Unsurprisingly (in retrospect only mind you), things improved quickly in Santa Barbara.  The middle motorhome in our tightly packed group of three departed, giving us a little breathing space.  We remembered that not having electrical or water hookups wasn’t such a big deal, particularly when the weather’s nice.  And did I mention we were right on the beach?!  Sand between the toes works wonders.  For what, you ask?  Yes, I answer.

Incidentally, we’ve learned that our limiting factor with dry camping (again, this assumes mild weather – if it were hot enough to require the a/c not to be miserable, it would be a different story) is tank levels.  Specifically our grey and black water tanks.  We’re able to be conscientious with both as technically we’re never really required to go to the bathroom inside, and we could wash dishes in a communal sink and/or use paper plates.  But in practice it just isn’t nice to tell a dancing, cross-legged Woodsprite that she has to grab the flashlight and hike out to the public pit toilet to poop.  So four or five days seems to be our dry camping limit before we have to find a place to dump the tanks & reset.  That also seems to be the point at which we get tired of firing up the generator in the morning and evening to charge everything that needs charged & re-juice the coach battery.  Fortunately our refrigerator runs on either electric power or propane, so our food stays cold & fresh regardless.  Very good to learn these things from experience.

Back to Carpinteria Beach though – we adapted quickly to an on-the-beach lifestyle.  Morning and evening walks down the coast, homeschool tasks completed in the Clam on the sand behind the RV, frequent dips in the water…

Carpinteria is known as a safe, family-oriented beach due to the long and shallow wave-breaking zone.  Though there is a surf spot there known as “Tar Pits” due to the formation of hardened, prehistoric tar on and just in from the beach about a half mile to the East of where we were, the waves never topped about two feet or so, which translated to chest high at most while wading.  My plans for surf lessons would need to wait.

On the other hand, Keeper turned his own corner there in a way that made my heart swell.  I previously mentioned his aversion to, or at least hesitation about body boarding due to prior forehead-grinding-in-sand experiences and his perception that he was seconds from a tragic drowning death.  I had tried to help him overcome that by going out into the water with him a few times, to no avail.   What ended up doing it for him was a girl (yes!).  OK, not entirely true, it was a girl and her brother, both of whom were near him in age.  Keeper and I had done a little pitch dark night swim the evening before, which had its own cool adventure aspect to it, and on the way back to the site we came across the two of them and a few other kids heading out to the beach.  Surprised to see us soaking wet, they asked about sharks.  I hadn’t seen them well enough in the dark to recognize them the next day, but evidently they recognized us.  I guess my answer that there were only a few dozen sharks around and the fact that we were wet while they were bundled against the chill made us memorable.  Or something.  At any rate, she and her brother had said hello to us the following day, and had been out riding the small waves for quite some time when Keeper suddenly grabbed the Boogie Board and said he was heading out there.  I throttled my excitement, but watched closely.  Turns out having kids your age, one of them of the opposite sex, body boarding with you is a much better motivator to learn than is having your annoying Dad telling you how you’re doing it wrong.

He was out in the waves for at least an hour, and by no more than halfway through he was catching waves easily and confidently.  His quote later will stick with me, both for its exuberance and for its confidence, which doesn’t always rear its head when Keeper’s trying new things.  He had expressed his intention to head out and catch a few more waves before sunset and I mentioned that they had gotten a little bigger with high tide and were breaking a bit steeper and closer to shore, making wipeouts a bit more likely.  His response, while tearing away from me toward the water, board in hand:  “I’m not wiping out, I’m going to catch them and I’m going to look AWESOME!”

Firebolt settled into a different groove in Carpinteria, though no less confident.  What she appears to have realized is that she’s not a swim-in-the-ocean girl.  It’s not entirely clear what she objects to, but tough to remove sand is at least a partial culprit.  No amount of cajoling gets her into the waves with us, but what I love is how calmly she rejects our pleadings.  She appears more 30-something than 8 when she patiently listens to all of us badgering her childishly, then replies “no thank you, I’d rather sit here and read.”  And read she does.  She is tearing through books and can’t get enough of them.  In fact, one of her more memorable recent quotes to me was: “Dad, I don’t think I want to be President anymore.” [This has been a previously stated goal]  “Oh yeah?  Why not?”  “Well, I really like to read and I don’t think Presidents read much.”

Go ahead, unpack THAT one.

I did explain to her that I think the best presidents do a ton of reading, which got her thinking about Abe Lincoln, so maybe her political career isn’t tanked just yet.

Woodsprite has found her bliss in the shallow area where the waves have already broken and are making haphazard patterns over the sand.  I showed her how to find sand crabs by looking for their antennae on a retreating wave and she often asks me to dig a few up so that she can check them out, but she hasn’t yet decided that digging them out for herself is a good idea.  She’s a fairly recent swimmer, so I won’t take her out in the actual waves unless she’s wearing a life vest.

She expressed an interest in “surfing” based, I think, on a kids’ book in which a singing cat goes to the beach and spends some time surfing double overhead waves (and still manages to stay dry!).  I took her with the boogie board into the whitewash area, which was only about ankle-shin deep.  On her first attempt — and by “attempt” I mean that I put her on the board and then pushed her when the remains of the wave swept through so that she could ride the whitewash the few yards into the shore — she rode it for a few feet but couldn’t quite stay balanced on it, then fell off onto the sand, only to have the water and sand continue to wash over her and the boogie board leash wrap around her neck as the board continued on without her.  It was far more gentle than it sounds, but hilarity did not ensue, and though she may pull a Keeper and turn the corner with board sports, it’s safe to say she’ll be sticking with chasing already-broken waves on foot for at least the near future.  She still loves that.

Keeper pulled another coming-of-age stunt by searching for and finding a place to hang the hammock inside a small clearing at the top of the dunes just outside the campsite, and then insisting he’d like to sleep there under the stars.  I let him know that he was essentially on the entire campground’s path to the beach, or at least right next to it, and in response he assured me that he’d have his knife, again.  Ah good, at least you can shiv the teenagers trying to sneak out in the dark.

He spent the entire night out again, and told us in the morning that he’d been semi-confronted by a group of what he assumed were kids at some point after we had fallen asleep.  He said that he heard the group approach, then get quieter and start whispering once they spotted him.  They didn’t seem to be moving and may have been doing some scheming, so he summoned up his deepest Peter Brady voice and boomed “Can I Help You??”  Satisfyingly, they scattered immediately.  He didn’t even have to pull out the pocket-knife.

On the second to last day, we opted to take advantage of the cheap Six Flags passes we had bought back in Maryland.  We had a Six Flags park (plus waterpark) right down the road from us there, and found that the season passes, if purchased ahead of time, cost about the same as a day in the park.  The park there isn’t much, but it’s almost never crowded, and a couple hours in the water park with the kids is a perfect antidote to the sticky Maryland summer.  At any rate, the passes entitle us to admission at any Six Flags park, and Magic Mountain just north of LA is pretty much their flagship.  My understanding is it’s the only park with more roller coasters than Cedar Point, so we felt like we had to make the comparison.  Plus it, like many things I’m exposing my family to in Southern California, figured heavily into my childhood.  Disneyland was for good clean fun, but Magic Mountain was where you went to get your mind scrambled.

