Northern California, Redwoods NP

<<<NOW WITH PICTURES!!>>>

Sorry we haven't blogged since we left Martinez! We'll actually be in Seattle today, so here I'll catch everyone up on our travels up the NoCal coast, and soon Lily will write about Oregon and Portland.

Before we left the bay area, Lily and I wanted to do a bit of tune-up work on Inigo. Our last afternoon in Martinez, we replaced the spark plugs, ignition wires, and distributor cap. The next day, we said our sad goodbyes to Lily's dad and Aunt and left.

As we accelerated up the onramp onto the highway heading north, Inigo let out some weird popping sounds, and the camper struggled to hit 50 mph! "Well," I said to Lily, "I guess we're not leaving today". We had to re-gap the spark plugs, and we found out that two of the ignition wires were swapped, so the plugs were firing in the wrong order, running on 6 cylinders instead of 8. Just a little snag, and luckily we were able to leave the next day, with the engine sounding better than ever. We were finally, finally ready to head up to wine country!

We didn't spend much time in Napa, as we had visited a couple months earlier. I did stage at Redd for a day, and I was able to absorb a good amount in a short period of time. I worked my own station, I was fed well, and could have worked there longer, but one day was enough for me. We decided to get back on the road, and I must say - the drive north through Napa, Sonoma, and Mendocino counties was beautiful!




After a quick stop in Fort Bragg, we arrived in Eureka, a really nice little artsy port city in Humboldt county. A wonderful lady named Beth, whom we met on couchsurfing.com, hosted us in her driveway for a couple of nights. Eureka has a nice little pier area, and the downtown area has some cool art galleries and stores.

On our way up the coast after Eureka, we stopped at a tiny little oceanside town called Trinidad. The town is perched on top of a huge cliff overlooking the ocean, and the ocean shelf have these huge jagged rocks sticking up. There's a nice marina and the beaches are beautiful. We had a nice picnic lunch and then walked along the beach with Bebe off the leash - she loved it!





Our trip continued north through the slow, windy steep roads of US 101 along the coast. After some of the slowest, most challenging driving we've done on the trip, we spent a couple nights in the tiny town of Orick, where we stayed with another couchsurfer - a lifetime hippie named Steve. This guy was quite a character! He has three huge black guard dogs and six chickens, from which we cooked fresh eggs for breakfast on his wood-burning stove.

Why did we stay in Orick? It's smack in the middle of Redwoods National and State Parks! We did a few really nice hikes and saw some unbelievably large trees. We stood in the middle of a couple huge chimney trees - redwood giants that are hollowed out completely on the inside by multiple forest fires (only the bark remains, which is resistant to fire). We also picked a whole bunch of fresh bay leaves from some bay trees! The weather was pretty horrible, though - very cold and occasional rain, so we weren't able to see as much as we wanted to.






Oh, and the drive up from Crescent City to Grants Pass, OR along Rt. 199 was especially beautiful. The road goes along Smith River, and the water was this wonderful blue-green color.




-Ben

About to get on the road

We've taken a three month "break" from traveling since we got to Martinez. It's been two months since we've updated, but only one noteworthy thing has happened. About six weeks ago, Ben and I adopted a dog from an animal shelter nearby. We've been wanting to adopt a dog for a while. She's a chihuahua mix, and we named her Bebe! She's really cute and loves belly rubs. We think she probably has some jack russell or rat terrier in her, because aside from looking like that, she's very fast and has a ton of energy. I took her on a couple of bike rides a couple days ago, and it was a great way for her to run nearly full speed while I biked at a moderate pace. She loves running and it's good for her to get hard exercise, because she can be a little hyperactive sometimes... Onto the pictures!

A few days after we got her:




The next two pictures show a frequent series of events:

She just loves her belly rubs.




We've taken her to the marina here in Martinez, as well as a dog park nearby. Here are some of her looking cute in the grass.



She is very curious about inanimate objects, but not so much with people and animals.




WHAAAAA???



We will be getting back on the road in about a week, to head back to the Boston area, via Portland, Seattle, Vancouver,the Black Hills in South Dakota, Chicago and whatever else crosses our path. We will post regularly when we are on the road again.

-Lily

San Luis to Martinez

After leaving Santa Barbara, we spent a couple of days in San Luis Obispo. We had a really good lunch downtown and bought some really awesome aged balsamic vinegar. From there we drove to Monterey, to spend some time with my grandparents. We had an awesome Christmas dinner that Ben cooked most of. I made dessert, which included lime squares (which came out alright) and the best apple pie in the world. We spent some time with my mom, as she was visiting for a week also. On Dec 29th, we left Monterey and went up to Martinez. We had a very relaxing drive, and we stopped in Gilroy and a neat little market. We got some really cheap garlic and oranges and other stuff; we even bought a little ice cream cup of GARLIC ICE CREAM which I thought was actually really good (no one else liked it).

