Today we did paperwork, financial stuff, medical insurance tasks and brought some computer files up to date. We didn’t go anywhere and, frankly, it was quite boring. I’m glad that crud is behind us. I will not torture my 3 readers with a long narrative about the stuff we did. Doing it was miserable but reading about it would be worse.
It is cocktail hour.

Exploration of roads we had never seen before was the agenda for today so we put a bunch of diesel into Charlotte’s tank and took off going west. We drove across the mundane terrain between our camping spot in Menifee to Wildomar, a municipality with few attractions. From there we got onto SR-74 which passes over the coast range and emerges at I-5 in San Juan Capistrano. SR-74 is a very twisty two-lane road with turnouts for slow traffic and we turned out into most of them because we found the areas visible from the road quite attractive. The terrain is very steep with small creeks in the bottoms of the valleys.
As we approached San Juan Capistrano, we stopped in at Ronald Casper park, a facility operated by Orange County. The campground has 3 main camping loops but only one loop has water and electrical hookups for fake campers like us. The campground is located in the bottom of a wide arroyo and, due to recent rains, everything was green and happy-looking. There is a very nice visitor center, relatively flat trails, equestrian camping spots and nice restrooms with good paved roads. This year it coats $26 per night with electrical and water hookups but it cost $21 if one is over 60, like me.
After taking a spin through the campground we continued west to I-5 where we turned south for a few miles and we exited to Dana Point. When I was a kid, there was an actual point here with a good surfing break but that has all changed. Now there is an enormous marina where the affluent can park the boats they rarely use. I liked the point better.
Just south of this municipal improvement is Doheny State Beach where camping is possible but the spaces are pretty small. Other than a few pull-through spots it looks like the maximum RV size would be about 25 feet. The campground is right next to the beach and beachfront spots cost more than $60 but I think it costs less if you don’t park in the front row. We noted that the back rows are located at a slightly higher elevation and from them you can see the waves, a view which is blocked in the front row due to an enormous sand berm.
From Doheny we hopped back onto I-5 southbound through Camp Pendleton Marine Base until we got to SR-78 in Oceanside where we turned east. We continued east to San Marcos where we stopped at Camping World for some RV stuff. We continued east from there a few more miles until we hit I-15 northbound to I-215 north and ultimately back to Menifee and our temporary home in Wilderness Lakes TT.
For a couple of pix, click here

Today we started with considerable lounging but finally did some work in the afternoon. I did trailer maintenance stuff and Peggy did the laundry.
It would seem that very few of this blog’s readers would be interested in the finer points of black tank draining or holding tank additives’ chemistry so I will cut today’s report short right here.

Today we went to Pasadena, CA, to see my sister, Julie, and two of her kids, Katie and Peter, and to meet for a breakfast buffet at a place called Soup Plantation. I had never been to a Soup Plantation before but Peggy had and stated that she liked eating at the stores she had been to previously.
The drive from Hemet to Pasadena was an uneventful 75 minutes of freeway driving without the usual dreadful L.A. traffic snarls encountered on weekdays. We even beat Julie to the buffet which doesn’t happen very often because she prefers to dine slowly throughout the duration of the service.
Soup Plantation is quite strange in my view. First – there is very little soup available or I am a poor searcher because all I found was some chicken noodle soup and some chili which really isn’t soup. Second – they have an enormous salad bar such that perhaps a better name for the restaurant would be Salad Plantation. Third – they serve virtually no meat. I was able to find some miniscule pieces of some type of sausage in the gravy for biscuits and gravy plus they were offering some kind of scrambled egg dish that had some microscopic pieces of ham mixed into the eggs along with some green shit that was unidentifiable.
There were several types of bready crud like biscuits, some cinnamon nugget thingies, pizza-looking stuff with multi-colored bits of something diced into the top, some terrible french toast, tepid waffles augmented by maple syrup devoid of maple in addition to Jell-O and a sizable bowl of whipped cream. They did have coffee and orange juice but none for Julie because she used a dollar-off coupon. All in all, it was not the type of place I would care to go again.
After a couple hours of being unable to find any decent food within the restaurant, we departed and drove over to my sister Julie’s place which is on Orange Grove Avenue, home to the starting location of the Rose Parade held every New Year’s Day. Clean up from this year’s event is still in progress and some streets are still blocked of despite the parade being history for some nine days. We lounged around at Julie’s condo until about 3:00 PM when we hopped back into Charlotte for another 75 minute drive back to Hemet.
Two suggestions come to mind from today’s exploration: if you really want to eat a good breakfast, don’t go to Soup Plantation and always drive in the L.A. basin on Sunday.

