Today I finally caught up with the wildflowers! I decamped from Oak Grove and headed for Anza Borrego State Park. The high valley (3,500′) around Warner Springs was covered in little yellow flowers. That turned out to be the most dramatic display of the day. I breakfasted at the Warner Springs golf course, another little culture shock, suddenly a room full of self-satisfied golfer dudes :)
Then a 2,600′ drop, from 3,500′ at Pina to 900′ at Borrego Springs. The campground was full and there were people everywhere photographing the flowers and cacti. I hung for a while then drove to Blair Valley which was alleged to have good flowers. It did not really, but it was green and pretty and I spent a very enjoyable hour there.
Martha and I are to meet at Champagne Lakes RV Resort in the hills outside Escondido. It looked good on the web as a place to meet up for our first night before heading to the beach. It was pretty funky, but comfortable enough once we got my electricity straightened out. Martha showed up about dark, and woo hoo – happy family time!
Wednesday
Our little gravel spot along the sorry little creek between the shabby little duck ponds served it’s purpose quite nicely for a first night’s meeting before heading into the hurly burly of San Diego. I’ve zoomed along I-15 a hundred times, but I’d never ventured into any of the steep canyons to the east, and it turns out they are quite charming. Even better, the road to get there is Old 395! 395 is of course the north-south artery east of the Sierras through Reno, so it’s cool to think that back in the day I could’ve trundled all the way from Reno to here on it.
We ate in a nice cafe in Vista, which has a very inviting downtown sidewalk cafe scene. We can’t check into our expensive campsite till pm, so we split, Martha and Tyler go to the beach and I go to the Encinitas Public Library, where I web-surf with an ocean view!
Our $50 site at San Elijo State Park is really nice, right on the bluffs. The weather is less nice, 60’s and blowing, foggy wind. But we are at the beach! Carlton and family come over for an evening fire and hanging out.
Thursday
Martha wants to change venues, to a campground on Mission Bay. I am not a particular fan of this, but we are all happier when she’s happy, and as it turns out it was a great call! We split up for the morning. They go to the beach, and I go to Yogi’s Sports Bar for breakfast and to watch Louisville’s first round game (NCAA playoffs!). To my stupefaction and disappointment, #4 seed Louisville loses to #13 seed Morehead State. ridiculous, nearly unprecedented. But on the upside, I don’t have to worry about the tournament anymore. The one and only team I care about is gone, which will free up my time over the next couple of weeks considerably.
Martha’s campground – Campland By the Bay – turns out to be perfect for us! Our “campsite” is just a parking place in one of the parking lots, but it’s right next to the bay and to a lovely grass field, and to the little restaurant. Tyler had a great time, so Martha had a great time, and I had a pretty good time. We pretty much fell in love with Campland.
Friday
San Diego day. Coffee at a nice little muffin shop in PB (as the locals call Pacific Beach), M and T hit the beach and I wifi’ed, making both of us happy. We tried to cruise some touristy spots in Balboa Park, but San Diego traffic made the adventure way less fun than I’d hoped. We punted and grabbed lunch at our old favorite Point Loma Seafoods, then spent the rest of the afternoon back at good ole Campland.
Saturday
Leaving day. I was finally able to spend some quality time with my friend Elton, he and roomie Isabel met us for breakfast at the Campland restaurant, then Martha and I left in our separate cars to make our separate ways north to our separate homes. I thought I was going to take three days to get home, but the weather is turning bad so I’m a lot less sure of that.
In either the two day or the three day plan I want make it to Lone Pine tonight, since there’s really nothing but inhospitable Mohave desert south of there, so I just book it up I-15 to 395, stopping for a lovely little nap somewhere in that wasteland.
The weather is getting genuinely crappy, snow level is down to 4-5,000′, which is bad news since 395 north of Bishop is above 7,000, for about 40 miles. I get to Lone Pine with about an hour of daylight left, so I decide to press on to Bishop, to the free BLM campground at Horton Creek.
The campground was closed for the winter – duh. But it is deserted up there so I just found a level spot on the turnaround before the gate and set up there. It’s basically dark anyway.
Sunday
Dealin’ with the weather and gettin’ home day. The world looked quite magical when I got up. It turns out that I parked almost exactly at the snow line. Uphill, all was white, and getting whiter all the time. Downhill, the snow started fading quickly, and 200 yds down the gravel road there is no snow, it’s raining down there. The sagebrush and mesquite outside my van is quite photogenic, loaded down with a couple of inches of fresh, wet snow, and the panorama across the valley is stunning – the top half is winter wonderland, but the bottom half is just a wet, cold spring day, and there is a straight horizontal line separating the two all across my 40 mile panorama. I can simply coast the 200 yards downhill to escape the snow, so no worries here. Later, on the road in the passes, I’ve still got plenty of worries.
I harden a couple of arteries with a gutbuster breakfast at Jack’s in Bishop where I get down to seriously planning my day. There are chain controls about 30 miles north of here on 395, and the dude in the parking lot with six inches of snow on his SUV says it’s pretty bad. I remember that US 6 starts here and heads east, through Benton CA towards Tonopah, to hook up with 95 north through Hawthorne and Fernley.
Google says that route is about 80 miles longer, but it’s much lower altitude and there’s no snow alerts, so I decide to do that. There are, it turns out high wind alerts. At the little down of Benton I get a scare. The rain has turned into fat heavy snowflakes that are starting to make about an inch of slush on the road, and I have about another 800′ of elevation to get to the pass ahead. But then the fact that I am heading more or less due east into the central Nevada desert comes to my aid, and the snow stops before the summit!
The rest of the drive is easy, except for a little two-fisted driving around Hawthorne and Walker Lake. Hawthorne, with that giant Munitions testing area is an odd place. At the end of the day, driving west down 80 back into Reno I rejoin the rain. If I had gone 395 I probably wouldn’t have made it home tonight.
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