Last weekend, Ben's parents were here and we spent a nice day going to some wineries and then having dinner at Redd in Yountville, near Napa. It's been really nice to see so much family in the past month!

So we've been in Martinez for a month now, and I only just started working today. We'll probably be here for another six to eight weeks, after which we will begin to head back to the east coast. We'll try to remember to update our blogs, but we're mainly focused on working and making money right now. We are going to make sure we get at least a few days of leisure time in San Francisco and Oakland and Berkeley, so we'll write about that.

Until next time...

-Lily

Santa Barbara - very nice

Lily and I spent the past four days Santa Barbara, California, and we both really enjoyed our time there. The city has beautiful beaches, a nice pier, lots of cool stores, and some pretty good restaurants downtown. A couple days ago we went to a great farmer's market right on State Street downtown, and apparently there's a farmer's market every day of the week in the Santa Barbara area in a different place each day! Last night, we had a good, reasonably priced dinner downtown at a place called Opal. All in all, it seems like a pretty good food town. There's a lot going on for such a small city - it's too bad that housing rates are among the highest in the country here. Santa Barbara is on the short list of places we've visited so far on this trip that we would consider moving to when we're done with this trip - if we can afford the rent.

We weren't even sure we'd be able to stay in Santa Barbara for more than one night, but thanks to a new discovery, we were able to stay, have a great time, and meet some new people. For a couple weeks now, we've been having problems finding cheap or free places to park the camper overnight during our travels through southern California. Someone pointed us to a website called couchsurfing.com, which is a very large community of people from all over the world who partake in couchsurfing, whether it be as travelers, or as hosts. Basically, generous people open out their homes and lend their couches to travelers who do not have a place to stay or people to stay with. It's a fun, cheap way to travel, and you get to really get to know new and interesting people along the way. While we do not need couches to sleep on, we do need places to park, plug in, fill water, ect.

We didn't know anybody in Santa Barbara and just discovered couchsurfing.com, and on very short notice, a really cool guy named Kyle emailed us and took us in! He let us plug in, hang out at his pad with his roommates and friends, and use his shower and bathroom. He and his friends told us what to do in town, where to go for dinner, and more, and of course we returned the favor by cooking for them.

Tonight, we got to San Luis Obispo, which is about halfway between Monterey and LA and again another couchsurfer responded to the short-notice request and let us park in his driveway! After spending a lot of time basically by ourselves between Denver and Las Vegas, it's nice to actually socialize with people for a change, and get to know new people.

We really wish we had discovered this sooner!

-Ben

LA - NOT a tourist friendly city (but at least Marilyn is here)

You'd think that Los Angeles, being home of the stars and thus home of star-watching, would be a city that would do its best to welcome tourists so it could make as much money off them as possible. But if you're a visitor to LA, you're really on your own as far as figuring out how to get anywhere.

LA is known for its legendary traffic, but it also has exhorbitant parking costs, so what visitor is going to rent a car here? Better to take the public transportation and get where you want to go for a lot cheaper. There's still a problem with that plan though! There are at least three different cities operating public transportation around the LA area: Los Angeles, Santa Monica, and Culver City (which, incedentally, is just a part of west LA). On top of that, many of the bus numbers overlap from city to city, so when you want to get on the Metro 2, you might end up on the Blue Bus 2 instead (since they stupidly pick up at many of the same spots along their [very similar, but not similar enough] routes!). As for the LA Metro, there are Metro Local buses, Metro Rapid buses, Metro Express buses, and then just three or four Metro Rail lines for the entire city.

The public transportation has been a source of frustration for us for the past few days, and we realized how much we loved the simplicity of Boston's MBTA. We also have a greater appreciation for New York City's extensive subway system, as well as all the crosstown and up/downtown buses. Even the public transportation in LAS VEGAS was easier to deal with than here. At least in Vegas, all we had to contend with was the lack of expediency, but we always knew where we were going. In LA, the buses are slow, fares are not constant through the three seperate systems, and many of the buses have different AM/PM routes.

The biggest issue is that the vast majority of Los Angelenos drive their own cars, so there is really no motivation to update, consolidate, and streamline the current public transportation. There really needs to be a Los Angeles Metropolitan Area Transportation Authority, but LAMATA doesn't really roll of the tongue.

Good news (for me anyway): Yesterday we visited the cemetary where Marilyn Monroe was buried; we saw her Hollywood Boulevard Walk of Fame Star; and we saw the concrete slab in front of Graumans Chinese Theater where Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell immortalized their handprints and shoeprints for the premiere of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in 1953. We also had a lovely dinner at Campanile, courtesy (mostly) of Ben working there for a couple days!

