Archive for December, 2005
December 7, 2005 at 6:34 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Two little things for you today: (1) I’ve posted photos to the previous entry from Pinnacles National Park. See below.
(2) Since I’m feeling in a Christmas mood, here’s a deal you can’t refuse: I’m going to send you a FREE 5-song sampler CD from the Trailer Park Troubadours’ current album “Trailercana”. I’ve been listening to it today, and it’s great! Funny and musically great. I love the songs: KOA Refugee, I Married Up, etc.
So here’s the deal: be one of the first 100 people to post a comment on this blog entry with your name, city, and state, and any comments you might have. For example, “Rich Luhr, Charlotte, VT — hope you get back to California soon!” (For privacy, don’t put your full address in the comment.)
Then use our Contact Us form to send me your complete name and address in the “comments” box. I’ll mail you a FREE 5-song sampler CD. Happy holidays!
Why am I doing this? Well, I had a bunch of the CDs made up to give to people we meet along the road, and I figure those of you who can’t meet us along the way should have a chance to get one, too!
Otherwise, there’s not much to talk about. It’s 20 degrees here and windy. I miss my Airstream. But I can tell myself that next week we’ll be returning to “our vacation home in Santa Cruz California”. Sounds nice.
December 6, 2005 at 7:27 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Add this to the list of reasons why I love my Airstream.
We spent all weekend wondering if Emma’s cold was going to clear up enough for her to fly. Monday, we hopped on the plane and all seemed well until the descent in to JFK (New York). Then she started complaining about pain in her ears and crying. I’ve had these problems in many years of business flying, and so we brought out all the remedies but really there’s not much you can do when the Eustachian tubes are clogged by a cold. When we had landed we decided we wouldn’t put her through that again.
So we got a one-way rental car. It’s a five hour drive from JFK to our part of Vermont. $120 for the car, plus gas. Then we retrieved our bag from the airline, which took an hour of standing by the baggage carousel. We finally arrived in Vermont at 3 a.m. Fortunately we were on Pacific Time so it wasn’t quite so late for us.
No cabin pressurization needed. Another reason why I prefer traveling by Airstream.
December 4, 2005 at 8:08 am · Filed under Places to go
What a strange feeling, driving down the highway without an Airstream behind us!
We got that fantastic California feeling, zipping down 101 through the desert valley south of Gilroy. Couldn’t be a more beautiful day. Sunshine pouring down on perfect rows of garlic, strawberries, artichokes, cabbage, and many other fruits & vegetables. Farm stands, too. I think I spent the whole time hungry, thinking about all the food growing around us.
The funny thing is that Californians think Hwy 101 and I-5 are boring. They haven’t driven through the Utah salt flats along US50, I guess. I always find the desert drives to be colorful and endlessly fascinating, especially as the sun approaches the horizon and lights up all the land’s contours to the east.
We stopped off in Soledad CA to visit Pinnacles National Monument. It’s one of those out-of-the-way national parks that we wouldn’t have had a chance to see otherwise. No camping in the park, and it wasn’t on our planned route down the coast. But it turned out to be well-worth the small detour.
Pinnacles is an unusual park in that you can access it from the east or west side but there are no roads that go through. Rt 101 gives access from the east, via a winding, scenic little road called California 146. This road becomes a single lane for several miles before you finally arrive at the tiny Chapparall ranger station.
There are no services here. No Visitor Center on the east side. But plenty of great hiking, rock climbing “¦ and talus caves. The caves were our main reason for stopping ““ some bats were reportedly in resident in it, and we wanted Emma to get a chance to see some bats in the wild.
The sharp-looking rocks that form the Pinnacles are the remains of an ancient volcano. They lie directly on the San Andreas Fault, that famous border between the North American plate and the Pacific plate. The endless grinding of the two plates has put half of the old volcano’s magma flow here in Soledad. The other half lies 195 miles southeast.
If you are more tourist than geologist, the Pinnacles are a great backdrop for photography, a challenging place to climb rocks, and a beautiful place to hike. We had only a couple of hours, so we took a relatively short hike of 2.5 miles (100 ft elevation gain, not much) which brought us up to the talus caves and back.
Emma loved spelunking in the cave, as long as we were close by. There’s a bit of climbing involved, which is always popular with five-year olds. In the dark, negotiating rocks with a flashlight in one hand and an expensive camera around my neck, and an even more expensive child grabbing on me for support, I felt plenty challenged at times.
Unfortunately the bats were mostly out. We spotted only four smallish ones, snoozing on the wall. Still, it was a wonderful hike. Chestnuts had fallen from trees all through the area, with an amber hue that is completely different from the dark-brown chestnuts we have seen in the east. The Ponderosa pines left gigantic pine cones too, and the trail was constantly changing from dizzying cliffs to grassy floor, from dry wash to moist verdant moss. The hike was over in no time, and it was time to get back on the highway to Bakersfield.
Coming east from Hwy 101 the land turned to other western symbols: the wineries of the Paso Robles area, then oil wells slowly dipping up and down, strange-smelling processing plants, and palm trees. California is so big it should be three states, and so exciting and gorgeous it has the thrill of half a dozen others. I’m glad we’ll be back in ten days.