Despite all the amusement park visits (we have Disneyland still on the docket), we’re still not really amusement park folk.  But Magic Mountain on an off day was worth the drive.  And free!  No lines, and at least double the roller coasters from back in the day.  We couldn’t even ride them all due to time, but that was fine – my head can only take so many and the girls were height-limited out of most of them.  Minds suitably scrambled, we drove back to Carpinteria at sunset to enjoy the beach once more that day.

Overall, I loved Carpinteria.  Despite the rough start, it turned into almost exactly the beach-front beginning to our Southern California stint that I was hoping for.  We hiked on the beach, I biked up and down the coast on the trails, we set up The Clam on the sand and spent the days in and out of the water and lolling on our beach towels.  As a bonus, we spent a little time in Santa Barbara proper and I was able to arrange a meet-up with an old college (and high school!) friend who is now a city councilman in SB and is living the good life there with his wife.  We had some wine and snacks and conversation on the crest of the dunes just after sunset while the kiddos played back in Davista.  Soooo Santa Barbara.

I’m pretty sure that the old joke about “watch this” holding the top spot among famous last words isn’t limited to aviation circles.  Not that I actually said “watch this” when pulling into our spot in Carpinteria, but I was kinda thinking it.

First a quick catch-up – we drove from Pismo down to Carpinteria via the faux-Danish town of Solvang, where we had a lunch-and-stroll session, and narrowly managed to avoid eating the featured-on-every-corner æbleskivers, reasoning that they were a ball of sugared, cooked dough with jam on them, and probably would taste exactly like the description sounds.  Generally we’re unable to avoid such things, so I was proud of us.  Being full from lunch helped.

Solvang was another place I remembered from my distant youth, and it’s grown up into a mini-wine country town along with Los Olivos and a couple other towns in the Santa Ynez valley.  Sideways helped the rest of the country discover what many Southern Californians already knew about the area, and they play it, if not to the hilt, then at least halfway down the blade with various Sideways themed tours and the like.  It’s a nice place to explore, and the weather was perfect as I assume it often is.

Here’s Woodsprite in a large artificial clog.

We arrived in Carpinteria fairly late in the afternoon, probably more like early evening due to some dead-stop traffic through Santa Barbara.  It wasn’t dark yet, but was getting there.  I was on top of the world.  I’ve previously mentioned my feeling that I’d scored a coup by nabbing a beach-front spot for the week at Carpinteria.  More than that though, I had a sense that we had this thing – this whole uprooting the family and seeing the country via RV Thing – wired.  Driving had become much easier, we’d conquered (?) Highway 1 and multiple national parks, we could set up and break down quickly, we weren’t making mistakes (again, ?)…  “I’ve got this” was my overarching mood.

We pulled into Carpinteria State Beach and saw our spot, and though I wouldn’t say it dampened my mood, I would say it was not as expected.  Beach-front yes, though a small row of dunes prevented us from actually seeing water.  No hook-ups, but I knew that already.  What surprised me, though, was how tight it was.  Our beach-front spot was actually three spots right next to each other, and we would be sharing it with two other motorhomes.  And by sharing it I mean “turn sideways to walk between them.”  Furthermore, maneuvering into the spot didn’t appear to be a simple matter, as there were two more motorhomes right across the narrow street from ours.

Not to worry though, I’ve Got This.

I started my maneuvering with our neighbors looking on, though trying not to be too obvious about it.  Tacco was outside, positioning herself in the spot in order to tell me when to stop.  I have 4 mirrors and two cameras all looking at something slightly different behind me, and I’ve gotten pretty skilled at coordinating their use in order to shoehorn us into tight spots in reverse.  “Watch this.”

As I delicately positioned Davista for a perfect slide into position, I made what is truly a rookie mistake, one that I’ve made when backing a boat under tow as well – when backing up and paying close attention to what’s behind you, don’t forget about the front!  I’d been sliding underneath a tree with low hanging branches in order to get where I needed to be and not thinking much of that, when suddenly I simultaneously heard both a “STOP!” from Tacco and a sickening crunch from above.  The neighbors averted their eyes and pretended they hadn’t noticed us.  Never a good sign.  That tree wasn’t as friendly as I’d imagined, and among the thin, low-hanging branches were fully grown limbs, one of which had done battle with our fiberglass roof and won.  I knew immediately what had just happened, and my adrenaline surged, but not in the good way.

I was able to back straight out of the bad position without damaging us further, but I knew we had a problem.  I did manage to keep it together enough to get us into the spot without further damage, but not before realizing that we were far better off pulling forward into the spot than backing in anyway.  In my euphoria I hadn’t even stopped to think about it.

Upon climbing onto the roof, I was treated to the view of about a 4” by 16” jagged hole in the fiberglass, complete with bits of wood and leaf clinging to the edges.  Right on the corner of the roof too.  We were lucky in that it didn’t penetrate all the way into the inside, but it would clearly need to be covered to keep out any water.  Duct tape to the rescue!

Here’s our spot, in the far more friendly morning light.  I wish I had a picture of the hole, but then again maybe I don’t.

After settling down and re-caging my humility gyros I realized that we don’t have this even CLOSE to wired.  We’re uprooting our entire house a few times per week, and there are countless moving parts, all of which are subject to break or be banged up due to poor judgment or bad luck.  On top of that, most of them are of the “must be repaired now” variety, and could go so far as to bring us to a dead stop somewhere very inconvenient.  There’s no room for cockiness.

Again we were fortunate, in that the duct tape seems to have sealed it well and it appears we have no more than a fiberglass repair on tap (with no immediate urgency – no rain in the forecast!).  But it wasn’t an auspicious beginning to the Carpinteria beach dream stay I’d been so looking forward to.  On the other hand, I probably needed the attitude adjustment.

In the Navy, this is the type of incident that earns you a new callsign, and frankly I’d be happy to ditch “Flight” for something more creative, but Cap’n Crunch or Limbs or Doofus don’t excite me much.  I won’t encourage a change.

It was tricky to cut the cord that staying at my parents’ house had become.  Creature comforts, a non-public bathroom, my parents…  On the flip side, though, I had pictured the next phase of our trip, the Southern California Beach phase, ever since we started planning, even when the trip was still theoretical.  My thinking went something like this:  When would be the absolute best time to beach hop down the California coast?  October, definitely.  Where should we stay?  Enough places to get a good feel of the West Coast’s variety, but with some places at which we can get in the water, particularly near the end of that stretch.  A surfing lesson was high on the list of priorities, as somehow I had managed a Southern California beach-heavy childhood and adolescence without ever getting up on a surfboard, or even trying.  A travesty I fully intended to remedy.  I had been looking forward to all of this, and to introducing it all to my family.