We'll be heading up the coast again on Sunday or Monday. Trip Stats: we've surpassed 5800 miles, we're holding steady around 9.5mpg, and our cost per mile at this point is down to 36 cents/mile! Yay cheap gas!

-Lily

San Diego - Our kinda place

San Diego's got a lot going for it. It's got very nice weather, beautiful beaches, a nice city park, and lots of good Mexican food. It's wonderful to be able to enjoy the weather and do outdoorsy things at this time of the year. I guess that's one of the big advantages to full-time RVing - we get to drive to where the weather is nice.

We were lucky to find a great RV park to stay for a few of our nights in San Diego right on Mission Bay called Campland on the Bay. For 20 bucks a night, we were able to enjoy a spot just a couple hundred feet from the beach, and just a thirty second walk away from the pool/jacuzzi, with all the necessary RV hookups that alone usually cost $40/night. There were a ton of big RVs there, and a lot in San Diego in general, and I can see why.

We visited a couple beautiful beaches close to where we stayed. Mission beach is a thin strip of land about two hundred feet wide with the ocean on one side and the bay on the other side. We parked the RV, hopped on our bikes, and biked north along beach on the wavy ocean side and then back south along the back on the calm bay side. We also had lunch on Ocean Beach, which is a dog beach (dog park on the beach), and visited the ritzy town of Coronado Beach, which is near a U.S. amphibious Navy base where you can see Marines and Seals training from the highway.

We spent our last afternoon/night in San Diego at Balboa Park, which is the world's largest urban cultural park. There are 15 museums in the park, all of which normally cost money, but we happened to visit on a night when they were having a holiday festival, and all of the museums were free! We had a great time biking and walking around the park, and then enjoyed visiting a couple of the museums amongst the throngs of local festival go-ers.

Our favorite part of the night was the San Diego automotive museum. This place is full of beautiful exotic, classic, and vintage cars and motorcycles. But the highlight was a car and trailer from 1954 that broke (and still holds) the world's endurance non-stop record across the United States. For seven days, three men drove in five hour shifts drove over 7,400 miles from Anchorage, Alaska to Mexico city, re-fueling on the run from trucks on airport runways along the way. The custom car/trailer refilled the radiator and changed oil on the run, and even had hydraulic jacks with wheels attached that enabled the passengers to change a tire while still driving! The trailer holds 230 gallons of gas, 15 gallons of oil, and 30 gallons of water (50 more held in a tank in the car). At the back of the trailer is a tiny table for eating with a nation-wide mobile phone (in 1954?), and the men used a catwalk attached to the bottom of the war to walk outside and climb onto the trailer while moving. The story behind the car/trailer was also very cool - a man named Louis Mattar built it over seven years as a hobby with $75,000 of his own money, with no sponsors.

If anyone reading this visits San Diego any time soon, you should definitely check out that museum. The Mattar car was a lot of fun to see and read about.

We just got to LA, and we're staying with Lily's uncle Bob's brother Art. I'm going to work at one of the city's great restaurants while we're here. Then it's up north along the Pacific Coast Highway towards our next week-long stop, Monterey.

-Ben

Las Vegas - Bring Money

After two weeks visiting national parks in Utah, Lily and I were more than ready to return to civilization. We bypassed the Grand Canyon for a variety of reasons, mainly because we would have had to drive at least a few hundred miles to get there. We were ready to be back in a city - if that's what you want to call Las Vegas.

See, to me, Las Vegas is more of a giant adult-themed 24-hour amusement park than a city. It's lots of fun, but it's best when you have lots of money to blow. We were there for a few nights, and since we didn't have much disposable income (or any income at all), we spent just one day/night doing the fun things one generally does in Vegas. We had a lot of fun that night, and as a result, not so much fun the next morning. Still, we enjoyed our time there, and will be happy to return if/when we are floating in money.

Now we are in San Diego, enjoying the ocean. I still can't get over the fact that it's December, and we're wearing shorts and T-shirts. Today we biked along Mission Beach and had lunch on Ocean Beach. It's 70 degrees in December - I think I could live in a place like this.

Our camper, on the other hand, is becoming more and more of a pain in the ass to live in. The system of piping leading from our freshwater tank to the water pump decided to leak after thirty years. Today is the first day we've been able to enjoy ourselves - we've spent the past three days attempting to find a solution for a thirty year old system of water piping. I am happy to gloat that we did fix the problem, and are very proud of ourselves for figuring it out. I can guarantee you one thing: the next camper we own will not be older than we are.

-Ben