Today we took a spin out to the Salton Sea, California’s largest, albeit mistaken, lake. We have seen it many times before but always from a distance. From the top of the Laguna Mountains, maybe 50 miles away to the southwest, the Sea looks like a shimmering jewel in the midst of a brilliant, colorful desert.
We hopped onto CA-78 from our RV park in Shelter Valley and followed it through Ocotillo Wells and across much desert badland until we got to the shore of the lake. Up close, the Salton Sea is a testament to men screwing up nature and having it ultimately strike back. We went through Salton City, a seaside community of some nice but mostly grubby little desert dwellings. Some of them are hard to see through the enormous screening junk piles some folks have in their yards. We drove down to the rapidly receding shoreline and gazed out across the long beach of heavy metal and agricultural chemical residues mixed in with the dirt.
The Salton Sea was created when some levees on the Colorado River failed and the water ran downhill into the deep, way below sea level sump that now is the bottom of the Sea. Our GPS at the seashore indicated we were more than 250 feet below sea level. Take that, Death Valley. Virtually no new water, except runoff from agriculture, replenishes the Sea. Lotsa Selenium here for those interested. The salt level is higher than the ocean, so buoyant stuff floats very high in the water until the stuff dissolves and sinks into the chemical stew. Prolonged drought is evaporating the fraction of the stew that is water, leaving the other, not water, stuff behind. A brown cloud of nasty crud fills the sky when the wind blows. Up close the Salton Sea is not a shimmering jewel.
We bailed from Salton City pretty quickly and headed back toward Borrego Springs on S-22, a lumpy and curvy path through the Borrego Badlands. The terrain, geology and desert plant scenery along the way are fascinating. The Badlands here are every bit as bad as the Badlands in South Dakota except the Badlands here have all the convoluted terrain AND nasty pricker bushes and cactus. But no water.
We continued through Borrego Springs, checking out the houses, golf courses in the middle of a desert and some more roadside metal sculptures before heading over Yaqui Pass back to Stagecoach Trails RV. It was a very nice loop drive although we probably could have left out our the up-close and intimate visit to the Salton Sea. The rest of the drive was gorgeous.
Check the pix. Click here

Yesterday’s rain gave way to crystal-clear skies with big puffy clouds but the wind was still quite brisk. It seemed a perfect day to take a spin through Anza-Borrego State Park. Our initial wandering was southeast along S-2, a county road that skirts the eastern edge of the Laguna Mountains. We continued for about 20 miles until we arrived at Vallecitos County Park and Stage Station where I, my spouse, our kids and some friends went camping about 25 years ago. It was the camping trip from Hell. We tried to cook a Thanksgiving meal and have a spiffy celebration but the weather turned viciously cold, the Weber failed on the cooking and one of the dogs got into the cholla cactus and ended up looking like a pincushion. Our cheap air beds failed and we ended up trying to sleep on the nearly frozen ground. We did have a good game of cold-on-one-side charades with everyone just about as close to the fire as possible and turning regularly to keep the other side from being like the dark side of the moon.
At the county park we turned around and headed for Borrego Springs, an interesting but weird community right next to the Anza-Borrego State Park visitor center and Borrego Palm Canyon campground. On the way but quite close to Borrego Springs, there is a section of road with wildlife sculptures dotted around the stark landscape. We spotted metal mammoths, horses, saber-toothed cats, some big hawks and a small collection of T. Rex guys in the distance. The campground is very nice and the views therefrom are stunning. The visitor center is built underground and is quite appealing with good exhibits about the local wildlife, plants and geology. They even have a little theater with some neat movies about the park, one of which shows quick time-lapse clips with the desert vegetation putting on a year’s worth of show in about 15 seconds.
By the time we had lingered too long in the park, we headed back over Yaqui Pass toward our campground in Shelter Valley, getting back to our trailer just before it went black. The scenery out here in the Borrego area is magnificent and spectacularly varied as the sun moves and the light changes. We intend to go fool around and ogle in this area again tomorrow.
There are pix. Click here

