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 […]
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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 […]
We Are All Caricatures of Ourselves
When we were in Texas, I mentioned this quote (by my sister’s friend), referring to Texans. The sentence in full—that I love so much—goes, “Texans are caricatures of themselves and they don’t even know it.” It turns out you can find people and places that exemplify caricatures all over the country. Texas is just an […]
“Where the Kelp Meets the Sycamore Tree”
This exactly describes where we’re camped at our first California State Park campground by the ocean: Leo Carrillo State Park, directly west of LA at the foot of the Santa Monica Mountains. We walk under the bridge with this mural (imagine dolphins jumping up to meet bald eagles, all painted by children) to get to […]
In Search of the Bloom
For a week, we’re boondocking on BLM land at the Carrizo Plain National Monument, the largest native grassland in California. Before I get to why we’re here, I’ll give you a rundown of how we got here, because my friend Susan told me that people don’t understand that this, too, is part of our lifestyle. […]
Lola’s La Jolla
This is Lola. Lola is a good friend. When we were first camping near her part-time home of San Diego, the only spot we could find was in Laguna Mountains, where she drove up to camp in a tent beside the trailer in the cold to visit us. Lola loves La Jolla. Now that we’re […]
Sweetwater Summit
It’s a chilly, drizzly day on top of Sweetwater Summit at its regional park campground—in the town of Chula Vista, directly east of San Diego. But no matter: we have full hookups, which means we can run the heat pump on city electricity (saving our propane for nights in the tent), and I’ve been gleefully […]