Today was set aside for maintenance of Charlotte’s wonderful 6.4 liter turbo diesel engine so we took her over to Gosch Ford in Hemet, CA. We got up pretty early, for us, and drove about 20 minutes to the dealership. We initially met the service writer, Ben, and described the services we wanted: change the oil, rotate the tires and perform an inspection of the serpentine belt that powers all the mechanical bits attached to the engine.
The dealership had a shuttle for the unfortunates required to wait on service so we were introduced to Manny, a shuttle driver, who dutifully took us to a tiny restaurant called the Hangar at the local Hemet Ryan airport. He was very nice and he zipped us over to the chow hall and dropped us off. The food was okay and sitting on the porch of the restaurant watching the planes come and go was actually quite nice. On the horizon from our perch was a line of snow-covered mountains remaining from the recent rotten weather and they were spectacular.
Partway through breakfast we got a ring tone from our new Nexus 6 cell phone hooked up to Verizon and quickly started the series of completely bizarre and mysterious motions required to force the device into allowing us to speak with the caller but, alas, we were unable to implement the stuff required to answer the phone before the ringing stopped. We figured we would open up the voice mail app or service or thing but were politely told by the cursed device that voice mail was not set up so we wouldn’t be listening to any pithy messages left by the unknown caller. After considerable fooling around and some harsh words, we were able to get the phone number of the unknown caller and called back only to have the phone answered by the receptionist at Gosch Ford who had no idea who may have called us. We eventually were put in touch with Ben the service guy who asked us if we had the doodad required to get the locking lug nuts off Charlotte’s pretty wheels.
We have had the tires rotated previously by Kearney Ford in San Diego and they had no problem getting the locks off so even the presence of the locks was news to us. Gosch was unable to rotate the tires without the doodad and, since we were both unaware of needing it or having any idea what it might look like, they were only able to tell us it was time to consider replacing the front disc brake pads and they would be more than willing to perform this service if only they could get the front wheels off the hubs.
We settled for just the oil change and scrutiny of the serpentine belt and the dealership sent Manny over to pick us up at the airport. We will take Charlotte to Kearney Ford when we go see our kids in San Diego in a few days. I suppose the brakes will just have to be okay until then.
We have a couple pix available by clicking here

Today the weather was pretty nice in the morning so we decided to go up into the mountains to the mountain hamlet of Idyllwild. Peggy and I have been to Idyllwild a few times previously but not in the last 15 or 20 years. We started our journey with a stop at a place called Abbie’s Cafe on the east side of Hemet. They were quite busy even at 11:00 AM and the place was amply stocked with about 85% really old people nibbling away at soft foods and giving furtive glances our way. I think they thought we were way too young to be dining in their greasy spoon. I know why they go there – my chicken fried steak and eggs and Peggy’s Reuben sandwich were good. Prices were reasonable and service was good.
From the cafe we continued east on SH-74 up a long, steep incline to a store in a place shown on the map as Mountain Center. The road to here was dry but there was some plowed snow on the edges of the paving which became snow everywhere as we approached the town. From here we turned north toward Idyllwild but only went about three miles before the road was covered with ice and we lost traction. We bravely chickened out by turning around and heading back down the hill although we did not quite feel ready to go home. We coasted back down the steep hill to Hemet and then turned northwest to go see something called Lake Perris State Park.
Lake Perris is another lake imitating a reservoir. There are extensive vacant camping areas and the only person we saw was a park ranger who had a voice squeakier than a dry barn door hinge who told us how to continue through the park going north and back onto civilian roads. On our way back south, we skirted a range of hills shown on the map as “The Badlands” but that had scant resemblance to the Badlands we saw in South Dakota last year. They were just soil hills peppered with big granite boulders. I was unable to ascertain what made these lands any badder than any other granite boulder and dirt mounds.
We finally drove back into Hemet, turned west and returned to our Wilderness Lakes campground although there don’t seem to be any lakes here. There are a couple of shallow ditches with water in them and acres of flooded farmlands but no lakes, per se.
We have a few pix which you can see by clicking here