Pismo Beach, on the Central Coast, is not a particularly good place to surf, I think, but it was a multiple-visit childhood camping spot at which my last visit was probably age 13 or 14.  It’s a pretty unique place in that there is a huge field of sand dunes on which people ride ATVs and dune buggies.  What’s more, it’s one of the few (possibly the only?) California beach(es) on which you’re allowed to drive your car and camp right on the sand.

My memories of early camping trips are hazy due to their temporal distance, but the one that stands out most was when we took my Dad’s parents along with us.  My sense of it is that, like much else back then, Pismo had much more of a “Wild West” feel, with the corresponding lack of oversight.  I’m speculating here, but it was the late ‘70s / early ‘80s — these were the days when people drove around town with 3 people in a 2-person convertible, seatbelt-less, smoking, and with an open beer, and if you passed a cop they’d wag their finger at you while smiling.  Or so I’m told.  I imagine there were likely some controlled substances mixing with the all-day-all-night dune buggying.  And here I should be perfectly clear — I’m not talking about my parents’ activities.  All we did was camp on the beach and do some hiking and clamming.  We didn’t even have a dune buggy.  We were the outliers though — everyone else, it seemed, was there to hit the dunes.  Anyway, my grandfather wasn’t particularly hip to the constant buzz of the engines and the occasional sweep of the headlights across our heavy canvas tent’s walls.  “Oh, this is great. Yup, this is just great.  Fantastic.  Love this.  Oh hey, THAT one was close.  Wow.  Great.  Yup” and variations on that theme went on until I drifted off to sleep and likely for hours thereafter.

As well as the dunes, there are the large and tasty “Pismo clams” which can only be found there, and a decent little town to explore as well.  I had been looking forward to getting back.

My assumption was that there were no motorhomes allowed on the sand.  Not that it mattered, as there was zero chance I would be taking Davista out there.  So we booked at an RV park further to the north, with access to the beach.  It ended up being quite… I was going to say “commercial,” but that’s not exactly what I’m looking for.  “KOA-esque” is closer.  I guess what’s happening is with a bit of RV-ing experience under my belt now, I’m starting to mentally group RV campgrounds into 4 types:

Type 1 – Primitive and pretty.  This is what you tend to find at National Parks.  No hookups (i.e. electrical, water, sewer) and not really designed for RVs, but they tolerate your presence and have a few sites that can accommodate your length.  They’re going for max scenic beauty and peace and quiet.  You’re a hindrance to that, but they’ll let you in anyway.  They’re popular, because National Parks.

Type 2 – Also pretty and government-run, but RV-friendly.  This seems to be more the State Park model.  Sometimes city or county park.  Full hookups, large and level parking spots, picnic table and fire ring, and lots of space.  Your neighbors aren’t right next to you looking into your window through theirs.  I really like these.

Type 3 – Commercial “Kampground”.  These are the KOAs and many of the private RV parks.  Generally they’re not big because they had to buy their land, so they pack you in tightly, but they try to make up for that with creature comforts like cable TV, wifi, a game room, a general store, etc.  They also often try to create a party-ish atmosphere it seems.  These are the most expensive.

Lastly, the Type 4s – the No Go.  Basically a Type 3 that isn’t trying.  They give you a parking lot with the bare minimum of space, a power hookup and some allegedly clean water, ask for your money, then turn a blind eye to whatever happens next.  These are sketchy and easily recognizable (and avoided).

There are outliers and hybrids among all these groups of course, but hey, stereotypes can be useful.

So our campground in Pismo was firmly a Type 3.  The kids loved it.  Go figure, I guess they value the creature comforts more than the space and the scenery.

I forgot to mention the drive.  Here it is:

Not terribly scenic, and a shame to miss out on Highway 1 and Big Sur to our west, but we did get a chance to talk about El Camino Real and the California missions from back in its Spanish colonial days.  Firebolt was the only one who took much interest in that discussion, so I pointed out the El Camino Real road markers with the hanging bell,   and she now says “coooollll” whenever I point out another to her.

The access to the beach I mentioned turned out to be an asterisked access.  There was a small set of dunes between our RV park and the beach so we couldn’t actually see the water, but at the access gates to the dunes were long-winded signs explaining that the RV park’s management had no control over the flow of Pismo Creek, and we know you used to be able to walk right to the ocean, but with shifting tidal flats and geology and erosion blah blah yadda yadda bottom line: you have to walk a half mile either way or cross this stagnant body of water of indeterminate depth in order to reach the beach you’re looking at right in front of you.

Good thing we brought kayaks!

So we ended up with our own semi-private beach after we inflated our flotilla and ferried our beach gear across the creek delta (which ended up being entirely wade-able, as long as you didn’t worry about what you might be stepping on).  A squadron of pelicans doing their thing entertained us nearby, there was great kite flying, and the beachcombing was entirely decent as well, though the water was still a bit cold for full-immersion swimming.

Despite our having just left their house, my parents met us there on the first night, having just driven down to Malibu to catch my nephew’s water polo match.  This was the first time we shared our new “home” with anyone else, which was its own entertainment, both for us and for the kids.  They declined our offer to make beds out of the dining room table and couch and opted to sleep in the back of their 4Runner instead, which I did feel a little bad about.  Had there been more room I’d have set up a tent and slept out & offered up the bedroom (or at least offered them the tent and sleeping pads), but this wasn’t that kind of campground.  They did ok though; they’re troopers.  We even managed to stay up late and watch the football game on our outside TV while bundled against the cold, which was more fun than it sounds.  I guess I’m more thankful for those creature comforts than I let on.

Pismo was a short stay by design (only 2 nights), but I discovered on the second day that my Dad had been not-so-secretly looking forward to driving on the beach again even more than I had.  So we made plans to drive their 4Runner and our Outback down to the dunes to “check it out.”  We didn’t really define what that meant, and it became clear pretty quickly that this was our (i.e. my dad and I) thing, so our lady-folk sorta stepped aside and went along with it.  They brought some beach gear and games and probably a snack or two, but otherwise just enjoyed the show.  Somewhere deep in my lizard brain I had a notion that maybe we’d rent a dune buggy or a couple ATVs for a bit, but I don’t think I ever voiced that ahead of time.  I just wanted to go play.

So off we went in our cars, through the state park’s gate and onto the sand, with nothing but a cheerful “You’re 4 wheel drive, right?” from the ranger at the booth.  “Of course!”

Almost immediately I questioned our wisdom.  It took about a minute.  I’m sure Tacco had been questioning it all morning.

What I remembered from the Pismo of my youth was a long, flat, stretch of fairly hard sand.  I was far too young to drive, but I do remember that it looked quite easy to drive on.  I also remember the smattering of tents inland from where you drive, and the dunes further inland from that.  What I saw was entirely different.  It was soft sand – VERY soft and somewhat deep sand, with the waves washing both themselves and random blobs of seaweed right onto the area in which we’d be driving.  There was nothing hard or flat about it, and we had to maintain quite a bit of momentum just to keep moving.  We did ok initially, but it was a rough ride and required significant maneuvering to avoid some of the bigger hills of sand and piles of seaweed, not to mention the people who insisted on walking on this same beach, as if it were, like, a beach (c’mon, can’t ya see I’m driving here?!).  Maneuvering while maintaining momentum is a tricky dance on sand.  It’s also disconcerting to have sandy saltwater from the remains of a wave that just broke come splashing onto your windshield.  It seemed prudent to drive near the water’s edge as the sand only got deeper and softer as you got further inland, but I couldn’t help but imagine the tide rising to swamp our car once we inevitably got stuck.  “Why do they allow this?!?”

