If you’re lucky enough to have been able to take a vacation, you know that the whole point is to be away from regular life. You want to be physically away, in a new place, where you can forget about your usual worries, where you get out of your routine, where normal life is suspended. If you’re lucky […]
Tag: California
Peering at the Ocean, Peering under Rocks
Damn this cold and wind. I feel like I haven’t been truly warm since this past fall in Death Valley, and even then the temps dropped as soon as the sun lowered. I know we’ve had warm—even hot—days intermittently, but we seem to carry the cold with us, and the ever-present wind. Here at Sonoma […]
Naked River Nymphs & a Shoe Hoard
I like to base my posts on a theme, or a story, or even just an explanation about an aspect of life on the road. Anything to avoid the “We’re here, and we did this” pattern, which becomes mighty monotonous after >400 posts. Sometimes life is simply random, however, and I can’t knit a pattern out […]
Unexpected Perks of Visiting Friends on the Road
You know how we love to meet up with old friends who live near our route. Sometimes they come to the campsite, or we go to their house and hang out on their deck, or we meet them in town; once we even stayed in a friend’s driveway. Just seeing familiar faces is a pleasure. […]
Mystery Neighbor at the 21% Lake
We’re about an hour north of Fresno, CA, at a Corps of Engineers campground built around a reservoir called Hensley Lake. Hidden View Campround As with nearly all USACE campgrounds we’ve stayed at so far, this one’s been designed beautifully and outfitted to the max. When they plan building a dam to create a reservoir, […]
Heart-palpitating Monterey Bay Aquarium
I’d anticipated this day for years; I was thrilled by this day; I took tons of photos this day; but my post of this day is the lamest I’ve ever written! Here are my excuses: I’m writing it offline so don’t have access to facts other than what’s in my sieve-like brain; I even stupidly […]
Photos from Los Padres/Big Sur
Here are the missing photos from my previous post about our week near Big Sur. The land between the highway and the ocean at our Plaskett Creek campground is owned by the National Forest Service, and they lease it to cattle farmers. So it’s divided by barbed-wired fencing for occasional cattle, but when walking paths […]
Los Padres Nat. Forest at Plaskett Creek
Here’s a text-only post because I don’t have enough data to upload photos. Photos coming soon! I’ve also thrown it together from unedited notes, so my apologies there, too. This week we’re in a national forest campground just a tad south of Big Sur. So far as I can tell, this means giant everything: giant […]
Goodbye San Simeon, Bring on the Music Game
Today is our final day at San Simeon State Park; tomorrow we take a short but dramatic drive up Highway 1 to a new (to us) state park in the Big Sur area. We’ll have no cell signal at all there, so I thought I’d post while I can. For the last of our week here […]
Beauty and the Stress
My friend Whit shared a NYT article with me yesterday about the contrast between the shiny social media portrayal of #VanLife and the sometimes-miserable day-to-day reality of constant life and travel in such a small space. You guys know this is a multi-layered theme for me here. It’s easy to make fun of the trendy […]
