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 […]
Contemporary Tiny House
I bought this house kit because of that contemporary-style rock garden at the foot of the steps. I’ve worked on Japanese houses with tall trees in the courtyards, but never a tree inside the house. There’s no roof to this kit, but I’m imagining a tall ceiling for the entire the left half of the […]
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 […]
Shana & Marcus Make a Day into a Gift at Del Mar Fairgrounds
We are steadfast boondocking enthusiasts, but on occasion we find ourselves enjoying time in oddly amazing (campground) situations. We decided to give the fairgrounds in Del Mar, CA, a try. Known as the place where the surf meets the turf, it played host to the world-famous Sea Biscuit back when he began his historic run […]
“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 […]