And where were the dunes?  And the tents?  I quickly assumed they were further south, but after about a mile of swerving uncomfortably down the beach I still couldn’t see them, and began picturing not only having to turn around and drive back across that same stretch, but imagining how far I’d have to be towed once I dug into a patch of sand from which I couldn’t extricate us.  I wish I had more pictures of this, but we were all quite busy.  Here’s the one I have of us from my mother in the car behind us, no doubt listening to my dad imploring me not to slow down.

Alas, to no avail.  My nagging doubts eventually overcame our momentum, and I pulled over away from the ocean to stop and figure out what on Earth we were doing.  Mistake.  Stuck.  Of course.

I went back to talk to my Dad, who had been having a much easier (but not easy) time in his 4Runner, and learned that this stretch of beach was indeed not the dune / camping stretch, but also that there was another beach access point just about a half mile ahead, so even if we hadn’t wanted to continue past it into the actual camping area, if I had pressed on we would have been able to drive back off the beach there.

What I also quickly learned, and is probably obvious by now to any observant reader, is that we were in no danger of being swamped by the high tide, we were driving on Pismo Beach right at high tide, which is precisely the wrong time to drive on Pismo Beach.  An hour later or an hour earlier and we’d have been just fine, happily trucking down the previously alluded to stretch of hard, flat sand.

After some scenario gaming, we opted to try to push the Outback forward enough with the 4Runner’s front bumper to allow it to get moving on its own again, and then make it to the next access point, where we’d drive back off the beach and proceed to Plan B.  My clutch’s nasty burning smell informed me in no uncertain terms that it didn’t like what we were doing, but ultimately our scheme worked and we made it to the dunes/camping access point only to find a sizable audience of locals with lawn chairs set up, watching the spectacle of Pismo tourists and sand-driving noobs attempting to drive themselves off the beach at high tide and cheering the several who got stuck.  I guess that’s a Thing there.

Suffice it to say we never made it to the dunes, but we did spend quite an enjoyable afternoon set up with our towels, a picnic table, and some tasty local seafood, complete with clams, at show center for the parade of surprisingly large RVs shimmying through the sand and muck.  Evidently they allow them on the sand after all!  There is also clearly a booming tow-truck (and tractor) industry in Pismo, too, and the armada of flashy tow vehicles headed out to rescue hapless RVers received a fair share of the applause, hoots, and hollers as well.

Overall, despite the missteps, Pismo was a great success, at least as assessed by the kiddos.  They had a blast.  And often that translates to a parental blast as well, we’re finding.

Tomorrow we leave for Carpinteria State Beach just south of Santa Barbara, where I managed to snag a reservation at one of the few no-kidding beachfront sites for four nights.  I feel its pull.

Tacco covered the whole “Bay Area” thing already.  What she didn’t cover, and may not even know, is that it goes deeper.  Having grown up the LA area, I was used to considering my home the absolute center of the universe (which is pretty typical I would think) and assuming that everybody else agreed with this (which may be a little more LA-centric).  LA is interesting that way – Tacco was dead on about the whole “back East” concept, but understated just how dismissive we were about “back East.”  It wasn’t a compliment to talk about things that were “back East”; it wasn’t even neutral.  What’s more, the stereotypical LA mindset of my youth, and maybe even today, goes so far as to dismiss even the rest of Southern California as rube-ish.  San Bernardino / Riverside?  Sorry, too far from the beach.  San Diego?  Please.  In my world, the universe’s center stretched about as far south as Laguna Beach and as far East as “The 5.”

Don’t get me wrong — where I grew up is a great place; I still feel at home when I’m there and in the vicinity.  I feel no pull to move back, but I have zero complaints.  But some distance-related perspective made me realize that my arrogance was probably a bit misplaced.  Downey, my hometown, is perfectly pleasant in its own concrete jungle suburb sort of way, but would meet NO ONE’S center of the universe criteria except someone who lived there.  Oh we knew, though.  You all envied us.

My LA provincialism bumped up against Bay Area provincialism when I moved up north for school, and makes for some solid comedy in hindsight.  I couldn’t understand how being “twenty minutes from Everything” wasn’t immediately understood by everyone else to be the trump card of all trump cards.  Bay Area folks would list off their own incontrovertible proofs of why the Center of the Universe was actually 350 miles north and I’d be surprised I had to explain how wrong they were.  In my mind we had beach, mountains, desert, city, lots of fast food, and Disneyland.  Boom!  Checkmate.  In the meantime, folks from places like NYC or Chicago would be over in the corner rolling their eyes.

At the time, there seemed to be a San Francisco / Los Angeles rivalry that LA wasn’t even aware of.  SF was more or less “that cutesy town up north with the cable cars and stuff” then but was otherwise never really thought about by LA-folk.  That condescending pat on the head was not reciprocated by our northern neighbors, I discovered.  Rather it was a dead serious “here’s why we’re better” laundry list.  All of the elements of which had a good bit of truth to them, by the way, but still, LA couldn’t be bothered to compete.

At any rate, before I went down the rabbit hole of silly intra-California squabbles and extreme provincialism, I was trying to get around to my post title, which is what you call San Francisco when you live in the Bay Area, even when you’re speaking to someone who isn’t from the Bay Area.  Because clearly “The City” would refer to San Francisco, even if you were in Omaha or Fort Lauderdale or Providence.  What you absolutely wouldn’t ever call it, unless you were being arch and ironic or arrogantly making fun of outsiders, is “Frisco.”  Obviously.  Even “San Fran” is iffy, even though I tend to let that one slip on occasion.

We had been in the Bay Area for a week and hadn’t yet taken the kids to The City; it was time.  And there’s no better time to visit, in my opinion, than Fleet Week.  Fleet Week tends to fall over the first full weekend in October, which is the dead middle of summer in San Francisco. June and July’s fog, mist, and chilly wind tend to shock visitors to San Francisco expecting, you know, summer. Even 10 minutes away across the Bay and to the south down the peninsula the seasons run their normal course, or at least the Californian version thereof.  But late September and October tend to look much more like a normal summer in The City, at least a mild one.  Various ships pull into port and sailors flood the streets, and there’s a huge airshow featuring the Blue Angels at what has to be their most spectacular venue, with show center right between Alcatraz and Ghirardelli Square.  Despite any stereotypes about the typical SF resident, San Franciscans love Fleet Week.