It is still raining but without the unfettered fury we had for the last 36 hours. After waiting out the rain, we hopped into Charlotte and took a spin down some local roads.
Our first stop was Diamond Valley Lake which is not really a lake but would more appropriately be called a reservoir. They have an enormous boat launching ramp, maybe the biggest I have even seen, but little else. Although there is a scroungy river here called the San Jacinto, it does not enter nor exit the alleged lake. What seems to have happened was some water authority has put some earthen dams between two parallel ridges and they must pump the water into the reservoir because there is scant watershed to feed it. In any event, there is a bunch of water there and the area surrounding it is quite ordinary, hardly worth a trip. There is also a sign indicating Diamond Valley Lake is the nicest lake in California which would appear to be a pretty substantial fib.
After seeing this inland wonder, we drove into Hemet, a small city of some 85,000 souls located about 10 miles north of California’s nicest lake. Peggy was scoping out some facts about Hemet and found the average age is 71 which seems pretty old. Once we got into town, however, we became convinced that the average age reported might be a bit low because we noted people older than us everywhere. Many were scurrying about on little wheeled vehicles with their walkers strapped to the back. Vehicle speeds were exceptionally low downtown possibly because old folks here really do not have anyplace to go and they certainly are not going to hurry to get there. I drive pretty slowly these days but I am a veritable whirlwind next to the local drivers. We got up to as high as 21 miles per hour on streets plainly posted at 40.
After short stops at a fabric store, a diesel station and a liquor store run by folks not familiar with English, we decided we had seen enough for today and returned to our camp spot at Wilderness Lakes TT. We are dull.
There are some pictures of our dullness you can see by clicking here

It is raining. It is raining quite a bit for this part of the world. Driving conditions were going to get worse as the day progressed so we figured we better do some food shopping in case the ability to get around was eliminated. We ate breakfast with fortified coffee, watched a little morning news and then set off for a Trader Joe’s about 1/2 an hour away in Temecula, CA.
We probably shouldn’t have watched the news because by the time we got to Temecula, it was raining quite hard. All the gutters were overflowing and drivers were engaged in the peculiar and terrifying antics that seem to be a trademark for southern CA whenever there is the slightest deviation from bright sun. Trader Joe’s parking lot was demonstrating the benefits of sheet runoff by soaking everybody’s shoes as they sprinted from their cars to the store.
We bought all the tasty stuff we could bear at Trader Joe’s before wading back to Charlotte and transferring the groceries into the back seat. The rain was so vigorous at this point that all the cardboard boxes surrounding our food got quite damp. We hauled the newly moistened groceries back to the Barbarian Invader and transferred the groceries from Charlotte to the Invader in some more penetrating rain. Quite a few of our boxed goods got to ride the kitchen counter while our two electric heaters attempted to dry them before they go into storage.
According to the news, all the roads in southern CA are filled with tardy motorists awaiting the authorities tasked with towing away drowned cars, removing newly-wrecked cars from the freeway, removing mud from the highways and trying to make the flooded areas dry. They seem to be overwhelmed.

Today is the first day of our 2016 explorations of neat stuff in the USA. We finished up our trip for 2015 by driving from Yuma, AZ, to the Thousand Trails Pio Pico RV Resort near San Diego, CA, where we did family stuff, maintenance and took some time out for a couple weeks of fooling around in Cabo San Lucas with our kids. It was fun for us but probably stupifiingly boring for blog readers (if any) so I will omit this time period in the blog.
We started out today by picking up our trailer (sometimes referred to as “The Barbarian Invader”) at San Diego RV Center where they serviced the wheel bearings and the brakes. No sooner had we hooked up the Invader when it started to rain quite impressively and it continued as we drove west on I-8 to I-15 north to I-215 north where we turned off at Newport Road to get to the Thousand Trails Wilderness Lakes RV Resort. We couldn’t really see much of the park as we pulled in but we did get to partially set up the trailer before the merely miserable rain morphed into a deluge which quickly filled the park’s roads with about 4″ of water and a big bunch of ducks, coots, geese and swans who seemed to be enjoying the weather.
The park has full hookups but due to the miserable weather I initially did not hook our waste lines to the park’s sewer system. After a few hours of deluge, the weather relented a bit and I went outside to hook us up. Unfortunately, when I opened the cap to the sewer, the flood waters standing in the roads immediately started disappearing down the hole so I closed it up and retreated back into the Invader. Maybe I’ll try again tomorrow if the rain quits. We are actually in pretty good shape; we have water, empty waste holding tanks, 30 amps of electrical power and our TV satellite antenna is giving us good reception. We eagerly await the opportunity to check out this part of the world but the weather is going to have to improve some before we will leave the comfort of our travelling home.
For pix of the San Diego area while we were home, click here