December 11, 2005 at 12:36 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
OK, hopefully this will be the only time this winter we encounter serious snow! But if you must have snow, then you must go sledding. It’s an all-American sport that is great exercise, fun for the family, and free.
… except for the fancy Hammerhead Sleds that my brother Steve, and Guy, took down Mt Philo today. Those are $289 (available through EMS, Snow Leopard, REI, Neiman-Marcus, FAO Schwartz, and other stores, and factory-direct through the Hammerhead website).
[Please forgive the shameless promotion — my brother runs the company.]
We had a blast! The road down Mt Philo was covered with a nice packed base of 1-2″, and we were bombing down it. There were lots of families out for sledding, too, who we had to avoid carefully. Good thing the Hammerhead steers.
No injuries, either among us or the bystanders!
Emma and Eleanor stayed back with Katie to make cookies — another nice thing to do on a snowy Sunday. And now it’s nearly 4 pm, the sun is setting, and my thoughts are turning to the sunshine of Santa Cruz. …
December 11, 2005 at 5:44 am · Filed under Uncategorized
We have had our Christmas in Vermont, and it was very nice. You have to use your imagination because I left my camera holstered most of the time: Christmas dinner Friday night, with ham, spinach casserole, sweet & white potatoes, pumpkin & key lime pies, wine and eggnog. Can you see Emma bouncing around excitedly?
Saturday morning: egg breakfast, gifts with the family, peeking in stockings, afternoon movies (Wizard of Oz, Shrek2), noshing on the leftover ham, cheese quiche, sweet pickles, artichokes … the adults trying on their new fleeces, Emma playing with her new magnetic toys, and the dog wrestling with her chew toys. All very good & peaceful, with a few inches of fresh snow on the ground outside. Yes, we had a white Christmas.
And now we are staying with our friends Guy & Katie for the next two nights, as our Vermont break winds down and we prepare to head back to California on Tuesday. But there are a few more things to do, first.
Tomorrow I will head over to Plattsburgh NY to visit Colin Hyde. He has numerous interesting projects underway, including my own 1968 Caravel, and I plan to go take photos of a few of them for this blog.
We also have to do some serious thinking about what to do with the the gifts we’ve received this Christmas. As full-timers, we have only two places to put things: (1) in our trailer, which is already stuffed; (2) in our storage unit here in Vermont, for retrieval next summer.
I have received a very nice new fleece, for example, and so I will leave the older one that I wore to Vermont, in our storage unit, and take the new one with me on Tour. I’ll also leave a few other warm things behind, in the hope that we won’t need them for the next few months!
The same process has to happen with Emma’s stuff, but a bit harder to deal with. We don’t want to disappoint Emma by forcing her to leave new presents in storage, but she already has THREE bins of toys stored on the bunk above her bed. So when we return, she’ll also have to select a few of the older things she doesn’t play with much, and pack them for shipment to friends with younger children, or donation. It’s a good lesson about sharing, I hope.
This is how it works in a travel trailer: you keep only some of what your normally collect. It forces you to think about what you really need. Most people discover that is much less than they already have.
December 9, 2005 at 9:37 am · Filed under Uncategorized
We had dinner last night with a bunch of friends from Vermont. All of them are curious about our adventure, so we spent much of the evening answering questions about how it is all going.
And of course, our friends are very supportive of our trip, so they brought us a few supplies: a package of Trailer Trash Snack Mix and a Trailer Trash Talkin’ Beer Opener. Then they said, “By the way, we’re all really jealous!”
December 8, 2005 at 2:00 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
I posted two photo albums of pictures on Flickr today: Capitola CA and Pinnacles National Monument. While we are freezing in Vermont, you can browse a little California warmth.
Still about 80 free Troubs CDs available to snag! See yesterday’s post for details.
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.
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