We actually managed to head into The City twice, once to watch the airshow and once just to play tourist for a bit.  On the first day we started at the Embarcadero Ferry Terminal, where there’s a food court of sorts that makes it nearly impossible to choose among the multitude of equally good options.  Then we did a bit of cable car riding over the hills toward Fisherman’s Wharf, with the kids standing on the outside step  and leaning into the street Rice-a-Roni style.  The cable car used to be a reasonable deal and an ok way to navigate the downtown area, but at some point they changed their fare structure – it’s no longer reasonable.  Kids dug it though!

Ghirardelli Square got Keeper’s blood pumping.  He’s a big dark chocolate fan and a connoisseur of sorts, so getting to squeeze as many of the little sample-sized squares into a souvenir tin was right in his wheelhouse.

He is not, however, a fan of museums, which is unfortunate because we’ve been striving to visit more than our share, and we found a great one right on the waterfront that’s run by the National Park Service and talks about San Francisco and the Bay Area’s maritime heritage.  Frankly I didn’t even know it was there, and it’s excellent.  Firebolt and Woodsprite loved it as well, and found to their delight that there was an opportunity to earn yet another Junior Ranger badge.  They’re amassing quite a collection.

Our last stop was Chinatown, which always makes for an interesting stroll.  We didn’t get to eat there, but did manage to buy a 3 yolk moon cake, as the following day was the Mid Autumn Moon Festival, at which they’re traditionally eaten.  It’s a pretty nasty little foodstuff, in my opinion (which was shared by the rest of the family).  Lotus seed paste with salted duck egg yolks scattered within, and surrounded by a thin crust.  Heavy, oily, somewhat gritty, very caloric, and not particularly tasty either.

We split ours into about 8 pieces to share with my parents, but only about 4 got eaten.  Maybe it’s an acquired taste.  But I’d have much rather introduced my kids to traditional Chinese food via dim sum.  Next time.

Friday was airshow day, and not only did my parents join us, but they let us in on a viewing semi-secret, which was that their Disabled placard and our military ID gave us access to parking at Fort Mason, which is essentially right at show center, with panoramic views.

We parked easily, feet from our viewing spot, and managed to sit next to a gentleman from LiveATC.net, which records and streams Air Traffic Control comms online.  Today he had a live feed of the airshow performers’ cockpit communications on his speaker, which was a great (and often humorous) supplement to watching the maneuvers.

At one point soon after the Blue Angels took off and were heading toward show center, one of the pilots was asked in a quick exchange, “How’s your rider?” “Good!  GLOC-ed twice already, but yeah, good!”  I laughed out loud and noticed quickly that I was the only one and that all the other show watchers in our area were looking at me quizzically.  Oh yeah, that’s right, you guys don’t speak Jive.  So I quickly translated for them – that one of the pilots had a passenger along for the ride in the back, who had passed out from G Forces twice already in the short flight, but was “doing great.”

I find it extremely difficult not to enjoy a good airshow, particularly when the Blues are involved.  I do find that I’m no longer “wowed” by the maneuvers like I once was, but the symmetry of it, the precise formation flying, the excitement of the people around me – all of that makes for a deep contentment.

Aviation appears to be a bug that Keeper did not catch, which I suppose is a minor disappointment on some level, but will probably serve him well career-wise.  They’ve said for a while now that the last fighter pilot has already been born, as the trend and technology inch more and more toward unmanned flight.  I don’t think airline pilots’ jobs are in any danger of going away any time soon, but the issue isn’t one of technology.  As with driverless cars, there are minor technological bugs to be worked out, but the larger issues deal with public acceptance.

Keeper started off the airshow viewing a bit surly, and asked why he should be interested in “a bunch of planes flying around,” but he came around after a few of the performers did their thing and the infectious positive vibe of it all overcame him.

Afterwards we walked over toward a Food Truck gathering called Off The Grid, which had set up on the west side of Fort Mason.  More excellent food, and a free mechanical shark to ride!  Hard to get the gist from a photo rather than a video, but he fell off pretty quickly.  Oh, and did I mention more good food?  I did.  Still, yum.

As sunset neared, we ate the rest of our dinner, played some cards, and tossed the football around on the huge field.  The kids were ecstatic, which was great to see.  It’s far from a given.  Also, it’s been much more challenging than we’d anticipated to get them out and about.  Inertia being what it is, they often default to staring at a screen in their beds or at least in one of the motorhome seats, and they resist our exhortations to get outside and move move move.  Keeper, after challenging everyone to a race and then running top speed around the field for no particular reason, informed us, winded, that he “had forgotten how great it feels to run around.  It’s been so long!”  I asked him to please, please remember that.

Think he will?

Tomorrow we’re off to Pismo Beach, and the beginning of our three week Southern California beach stretch, which I’ve been looking forward to.  I spent much of my childhood and early adulthood convinced I couldn’t possibly live away from the beach, and then I discovered for the rest of my life that I most certainly could.  I’m wondering how revisiting my childhood will affect me and the others, as well as what they’ll all think of where I grew up.

When I was in college, I had a vague notion that there was a tailgate “thing” happening there on football game days… that it went further than people setting up portable grills behind their cars in the parking lot.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not about to try to initiate a battle royale of college tailgate scenes — I’ve never been to an SEC home game, and I’m pretty certain that the huge Midwest State schools throw massive benders on Fall Saturdays.  Just saying there was much more happening on the tailgating front than I knew at the time.  I previously mentioned that the Stanford campus is enormous, and there are multiple “groves” (read: areas with nothing but widely spaced trees) surrounding the stadium and extending to the north and west for dozens of acres.  It (the whole campus) is nicknamed “The Farm” for a few reasons, but all the open space is a reminder of its origins.  Every home game Saturday we’d make the trek out to the stadium and find the groves full of not just parked cars, but elaborate tailgating setups, with major food and drink production / consumption, generators feeding DJ stands, games, etc.

It didn’t leave much of an impression on me because I was 18 and had a very small sphere of that-which-I-paid-attention-to.  What I discovered since, though, is that people plan these tailgaters for months.  And that not only are the groves used for game day parking, but certain areas will let RVs come in, set up, and camp.  AND… camp not just for game day, but for two days prior and one day after.  Of course you need to be a season ticket holder to qualify for that privilege, but secondary markets being what they are in the internet commerce age, those tickets aren’t difficult to come by.  So what a perfect idea for a family who’s living in an RV anyway and needs to park it – hang out at the alma mater, tailgate with friends who do this regularly and promised to save us a spot, and catch a game.  Score!

The plan morphed a bit when we started looking at the no-kidding logistics of boondocking (that’s camping in your RV without water, electric, or sewage hookups – another term I learned relatively recently) on a semi-remote corner of a college campus rather than hanging out at my parents’ house where we had just about everything we needed.  Plus there was the matter of my work trip, which cut into what would’ve been day 1 of campus camping regardless.  As much as I would love to see my kids, over the course of a weekend of campus tours, class auditing, and interaction with students, become enamored of Stanford and resolve on the spot to do whatever it takes academically and extracurricular-ly to ensure eventual admission…  Sorry, I couldn’t finish — that just got sillier and sillier.

