Welcome to Beautiful California

After our stop-over in L.A. we were really ready to get to the end of the trip and be moved into our own place. On Saturday, 7 June we left the L.A. area and headed west and north to our final destination in a place called Pismo Beach. The trip was just over 200 miles. It was not a hard drive.
This is sparse, rough country. These huge hills and small mountains push close up on the coast collect all the sea mist. They are covered in short, scrubby plants with brown and dark green colours. The ocean alternates from bright blue and grey. It’s beautiful county. Some of our favorite landscape yet. There are cow pastures and vineyards everywhere with giant jumbles of rounded rock sticking through. Wineries are only a stone’s throw apart. On top of all this wild land and rural use is a luxury vacation veneer. This is the place where the masses from L. A. and San Francisco come for vacation. Everything around here is a jumble of small-town America, world-class accommodations, colonial Spain, and utter wilderness.

The only challenge of the trip was actually getting into the apartment when we finally got there after 2405.2 miles. We knew that the property was a vacation rental condo. We assumed that there would be an office in one of the rooms of attached like most apartment complexes. Once we were here however, we found no such office. When Maya called to found out where the office was we it turned out it was a couple exits back down the highway. So we had to get back on the road and drive into the down town area of Pismo Beach to found this little house-converted-to-an-office where we could get our keys. This is all with the huge trailer still attached to the car! *Matt makes grumbling noises*

We did manage to get our keys and get moved in. Unfortunately, it’s a fully furnished place – furnished with stuff we don’t particularly like. For starters, there is no place to even put all our boxes because all the space is full of furniture and hideous (to our eyes) decorations. There are cheap kitchen utensils in all the drawers, mismatched towels in the Lenin closet, and sheets on the bed that are a little too worn for our tastes. Worst of all is that the predominate colour in the place is beige. The cabinets, sinks, table, chairs, wall paper and even the fridge are all beige. The floors in the kitchen and bathroom are marble tiles – as are the kitchen countertops. That is a nice feature, but they match the colour scheme of the rest of the condo with cream/white/brown swirls on the floor and black/grey/beige flecks on the counters! After hoping to get settled into our own place there is this oppressive feeling of still being squatters in someone else’s home. That is essentially what’s going on as someone owns this condo and has let the rental company use it. There’s even a greeting in a little frame on the counter from the real owners telling us they hope we enjoy our time here as much as they have over the years. After coming so far it’s hard to not yet feel at home. At least there is a lot of stuff in the area to do…

You See L.A.

On the fourth day of driving we set out from a hotel a little west of Phoenix headed for Maya’s grandparents’ house a little south of L.A. With only 350 miles to travel it was the shortest distance yet (we planned it that way). However, the day would end with navigating through a veritable thicket of highways and avoiding the millions and millions of other vehicles in the world’s 12th largest urban area - Los Angeles.

Gas in Arizona had been fairly cheap, at least compared to what we had been paying in Florida. The least we paid for gas on the whole trip ($3.65/gal) was in Tuscon, AZ. Apparently, we weren’t thinking about that when we got to the border with California. We decided to get into the last state of our trip before stopping for gas. In Blythe, CA we bought the most expensive gas of the trip - $4.59 a gallon. After we got back on the highway Maya noticed that she had a message. When she checked it, it was Grandpa calling to tell us to get gas in Arizona as the price really jumps once you cross into California. No joke! So remember to fill up before you get to California.

In California the speed limit is set at 55 MPH for all vehicles while towing. Since crossing into California from Arizona happens in the Colorado Desert, we thought this was just a desert thing – to cut down on the number of engines that overheat while pulling trailers up the Little San Bernardino Mountains when it’s over 100 outside. As it turns out, all of California limits trailers to 55 MPH. Not that we were really doing much over that in the first place, but after Matt had finally gotten used to the trailer (after 2000 miles), to be limited in any way chaffed a little bit. For those of you that are true Bugs Bunny aficionados we also passed through the Coachella Valley.