Yahoo! We are back on the road again.
The last few weeks have been a flurry of meetings with old friends, visits with our son and his wonderful spouse and a bunch of tending to chores regarding our disgusting old bodies, our vehicles and finances.
The hobnobbing with our kids and friends was great. We probably overstayed our welcome at the kids’ house because we spent six days and nights there while our trailer was having a new toilet installed, bearings packed, brakes serviced and some phantom interior potable and drain water leaks fixed at San Diego RV Center. We also foisted ourselves on them every so often during our stay, particularly when we may have had something to drink.
So all our gear should be up to snuff or at least that is what we probably erroneously believe. We are headed mostly east for the first half of this year’s expedition because during the second half we will be on the way back. Our intent is to return to some of the states we passed through in 2015 when our trip took us up the east coast. If everything goes according to plan, we will skirt the west side of the Appalachians in the spring, the east side in the fall and mosey back to the toasty, sometimes ablaze or afloat state of California.
We picked up the the Barbarian Invader this morning at San Diego RV Center (which, strangely, is not in San Diego but in distant Lakeside, CA) and hooked up our F-250, Charlotte, to the kingpin on the trailer in drizzling rain. We gave the maintenance guys $1500 for their time and parts and headed on our first leg of 2018’s excursion. Maybe leg isn’t the right term because we only towed our moving home to a spot near Anza-Borrego State Park about 60 or 70 miles from where we started.
Although it was raining on our first pull of 2018, the views as we passed through San Diego County’s back country were very nice. We started on I-8, turned north up CA-67 through Ramona and up into the coastal range of mountains, crossing above 3000′ near Santa Ysabel. We turned north from there on CA-79 toward Warner Springs but before we got there, we turned off the ridge and easterly down into the desert on a road called S-2. After a slow drop down to about 2000′ and a complete change of climate zone, we pulled into the Stagecoach Trails RV campground near a small clump of residences called Shelter Valley.
The park has full hookups and almost glacially slow wifi but the surrounding desert and mountain scenery looks like it will be spectacular once the storm quits and the skies clear. Today the wind is only blowing about 50 mph so working outside the trailer has a sandblasting-like effect on any exposed flesh. We are so happy to be back on the road, however, that we were quite comfy just climbing into our trailer with our new crapper and sheltering from the breeze. I tried to be the first, inaugural happy camper with the john but Peggy was faster. It is a very nice terlet.

It is New Year’s Day and our preparations for 2018’s proposed adventures are almost complete. The tow vehicle, our 2008 Ford F-250 pickup truck dubbed “Charlotte” by our daughter, has had the brakes replaced, some exhaust sensor work, oil changed and some electrical conductor replacement. It should be good for the next 25,000 miles except for oil changes.
The trailer, reverentially referred to as the “Barbarian Invader”, goes into the shop on the 4th of January for a brake system check, the bearings will be repacked, the toilet will be replaced and some drain piping minor issues will be addressed. We should be able to pick the trailer up at the shop and leave town on the 9th. We will stock up on groceries and liquor while waiting for the trailer to be made sound. We will have seen all our homeland cronies at least once and it is time to bugger off on another tour through the U.S.
Our proposed strategy for this year is to move fast through places we have seen before and take our time with opportunities for exploring in strange locales. We have a problem, right off the bat, with this year’s winter travel. We have taken the road east from San Diego through El Centro, Yuma and Tucson several times and we have seen almost all we want to see. We have traveled to San Antonio a few times and we have seen that country, too. Unfortunately, we want to cross out of Texas into the City of Natchez, in Louisiana, around March 20 for our initial run up the Natchez Trace. We will need to be creative in order to chew up the 80-some days along routes we have recently traversed multiple times (2015 and winter 2016/2017) between San Diego and East Texas. I’m sure we will figure out something. In my mind, we are pretty resourceful in our dotage.
To show how creative we believe we are, our first leg will be all the way from San Diego to the Anza-Borrego State Park, a blip of a drive at about 58 miles. The road there passes through some rugged coastal mountain ranges before dropping down into the desert. It isn’t like we jumped in the rig and took off on a long drive the first day. After Borrego, we’ll see where we go next.