So instead, we opted to mobilize before dawn on Saturday, drive down to Palo Alto, set up Davista, catch a few hours of sleep, then do the game day thing, followed by cooking out and spending the night.  This turned out to be an excellent compromise.

Another thing that sticks in my memory of college days is that football Saturdays always always seemed to be hot and sunny, no matter what the rest of the week had offered up, weather-wise.  Saturday, September 30th was no exception.

My good college friend and old housemate had set up the main tailgate event on his mother’s regular RV spot, which we parked a few spots down from.  He had invited several other friends from our old “draw group,” which is (or was?) the Stanford term for the group of people you choose to enter the housing lottery with so that you end up in the same campus housing unit each year.  Basically roommates / housemates.  They’ve all gone on to success in widely varying fields, and every opportunity I get to see them (which are exceedingly rare), I thoroughly enjoy it.

Adding to the fun factor was having my parents there too.  They hadn’t seen some of my college friends since graduation, and my dad made the laughing observation to one of them that he could recognize all of them, but that we were all “a little more grey and puffy.”  That went over way better than it sounds like it would’ve, and is actually reasonably accurate, though most of them have managed to stay in far better shape than I.

 

We beat the Sun Devils handily, and the kids gamely sported the school garb and braved the direct sun for about 3 quarters, which was longer than I’d expected.

 

Even better, I managed to drag the kids (with Tacco’s help) post food/sun/game out for an evening walk around campus, just so see what was going on.  As it turned out nothing at all was going on, at least not in the main areas – I’m sure the dorms and fraternities were another matter – but it was a few miles on a warm night and a chance to show the kids a glimpse of what college life looks like, minus the keg-stands.

Firebolt still insists she intends to play soccer for Stanford, so mission accomplished I suppose, though if that’s the case we really ought to get around to having her play some soccer.

 

Tomorrow I leave for another trip, and the busy-meter swings back into the yellow-orange-red zone as we have several events and visits planned, as well as multiple campsite reservations down the coast.  But the slow-down time has served its purpose.

This should be a quickie.  We’re relaxing, not doing much, not thinking a whole lot, which means mission accomplished for this week.

We arrived in Alamo mid-afternoon on Sunday after a leisurely (and again, gorgeous) drive down a little more coast, through the Anderson Valley, and then a good bit of Sonoma county.

My dad had gone through the considerable trouble of pruning (heavily) the trees at their driveway entrance so that we could fit.  It was a precision operation despite the chainsaws – only a foot or so of slop on all sides, at least based on measurements taken previously.  It worked out perfectly though, with no scraping whatsoever, other than a slight bit of front-jacks-on-driveway due to the slope.  Couldn’t have prevented that one.  After a few orientation missteps on my part, we were comfortably leveled and plugged in in their driveway, awning out even.  Plenty of room to spare.

The kids were thrilled and ran up to greet their grandparents, followed very shortly by claiming bedrooms.

I previously mentioned that we had no plans, but that’s not entirely true – we had the Stanford home football game at the end of the week at which a school friend and I had arranged us to both camp and tailgate.  And I had a work trip to fly in the middle of the week which necessitated a commute back to Boston.  Plus we were working hard to integrate ourselves into my sister/brother-in-law’s busy family schedule so that we could get some time with them and allow the cousins some play and reacquainting time.

It turned out that the best (only, actually) time for a family dinner with them was that night, so we headed over to their house for some amazing food and hang-out time.  They’ve created one of the coolest back yards for gatherings that I’ve ever seen – it’s about a fifth the size of ours and puts it to shame.

Such a blast hanging out there with them.  They’ve just sent their oldest off to Pepperdine on a water polo scholarship, and the other two kids are athletes as well, so they’ve got their hands full.  As do most of us I suppose, but it’s always interesting to compare lifestyles with them.  I’m not sure it’s so much a glimpse of our future as our kids have different interests and personalities, but all three of theirs are older than all three of ours so it’s been very helpful to be able to go to my younger sister for advice of the trailblazer sort.

The rest of the week was throttle-back time.  Firebolt helped Papa with his morning puzzles, we started a puzzle, and went to a few water polo and volleyball games.

I was fortunate enough to reconnect with a college friend in Seattle just prior to my layover there this week, and we decided to get together for a catch up session, which we manage every couple years or so.  Plus I got to stay at his house instead of our layover hotel in Tacoma (apologies Tacoma, no matter how much I try to appreciate your charms, I can never contort you into as fun a place to stay as Seattle.  Or even Tampa.  Syracuse.  Hartford.  Anyway…)  It was a glorious, mid-80s day in Seattle, I got to nap in their hammock in the back yard, we ate like royalty (oysters, fresh salmon, Pike Place-fresh veggies), and spent several hours walking around town, having a few beers, and catching up with him and his family.  Good for the soul.

Upon my return to the Bay Area and the fam, we solidified our plans for the weekend game.  Plan is now to do dawn patrol to Stanford Saturday morning, set up, tailgate, watch the game, and then spend one night there, hopefully with a stroll or bike ride around campus with Tacco and the kiddos that night.  Stanford differs from many college campuses in that the campus itself is huge and self-contained.  Students rarely leave because they don’t have to.  If things haven’t changed, Saturday is a pretty big party night on campus, and the students will have just arrived for the school year – I’m curious what the kids and I will see…

California’s iconic Highway 1 is, unfortunately, closed in a few places along its most scenic stretch between Monterey and Morro Bay.  Last year’s abundant rains, though sorely needed in the severely drought-stricken West, led to massive landslides along the coast, one of which not only buried Highway 1, but essentially changed the shape of the coastline.  After some deliberation, the powers that be decided not to dig it back out, but to re-build the highway over/around it.  This project, however, won’t be complete until 2018, which is inconvenient for us (and it’s all about us!), but at least forced us to choose our coastal drives and rugged oceanfront campgrounds wisely.

The stretch through Oregon was one such drive.  The other was the drive from Patrick Point to Caspar, near Mendocino.  Much of that stretch pulls away from the ocean at a section of coastline known as the Lost Coast due to its (the coastline’s) almost complete inaccessibility.  Highway 1’s northern end/start, however, is at its intersection with Highway 101 at Leggett, near the southern end of the Lost Coast, and the section of Highway 1 between there and Muir Beach just north of San Francisco runs a close second to its south-of-San Francisco stretch for spectacular coastal views.  Here’s our route.

I’m going to zoom in on that little stretch of Hwy 1 between 101 and the coast.  It’s about 20 miles, give or take a few.  We’ve done quite a bit of driving this trip, and spent the better part of the first month and a half between 6,000’ and 8,000’ in the Rockies, cresting multiple passes and snaking along with river after river through various canyons.  None of it came remotely close to that 20 miles for sheer driving brutality.