December 3, 2005 at 8:24 am · Filed under Uncategorized
The Airstream is parked and stored, while we head out for early Christmas with our family back in Vermont. Yesterday we backed the Airstream into a tight little hideaway on private land, hidden from public view and behind an electric gate. It will stay here, plugged in and locked up, until we get back from Vermont.
There are some interesting collectible vehicles here. Check out what we are next to: a 1953 Airstream 24 footer. This would be a nice one when fixed up.
Our flight from California to Vermont leaves from Ontario CA, which is near Los Angeles. Logically, we should have had a flight from nearby San Jose, but when I booked the tickets I thought we’d be much further south. Changing the tickets was prohibitively expensive, and we didn’t want to rush our trip down the California coast, so we’ve opted to leave the Airstream here. That way, when we return, we can resume our trip and see everything we wanted to see at a leisurely pace.
Eleanor was packing last night for this trip and muttering dark things about how inconvenient it is to travel as a famiy by air. “You have to pack everything into one bag … You have to disrupt your whole house. What a pain. When you travel by Airstream you have everything with you …” She sounded just like the old National Geographic ads of the 1960s.
So we’ve already discovered two reasons why we like this mode of travel: (1) we can change plans without airline “change fees”; (2) we don’t have to pack and unpack, and we have everything we need, not just what fits in a bag.
We’re about to discover a third reason, too: hotels. I expect that the next two nights of hotel will cost us more than we spend on campgrounds in a week!
Finding Internet access on the road will be a challenge too. If I can find good Internet along the way, I’ll keep blogging this weekend. If not, I’ll catch you up on Tuesday. We have some interesting stops planned along the route to Ontario, including Pinnacles National Monument today.
December 2, 2005 at 11:44 am · Filed under Travel / lifestyle musings
One small risk of roaming around with no set plans is that occasionally you have to move on before you’d like to. Our plan was to stay in Capitola tonight and move the Airstream tomorrow morning to a place nearby for storage. But we were paying daily for this campsite and someone else had it reserved for tonight. The rest of the sites in this campground are booked too, so we need to pack up and move on by 12:30 pm. We’ve decided to go over to a parking lot near a laundromat, do some laundry, and then set up at the storage place tonight. We’ll boondock there and hit the road tomorrow, heading toward the Ontario (CA) airport.
It’s going to be a nasty shock traveling without the Airstream for a couple of days, to and from the airport. I just checked hotels in Paso Robles, CA, which was where planned to crash for the night on Saturday. But the Holiday Inn Express is $142/night … a bit more than the $0-25 we would have spent camping. I keep forgetting how expensive travel is if you always stay in hotels!
December 1, 2005 at 7:01 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
It has been a very busy week here in Capitola, the seaside bedroom community next to Santa Cruz. I have had to spend most of my waking hours working to get the Winter magazine in shape, and close up another project. Eleanor and Emma have been off running errands and exploring the area.
This is a great spot and it’s just a shame that the weather has been less than optimal most of the week. Since we arrived it has been cloudy and cool, with quite a bit of rain (by California standards, not Vermont standards). So we haven’t done much with the beach here at the campground, but we have managed to check out the small beach village (touristy but cute), and meet with a few friends.
Tom Bentley came by yesterday. He’s a contributor to the magazine and will have a nice article about a “Beatmobile” (Airstream motorhome touring the country for the Beat Museum) in the Winter issue. He just returned from a year teaching English in Kosrae, Micronesia, and I was fascinated to hear his tales of that little “island paradise.”
We also gave a tour to a couple who are camped here in a new T@B trailer. They aren’t happy with it, and are considering upgrading to an Airstream. Everyone here in the campground seems to know us (“Are you the people with the Airstream? Did it come with those stickers?”). We are a bit obvious in any campground.
Yesterday afternoon I managed to escape the office for about 90 minutes, during which we attempted to take a walk on the beach near town. But of course the mobile phone rang and it turned out to be a reporter for the NY Times syndicate, doing an article on Airstreamers.
So I spent the entire walk chatting with the reporter, while trying to snap photos with the Nikon one-handed. As a result, I had to delete a bunch of pictures in which the horizon was tilted.
But it was worth it. Media people are fascinated to hear about our trip, the fact that we sold our house, that we’re home schooling, etc. You’d think nobody had ever done it before.
Today I managed to escape long enough to head down to the Monterey Aquarium with Eleanor and Emma. Everyone recommended it, and I can see why. It’s a superb aquarium, even better than the Boston Aquarium. They had a wonderful set of exhibits on jellyfish, which are one of my favorite things to see. Some are nearly invisible, while others are so colorful they rival birds for their plumage.
The museum went a step further too, with an exhibit of art featuring jellies. What does this glass remind you of?
At one point Eleanor and Emma got “in” a tankful of rays. I stayed out in case they needed assistance.
Going to the aquarium was probably the best thing we could do today. It has been raining most of the day. Tomorrow we have to run some errands and start prepping the trailer to be parked for ten days. We’ll put it away at a fellow Airstreamer’s house nearby, and drive down to Ontario CA (near Los Angeles) to catch a flight home on Monday.
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