The night before last we were on our way home from visiting our son and his wife in San Diego when our truck did a nasty. It was nighttime and we had just made the transition from poorly lighted freeway to completely unlit road when the “check engine” light came on. About 5 seconds later the display on the dash brought up a message that said “STOP SAFELY NOW.” The message should say “imminent failure” or “prepare for disaster” because about 5 seconds after the message came up, the truck stalled. Fortunately, we made it to the side of the pitch-black road before the thing quit rolling.
We called our rotten insurance carrier, let’s call them 21st Century, and started the process to activate our towing coverage. The idiots selected a towing company called Reliable Towing and allegedly dispatched them to our location. They said it would be 65 minutes before the tow truck arrived. An hour and five minutes later, the tow truck had not arrived. We started calling both the insurance company and Reliable Towing and were given numerous estimates of arrival time, all of them short. Two and a quarter hours finally elapsed and soon after that the truck arrived. The tow driver stated that he only got the dispatch 30 minutes prior to getting to our location. Numerous people have been lying. Perhaps Reliable Towing should adopt a motto like “You will be left in abject terror alongside a heavily-traveled pitch-black curve while we ignore you” or “We were only fooling when we chose our name.” If we did this again, Reliable would be our last choice.
After the maximum towing distance had been exhausted, we only had to cough up $50 in excess of our insurance coverage to get our F-250 dropped at our home Ford dealership. It was late Saturday night, long after the service department had closed, so we filled out an envelope with our poop written on it, tucked in a key and dropped it in the night box. Of course the service department is closed on Sunday as well although we did drive by to determine that they were still selling lemons to suckers. Fortunately we were then near our son’s place and he picked us up at the dealership.
This morning (Monday), we finally got ahold of the service writer and, after a few hours of patience, were rewarded with an estimate of around $1500 to fix some components that I was blissfully unaware of until today. They alleged it was something called an exhaust gas temperature sensor that must be vitally important since it shut down our in-motion truck with scant warning. We are quite happy this component did not fail while we were partway down a serpentine, steep grade with our 12.000 pound trailer pushing us along.
We have rented a spiffy-looking black Dodge Charger to get around while the truck is in the shop. It has a very perky motor and alarmingly touchy brakes but it is also has very uncomfortable seats and insufficient room for fat guys, like me. The odometer has only 81 miles on it so maybe we are the first unsatisfied drivers of this vehicle. Nothing has fallen off, like normally occurs with Mopar products, and we hope the car remains intact until we return it tomorrow.

Today we chose to become tourists in our own town by taking a spin to Coronado Island and the Tijuana River National Wildlife Refuge.
To begin – Coronado is not an island but actually a peninsula. North Island Naval Air Station shares the island….uhh, peninsula with the city of Coronado, A gorgeous bridge, built by Guy F. Atkinson a long time ago, crosses San Diego Bay so folks can get from the city of San Diego and all the other places on the east side of the Bay to Coronado where there seems to be a majority of very rich Republicans. They live in truly opulent residences with way too many square feet of living space per person, like 10,000. Not a single car was spotted without perfect, shiny paint or with a domestic automobile logo and the only folks we saw that were anything but white were going home from their jobs at the naval air station. There doesn’t even seem to be any graffiti.
After considerable time cruising around ogling the nice residential construction, we headed over to see a fine example of commercial construction at the Queen Anne architectural confection known as the Hotel del Coronado. It is a beautiful hotel formerly owned by a guy named Larry Lawrence who was temporarily buried at Arlington National Cemetery, a facility exclusively for military personnel, most killed in battle. Unfortunately for Larry’s corpse, folks found that Larry might have wanted to be buried in ground reserved for heroes but he, unfortunately, had neglected to make the commitment to join any branch of the service so they dug up his lying body and sent it elsewhere. Rich assholes are not necessarily heroes and, as a matter of fact, rarely are so they have to submit to being buried with us mortals.
After much appreciation of architecture, we left Coronado and drove down the highway and peninsula known as the Silver Strand toward Imperial Beach. When I was a kid living here, the Strand was a long, lonely stretch of road with the Pacific Ocean on one side and San Diego Bay on the other. Due to considerable advancements in dredging, the Strand is now lined with upscale resort-like communities and condos such that the bay and ocean are only simultaneously visible for about 500 feet. In Imperial Beach, where it is evident that Coronado is not an island but the tip of a long spit, we pulled over to check out the Tijuana River National Wildlife Refuge.
The Tijuana River is a foul waterway emanating from Tijuana, Mexico and flowing out through Imperial Beach, when it flows. Regardless of the quality of the alleged water in the alleged river, there are abundant birds and other aquatic creatures that have adapted to this place. The animals here may be deaf because they seem to avoid being alarmed by the continuous circling of expensive helicopters doing touch-and-go operations at the Navy’s nearby Ream Field. From the Imperial Beach side of the river, a sharp line of development on the other side of a hideous sheet pile wall can be seen. It is Tijuana. Only expanses of undeveloped land and green and white Border Patrol vehicles can be spotted on the U.S. side.
It was approaching rush hour when we left Imperial Beach but, instead of using the freeways, we took city streets to go back to our spot at Pio Pico. It actually worked and we got back home in record time. Go figure.
We took some nice house shots on today’s trip. Click here

It is nice to be back in our own neighborhood but our duties while here are looming. Our truck needs to go in for brakes and battery issues. The trailer will have to go into a shop for bearing repacks, brake checks and a slightly wonky terlet. We are old and need to go to our doctors for old people stuff.
Relatives and friends need to be visited. We need to scope out the atlas to lay out our next trip around this magnificent country. Our vehicle registrations need to be renewed. We need to smog the truck. Once all this stuff is done, we will sod off on our 2018 excursion.
I hope nothing expensive is wrong with our truck, trailer, toilet, bodies, relatives, friends, vehicle registration, emission controls or brains.
We have been very lucky with our RV space here. There are lots of amazing birds, some of which are not so quick that our old, myopic vision systems can see them. We even identified some varieties that supposedly don’t live in this area. Maybe they are lost.
We have very colorful birds all around us. To see some, click here