Proof of California’s Progressive Stance on
Conservation and Climate Change #2:
After coming through the Colorado Desert we passed through a gap in the mountains. There was a lot of wind coming through this gap. We had met a lot wind on the journey, especially in the plains of Texas, but this sea-breeze-pushing-into-the-desert wind was the most intense on the trip. It seems like a good a place for a wind farm. The Proof is that there was indeed a wind farm (or maybe more than one) filling the gap and moving up the hillsides. The total number of these things is hard to guess at, but we guessed there must have been a few thousand. They were all sizes, pointing in all directions, and literally everywhere. It was a pretty incredible sight.

We made it to and through the Los Angeles area without mishap. There weren’t even any slowdowns or anything.

We spent a week at Grandma and Grandpa’s. We slept on their hide-a-bed and were generally lazy. We didn’t have a lot of motivation to go out and do stuff because after our trip it was nice to not have to go anywhere. We did a little bit of shopping at a place called 99¢ Only Stores. Matt found a still-in-cellophane copy of Heavy Metal from 1983. That’s on VHS! He considers this an amazing find. Maya’s big find was her favorite lip-gloss. It’s called Save-Ex and she’s only ever found it at this store. Mostly however, we just visited with Maya’s family. We played lots of card games - mostly Hand and Foot. The house rules out here are to play with 36 decks simultaneously! There is a lot less shuffling during the game (but a lot more afterward) and you are almost guaranteed to get your seven cards for a canasta. However, you can’t pick up the pile (Maya, the ultimate pile-taker, dislikes that rule). There were other differences too, making altogether a very different game. Apparently, our coming shook up the routine because the boys usually lose to the girls. Of the 10-12 games we played while we were there they ladies only won once! Matt is good luck in California, it seems!

The only tourist thing we did was to go see The Huntington. We have seen the house and library before. This time we went just to see the gardens. Having just come through all those miles and miles of desert, we found ourselves most attracted to the Desert Garden. It’s amazing! They have every kind of yucca you can imagine accept for joshua trees – they don’t have those. They do have golden barrel cactus and a tonne of different aloe plants in various shaped and sizes. The botanical collections include other themed gardens such as the Japanese, Chinese, Australian, Rose, Palm, Jungle and Shakespeare gardens. A neat place!
Lastly, a note about Asher. He loved Los Angeles. Grandma and Grandpa’s yard has this real thick, short, spongy grass. We have no idea if this is typical grass for southern California, but Asher loved to run on it, dig at it and eat it. After so many days in the car he seemed quite happy to be left alone in his cage or let out on his leash in the yard. It seems all of us are going to like California.

Words for the Desert

There are no words to describe the desert. To see it is an amazing experience. One just looks and marvels.
We drove 690 miles across desert, along the border with Mexico, over mountains, through the most biologically diverse part of North America, past countless yucca plants, and into the sunset. It was the best day of the trip.



[Please note that most of the images in this post were not taken by us but were collected from the internets to illustrate our trip.]

Don't Mess With Texas

Texas is big. They say everything is bigger in Texas. Now that we have been there, we can say this is because the state itself is huge! The first exit number when you cross into the state from Louisiana is 880! On the second day of our trip we were in Louisiana for about 20 miles and then in Texas for the rest of the day. We drove 640 miles in total. For those of you who have made the trip, that’s the same distance from Louisville to Tallahassee – almost all of it in one big state.

About 250 miles into Texas we stopped between Houston and San Antonio at a rest area somewhat close to the city of Gonzales. We stopped mostly for Asher. He got to get out of his carrier and run about. He really seemed to enjoy himself – more than usual. He bounded off the grass and into the brush. He scratched at the leaves and the dry soil with unusual vigor and he was really determined to secret himself down in the weeds and debris. There was a sign warning about the “Native Texas Landscape.” This was next to cactus and was likely supposed to be funny. But cacti turned out not to be the only dangers; when we pulled Asher put of the weeds he was covered in burrs!