We’re doing quite a bit of talking about geography with the kids on this trip, and one of the things I’ve been trying to get them to notice is the general difference between the East Coast and the West Coast.  Specifically, most of the East Coast is flat for miles inland.  Generally you have a flat, narrow barrier island made of sand, then 10-20 miles of lagoon or marshland.  On the West Coast you have the Coast Range (technically the Coast Ranges) stretching most of the way from CA to WA and plunging directly into the ocean.  Though not especially high in most places (although it does reach over 8,000’ in CA), it’s very rugged.  It makes for great scenery, but also tough driving, particularly if you happen to be, oh, just for example, driving 30+ feet of rickety motorhome near its max weight and towing 15 or so feet of car and bikes behind you.

You’ll often see the yellow signs giving a recommended speed for a portion of road that’s quite a bit lower than the speed limit.  Completely unofficially, I tend to ignore those when I’m in a normal car.  They should not ever be ignored in Davista.  On this particular segment there were multiple recommended 15 mph zones, and even a 10 mph zone for a hairpin curve that I don’t think I could’ve negotiated at 15 or even 13.  Narrow, very steep, and insanely curvy – the entire way.  Near the end, where we were almost at the ocean, I smelled our hot brakes for the first time this trip; I intend it to be the last, as it was extremely uncomfortable.

The next day at Caspar Beach I struck up a conversation with our neighbor, who had clearly been RVing for years and was driving a much smaller rig.  He was headed north (the way we’d come), but wasn’t intending to take Highway 1 across the Coast Range.  When I told him we just had and it was tricky but we managed it just fine, his eyes widened as he looked behind me at Davista / Toad and exclaimed “IN THAT?!?”  Our conversation petered out shortly thereafter, and upon further reflection, it’s possible I should’ve replaced “we managed it just fine” with “we dodged a bullet and are lucky to be here.”

At any rate, disaster successfully averted, we arrived at Caspar Beach in the afternoon, and found it a very cool little beach campground.  As most of the coastline up there is rocky cliff, the vast majority of the beaches are small, hemmed In by rocks, and formed by a river or stream’s meetup with the ocean.  That’s exactly what Caspar is, with the campground on one side of the small road and along the stream, and the beach on the other.  Here’s an aerial shot.

The campground has a little store with kayak, surfboard, and diving gear rentals – evidently all three of those get a lot of play on Caspar Beach, and it’s an especially good spot to dive for abalone.  While there we saw several divers cleaning their catches for cooking that evening, presumably.

The further south we go, the more swim-friendly the beaches get, and so we wasted no time getting swimsuits on and checking out the water.  We found it to be still a bit chilly for full-immersion swimming and not wavy enough for Boogie Boarding, but low tide exposed an enormous shell, critter, and bullwhip-sized kelp hunting area that kept the kids interested until nearly dark.

The next day was a weekend and therefore a no-school-all-play day, so we headed back to the beach, this time with kayaks in tow.  I had wanted to see how they did in small waves for quite some time and this seemed the perfect opportunity to find out – 1-2’ surf breaking gently over shallow sand seemed about as benign as we could hope to find, conditions-wise.

Unfortunately the Firefly (Keeper’s preferred single kayak) met us with a familiar hissing sound upon its inflation.  Suspecting a re-rupture of the hole we had repaired back in Grand Teton, we were surprised to find that patch intact and a new hole along the seam right next to it.  Not promising at all — that seam goes all the way around.  Momentarily undeterred, however, I talked Keeper into going tandem with me in the Sea Eagle, which is technically a single kayak, but can easily handle our combined weight.  Plus it’s self-bailing, which I figured would be a good feature in the surf.

I discovered quickly and to my surprise that Keeper and I had very different ideas about what constitutes fun when maneuvering among waves on/in something that floats.  After pushing quickly through the surf line, checking things out a bit, and getting used to the handling of the kayak, I turned back toward the breaking waves, only to have Keeper inform me, more than once, that he was “very uncomfortable” with my intentions.  It took his telling me a few times, with increasing urgency, for me to realize that he really meant it.  Unpacking it a bit later (after discovering, incidentally, that an inflatable kayak is a terrible thing to ride a wave in and essentially wants to either swap ends or turn sideways to the wave and then invert – fortunately we were in two feet of water so none of that mattered much), he told me that his last two attempts at Boogie Boarding had ended in him grinding his forehead into the sandy bottom due to the nose of the board being too far forward and digging in.  Furthermore he informed me that he was “two seconds from passing out and drowning” each time this happened, as he hadn’t had a chance to take a breath prior to going under.

Huh.  This may put a damper on my master plan to get him to learn to surf with me this trip.  We may need to revisit.

In the afternoon we drove down to Mendocino to grab some dinner and take a stroll there, but not before seeing a group of decidedly beachy-looking 30 or maybe 40-somethings hanging out in low chairs with towels and a snack-filled mini table on our beach, a couple bottles into a cooler of wine, with one of them diligently shucking fresh oysters and passing them out to the group.  It looked like they were getting ready to build a fire in order to press well into the evening.  So cool.  And so very California.

Mendocino is pretty much picture perfect, and has been deliberately preserved as such.  The picture below is from a bit too much of a distance to get the full effect, but it sits compactly on that spit of land jutting into the ocean and is as walkable as it is picturesque.  We opted for some pizza in a restaurant that had been converted from someone’s house, and we ate up in their loft, where they still had couches and toys for the kids to play with.  There was also gelato – bonus!

I know that Tacco has previously written about her semi-obsession with sea glass collecting.  Well, when I told her that Fort Bragg, which is a few miles north of Caspar, has a famous “Glass Beach,” she chalked that into our “absolutely must visit” column.  Not deterred by my telling her that the actual collection of glass there was prohibited, she read more extensively about it and learned that there are actually several “glass beaches” in Fort Bragg and only the officially named one prohibits collecting – so off we went after dinner, in a race with the sunset.

We turned out not to be the only ones with that idea, but it didn’t matter at all – there’s such an abundance of sea glass there, you could collect as much from a square yard or two as we’d collected on all the other beaches on which we’d searched, combined.  We now have several bags of multicolored sea glass awaiting Tacco’s deft crafting hands.  I’m eager to see what she comes up with.

Tomorrow we leave for my parents’ house in Alamo (SF Bay Area), which we’re all really looking forward to.  Primarily because we get to see them and my sister’s family, of course.  But it’s more than that – I think there’s an element of “taking a breath” that we all need.   We’ve been going going going since we started, with our average stay someplace being about 3 days.  Only in Park City did we stay longer than a week, and we packed our schedule quite full there too.  The plan in Alamo is to park in my parents’ driveway and stay awhile.  The girls have, for weeks, been asking “how many days until we get to see Grammy and Papa?” even though they’re quite capable of counting for themselves, and have expressed their intentions to immediately set up camp in one of their bedrooms, in order to sleep in a “real bed” for awhile.  Keeper has similarly talked about having an actual bedroom with his “own space” to stretch out in.  We need to pay attention when they say such things, it strikes me.  Actually I could’ve stopped that sentence at “we need to pay attention.”  Seems solid and overarching.