We won’t be able to get together with our son and his lovely wife until later in the week due to their work schedules so we were free to fool around today. Peggy has been jonesing for a restaurant in nearby Chula Vista named Zorba’s so after our showers we headed there. It is a Greek (duh!) restaurant and we were well filled at their tasty buffet.
We also took a cruise through the sewer hookup portion of Pio Pico campground and found a suitable empty space for our trailer despite management insistence that there were none available until tomorrow. We broke down what we set up yesterday and moved all our nifty camping stuff to the other side of the road. An hour or two later, we were set up in our new space so we took the rest of the day off so we could commit our efforts to drinking and loafing. We may get out and do something productive tomorrow. Maybe it will be the next day.

Yesterday we prepped our trailer for travel so we could get out of Rancho Oso near Solvang early today. We thought an early departure would help our travel plans by speeding our way through the dreadful Los Angeles traffic on our way south.
We don’t know if it actually did us any good. Traffic was okay on the back roads but the volume of cars increased dramatically once we got onto US-101. The number of cars, and the corresponding increase number of lunatic drivers, multiplied as we continued south. By the time we made it into the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles, traffic had stopped entirely. In Woodland Hills, we had to get off for fuel but we chose a terrible place because the gas station, which appeared to be right next to the freeway on the map, turned out to be deep into the maze of the city requiring considerable cursing and brake applications for maniac drivers. We finally made it back onto the freeway and crept along like a ten ton inchworm for miles until exiting 101 and heading south on the I-405. Traffic was even worse on the 405. Many foolish drivers, actually believing they were making wise decisions, held up progress by changing lanes many times in very short distances. It was shitty. Many hours later, we passed to I-605 and traffic actually started to flow in such a way that the needle on our speedometer lifted off the zero peg.
Leaving Los Angeles County took us into Orange County and the traffic was moving along at almost the speed limit. However, in San Clemente, rubbernecks became fascinated with some flashing lights on the other side of the freeway and that stopped and backed up traffic for about 6 miles. More creeping along ensued until we passed the pretty lights. We whistled through Camp Pendleton and were not required to stop for another blockage until we got to Oceanside. The San Diego drivers must not be as interested in nothing as Orange County drivers because the backup only lasted for 5 miles before we broke out into a few miles of freeway speed. Unfortunately, the Breeder’s Cup was being run at the Del Mar Racetrack and that again snafued traffic for a while. South of the track we were able to drive all the way to Pio Pico TT southeast of San Diego where we pulled in but found we would be camping in that part of the campground with no sewer hookup. We were pooped so we pulled into a pull-through and set up and figured we could deal with the sewer later. We covered around 280 miles today which is a long run for us old people.

Yesterday, other than me trying my hand at some cooking, we did nothing. It was pretty dull for the casual observer.
Today, however, we traveled into the territory east of Santa Ynez and CA-154. We turned off 154 at Armour Ranch Road and headed east into some beautiful country at the foot of the San Rafael Mountains. We didn’t expect to see a lot of wildlife because there are scads of Republicans and Rotarians and their enormous, pricey estates here but we were fooled. We saw, before leaving the campground, western bluebirds, titmice, acorn woodpeckers, Oregon black-eyed juncos and the usual doves, crows and blackbirds. Once outside the campground and on our way through Happy Valley, we saw about a dozen and a half mule deer, big murders of crows, entire cities of ground squirrels, a large tarantula, many flashy magpies, a northern harrier, wild turkeys, and some white-tailed kites hovering over their by now digested prey.
After a loop up Armour Ranch Road into Happy Valley, we returned to some back roads, Foxen and Refugio, near Buellton, and found more wildlife but it was more exotic in nature. There were some enormous cattle with great long horns but Holstein black-and-white, ostriches, bison, long-eared donkeys and a zebra. Strange livestock they have around here.
On the way back home to Rancho Oso, we pulled over in the allegedly Danish community of Solvang, famous for its cute northern European architecture and myriad shops catering to rich tourists. We have been in Solvang before and, since Peggy was at the wheel during this portion of today’s drive, she pulled right in next to a very tempting and dangerous bakery called Mortenson’s, where we spent more than we should have on pastries we absolutely should not have. The Danes believe that anything in pastry that is not chocolate or buttercream should be sugar. I am positive the stuff we took away is bad, and possibly deadly for us but we ate some anyway. It was great.
See pix. Click here