the orders all seemed to come separately so I made a few trips to the store to pick them up. One cool feature of this service was discovered when I went to pick up three separate packages. After entering the code for one of the items, it realized I had two other packages and let me get them without needing to enter each code. Amazon really does have a good handle on the delivery system and making it convenient for travelers like us.

We discovered Calavera Lake Park close by in the town of Carlsbad. There are miles of trails with some paved but most are your typical desert like trails. Some of the trails are fairly strenuous hikes. In the center of the park is an old dormant volcano. We didn't do the trail up to the top but did go around the front side of it. There are a few dozen geocaches within the park. This looks like a place that should be visited again to try to see more of the trails.

Heading Up Trail at Calavera Lake Park

Overlooking Calavera Lake

We did a day trip south towards San Diego for a couple destinations. The first was to the town of La Jolla - specifically Children's Pool Beach. Our goal wasn't to check out children at a pool but instead the harbor seals. A small seawall had been built to create a protected swimming area for families to enjoy, but apparently the seals enjoy it even more and so they now control the beach with ropes and signs to keep humans out of the area. There were dozens of seals on the beach apparently sun bathing. Every now and then one would sort of crawl on their bellies and head towards the water. They definitely are not all that graceful on land but once they reach the water, they are very adept. Several rock outcroppings are in the beach area and these seemed to be a draw for the seals. You could tell there was a lot of energy expended while trying to belly flop up the edge of the rocks. One of the smaller ones took about four attempts before he actually made it to the spot he wanted.

Catching Some Zzzz's

Seven Seals on a Rock

You Looking at Me?

La Jolla California

Bird of Paradise

From here we headed up to the Birch Aquarium at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. We had originally wanted to park near the pier and head to the beach to attempt another webcam cache but the parking along the road was completely full. I suppose that was because of all the students here for their day classes. We finally just parked at the aquarium and walked down the hill to eventually get to the beach. The webcam here proved to be quite challenging since the camera seemed to be on some sort of timer, changing its direction every 45 seconds or so. The bigger problem was a couple minute time delay between reality and what was being displayed on the website with the camera. We eventually figured out where we needed to stand to eventually get in the frame of the camera and we got our picture.

Scripps Memorial Pier

That's Us on the Webcam

Interesting Tree on Way to Aquarium

It was a much tougher walk back up the hill to the aquarium. We decided to eat our lunch we had with us before heading into the place. We were surprised by how busy the place was for a Wednesday. Part of the crowd was a bus load of middle school students on a field trip. When you were in the same room as them, it got quite loud. I definitely felt sorry for the chaperones because all we needed to do was go to a different part of the aquarium to escape the noise. There are lots of things to see and do with some outside activities for kids that we also found entertaining.

A Festive Shark

On one of our lazy mornings, we were sitting in the motorhome with the windows and door open since the weather was so nice. At one point I noticed the sound of a helicopter flying overhead but didn't think too much about it. After a few minutes of the sound, I started to wonder what was going on so I went outside and saw two helicopters circling overhead. It wasn't clear if there were police or news helicopters but it was clear something was going on. So I turned on the TV to discover that a couple grade schools less than two miles away were under lockdown because of an armed man in the area. We decided to go under lockdown ourselves. After about another 30 minutes, the helicopters were gone and we later heard that a suspect had been apprehended.

With things safe, we headed out after lunch for a bike ride down to the beach here in Oceanside. There is an easy way to bike there from the lodge without running into a lot of traffic. At the beach, we headed north to the pier and then a bit further north to the San Luis Rey River. There is a nice paved trail that heads inland so we followed that for a couple miles and then found a way back to the lodge that didn't require us to completely backtrack our path. It might be nice to try following the San Luis Rey River Trail since it seems to go quite a distance.

Perfectly Balanced Rocks

Oceanside Pier

Another short trip took us into Escondido. There was a geocache or two that we wanted to try. An interesting one was created by a couple that have a geocaching podcast we have listened to for ages. Their caching name is Podcacher. The concept of this cache was not typical. At the posted coordinates, you start playing an audio recording and basically follow the instructions. The cache owners recorded the audio while actually walking the streets. The instructions didn't give street names but instead landmarks so you really couldn't figure out in advance where you would end up. It was a neat way to wander around town although it wasn't really setup as a tour of town which might have been even more interesting.

Entrance at Escondido City Hall

Interesting Sculpture Downtown Escondido

Back in March at the Escapees rally in Tucson Arizona, we had met a couple (Nancy and Al) that were tent camping while trying to learn about different RVs and the lifestyle in general. They were planning on getting some sort of rig and starting a full time adventure of their own in the next year or two. We had brought them out to our rig at the rally so they could see what one looks like with people living in it and how all our stuff fits. We have kept in touch over the past months and by following our blog, they saw we were in California and reached out to see if we could get together again since they live in the Southern California area. The Elks Lodge is less than an hours drive from their place so they came down to have lunch and chat. We even had Lorraine and Michael join in so we could all sit around and talk. It sounds like they have formulated much of their plan and are in the final stages of getting the RV and downsizing. Who knows, maybe the next time we meet them, they will already be on the road?