Inside the rest area’s main building there was a bit of palisade wall, a model of a fort, and some informational displays. Above the “fort” a highly starched flag was “flying.” It depicted a cannon, a star and the words “come and take it.” As it turns out, there is an interesting nugget of history about this flag. Long before it was the Lone Star State, Texas was Tejas – a part of the Mexican state Coahuila y Tejas. Long-standing tensions existed between the “Texians” (American settlers in Mexico) and the Mexican government. Chief among these tensions was the failure of the Texians to obey Mexican law by freeing their slaves and converting to Catholicism. These tensions reached a new level in 1835 when the Mexican president, (no joke) Antonio de Padua María Severino López de Santa Anna y Pérez de Lebrón dissolved the federalist (favoring individual state’s rights) Constitution of 1824 and declared a more centralized government. Several Mexican states rebelled, including Tejas. The Texians had been given a small, bronze, Spanish-made cannon by the Mexican government some years earlier when relations were better. In late September of 1835 the Mexicans sent a small military detachment to recover the cannon from the noisome settlers. When the Mexican force arrived at a ford of the Guadalupe River near Gonzales they found the river too high to cross and the cannon in possession of a Taxian militia flying a flag announcing their defiant sentiment: “come and take it.”

A bit of a stand-off occurred over the next few days with the Mexican army eventually moving off to look for another ford. On the morning of 2 October, the Texian militia, having crossed the river the previous night, attacked and repulsed the Mexican troops. While the battle resulted in only one (Mexican) casualty, Stephen Austin’s prediction that only war could secure Texan freedom seemed confirmed. In this way the Battle of Gonzales served as “the Lexington of Texas,” when the shooting really started. In March 1836 the Republic of Texas formally declared its independence (joining the U.S. was something of an afterthought). Attention then turned to a group of resisters holed-up in an isolated mission called Alamo…

Back in 2008 and near the Alamo, in San Antonio, and also in Houston (where Texas won its war for independence) we hit major traffic slow-downs. Complete-stop-on-the-highway type slowdowns. And this is on the by-passes! There were other slow-downs too in seemingly random places throughout the state. They never lasted too long and there was never any obvious reason for them but they really cut into our speed. It’s not exactly easy to get a trailer up to any kind of respectable speed in stop-and-go traffic. This was not the furthest we drove in any one day, but it took the most time because of the terrible, terrible traffic. Good thing once you are past San Antonio, there is almost nothing. We made good time after that, rushing on through the desert night. Matt couldn’t look, as he was driving, but Maya saw an endless expanse of stars in the dark sky. Out there “the Lone Star State” seems a gross misnomer.

The Truth About Armadillos

Greetings! We have arrived at our destination and now that the apartment is mostly set up, the computer is unpacked, and we are back on-line we will commence to tell the tales of our harrowing experience…

We left Tallahassee behind (most likely forever) on 29 May, exactly 3 months after we first arrived. That first day we traveled about 540 and drove through parts of 4 states. We crossed the tiny little panhandles of Alabama and Mississippi that give them both coastlines. We skirted New Orleans by taking I-12 and crossed the Mississippi River at Red Stick, popularly known by its French name, Baton Rouge. Unfortunately, we did not take special note of the fact we had crossed into The West at the time because it was dark and we didn’t even realize we had crossed the river until later.

And now the shocking truth about armadillos: there are no living armadillos. They only exist as dead specimens placed by the side of the road and nightly re-arranged by persons unknown. This stunning theory is based on our observations that in all of forests of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana that we passed through, we did not see any living armadillos. We saw only bodies by the side of the road. There were a lot of these apparently road-killed animals. A suspiciously high number! We had made the same curious observation while living in Tallahassee. We saw a dead armadillo almost every day and yet never saw a living one. Discovering that the same is true across the southeast the shadowy image of a great ecological lie begins to take shape. The “nail in the coffin” for us was that we remembered going to the Tallahassee Museum. They were supposed to have all of Florida’s large fauna on display. They did have an armadillo – but only a stuffed one! So, be warned! Do not be fooled by the so-called experts! Do not be taken in by the conspiracy! Do not believe in armadillos!