I’ll be flying a trip for work while the rest stay behind, but even that sounds to me like a throttling back for a bit rather than an imposition.  We have no plans, or at least very few, and evidently that’s something we could all use a little dose of.

 

I have a very early memory of my grandmother singing that song repeatedly on one of our first trips camping in the California woods, and though it stuck with me, I hadn’t heard it again.  So it surprised me when Kurt Cobain did his tortured version on MTV just prior to his death.  I doubt she knew how dark it is.  Or maybe she did; she was full of surprises…  Regardless though, there’s inevitably a point during any drive through California evergreens when I hear her singing “in the pines, in the pines…”

Though it was a shame to leave the Oregon coast so quickly, particularly since our “bad” weather gave way to sun and mid-70s for our departure, we had several wickets to meet in California, so set off for the Redwoods via highway 101, which remains the route closest to the coast all the way until Hwy 1 splits off from it in Northern California.  The southern half of the Oregon coast becomes Dunes country rather than Rugged Rocky Shoreline country, which pushes the road a bit inland and blocks the view of the water, but it’s still a nice drive.  Here’s what we did:

Our destination was a campground in the Del Norte Coast Redwoods State Park.  The whole “Redwoods” area is a little jumbled and difficult to get one’s head around, as not only are there both National and State Parks that stretch down California’s northern coast and share the Redwoods moniker, but it’s not entirely clear whether you’re in one or the other, as they seem to share jurisdiction in several places.  When entering, you see signs that say something like “Entering Redwood State and National Parks.”  Complicating things further, there are multiple semi-famous redwood groves all the way down the coast to the San Francisco area that may or may not be in State or National Parks.  So I guess the net result of all this is that it’s tough to know whether you’re in the “right” redwoods.  We, it turns out, were destined to camp not in the right redwoods.

Quick backtrack – we had rejiggered our plans in order to get to my parents’ house in the Bay Area a bit earlier and get a little time on the Northern California coast.  This required canceling the reservations I’d made months prior at the Jedediah Smith Redwoods State (and National?  I dunno) Park campground, which are in high demand.  Though we’d now be staying in the area midweek, there was very little available to swap into on short notice, but the Del Norte Coast campground was wide open.  That should have been an obvious red flag, but sometimes it’s tempting to think that you’re just so cunning and savvy, you’re able to find the hidden gems that no one else knows about.

Or maybe that’s just me.  Anyway, here was our campsite.

Keeper had been fretting a bit about being off the grid yet again, and indeed that’s where we found ourselves, with the trifecta of neither cell coverage, nor wi-fi, nor campsite hookups (i.e. water / electricity).  It was a bit of a tortuous drive down into the valley in which this campground sits, and the other thing we noticed quite quickly about it was the peculiar disappearance of the redwoods as we descended.  There are none in the picture, and in fact I don’t think there were any in the campground either.  Odd choice, if you’re the guy deciding where to put the campgrounds.  And then of course the size.  This picture was the no-kidding, we’re now set up shot, not a picture taken in the process of shoehorning ourselves into the much roomier final campsite.  We couldn’t even open the awning.

Though I had been taking my best “hey kids, check out all these cool things about this campground!” tone, I pulled Tacco aside privately after about an hour of silver lining hunting and suggested we leave in the morning.  “This spot sucks” were my actual words I think.  To my great relief, I didn’t have to spend any time convincing her.  Here were the kids after we told them we’d be leaving early.

But I need to shift gears abruptly here, because the truth is that the two days we spent in the Redwoods were actually some of our best yet, and that’s not something I toss off casually.

Most of it comes down to the Redwoods themselves.  I grew up in California, went to college on a campus on which redwoods grow, had seen a few of the groves of the larger ones in years past, and in fact discovered recently that my parents have a redwood growing basically in their driveway.  Yet somehow seeing them this time floored me.

I read that something like 95% of the old growth redwoods had been logged before we collectively decided they needed some protection, so most of what you would see outside of the dedicated groves are relatively young.  And they’re pretty trees, without a doubt.  But when you see the huge ones, the 1,500+ year old ones, it’s… well, I shouldn’t speak for anyone else, so I’ll just say that it affected me profoundly.  It’s almost like the previously described difference between a partial and a total solar eclipse.  We saw the first ones upon climbing into the Redwood State/National Park initially on the way to the marginal campground, and I couldn’t quite process what I was seeing.  The size just doesn’t seem right.

Then on the next day, after leaving our tiny campsite at Del Norte, we visited and hiked through the Stout Grove, right across from the Jedediah Smith SP campground, where our original reservations had been.  There’s a reason that place fills up early.

Hiking through that grove gave me a similar feeling to what I experienced in some of the more active geothermal areas in Yellowstone – a sense that there’s “stuff going on” around you and underneath you (and here, above you).  Almost as if it’s humming with an energy you can only intuit, rather than sense.  So hard to describe, but it’s one of the few places where for most of the hike, we all hiked alone, and silently.

I’ll leave the futile attempts to describe it alone there, and just add that afterwards I asked Tacco whether she could ever get used to that scenery, and without hesitation she echoed the “not even a little” that I was thinking when I asked.

Our enthusiastic Junior Rangers (the girls – despite what we’d heard before, that program is designed for younger kids, and not the “up to 14!” that they advertise) jumped immediately into their assigned tasks and were able to bag another ranger badge.

After our hike and while parked at the Ranger Station, I was able to get some internet coverage and search for our campground for the evening, since we’d abandoned our redwood-free Redwoods site.  We opted for Patrick’s Point State Park, just north of Eureka, and we’re so glad we did.  Not only is the scenery stunning as usual, but the park is enormous, as are the campsites.

The site was so large that we didn’t even need to disconnect the Outback to get in.  What’s more, we couldn’t even see our closest neighbors, and across the road we had a clifftop path with multiple viewpoints looking down at the Pacific and expansive, empty Agate Beach to the north.

Keeper has been struggling with lack of personal space more than most, and he was thrilled to discover a small area of our campsite that was cleared of trees, but covered with them – essentially a cave made out of tree cover.  I offered to set up the hammock there for him to hang out in, and he saw my “hang out” and raised me a “I’ll spend the night there!”  I try to take every opportunity to encourage attempts of his to step out of his comfort zone, so I gave him everything he needed (sleeping bag, blanket, pillow, lantern, phone, charger) and cut him loose.  He asked for his knife as well, given that we were technically still in bear country.  We had a brief conversation about the mechanics involved in fending off a bear encounter with a knife, but I quickly noted there was no productive end-game to that conversation, and as long as he didn’t open the blade in his sleep it wouldn’t hurt.

Upon getting him set up and saying good night, I returned inside and wagged “a half hour, tops” to Tacco.  It was pitch dark out there, with lots of critters creeping around.  I was proud of him just to have tried.  Wouldn’t you know it though, he spent the whole night out there!  I love it.

In the morning we decided that a hike down to Agate Beach for some treasure (or at least agate) hunting would be a far better use of our time than any homeschool endeavors would, so we headed down right at sunrise, and had the entire beach to ourselves.  This is what it’s all about!