California Trippin'

Older non-surfer-girl at Ventura Beach

Debbie's brother had to go back to work after the weekend, but we'll meet him not too far off for a 10-day coach trip with the three of us. After leaving Palm Springs, Debbie and John found camp at Acton, California, in Soledad Canyon. Those last few miles down the steep canyon road were interesting, but our 61' rig (including toad) made the tight,nearly 300^o turn at the bottom with no jigging required to encounter our first Thousand Trails experience.

Thousand Trails is a large corporate entity that lends its name many local operations around the country. This is one of the deals Debbie signed us into. For a fee of (on sale, of course) somewhere around $450 we get to camp “for free” at one of the many Thousand Trails locations in the Southwest (additional fees add additional regions). Thousand Trails HQ takes our reservations and tracks our compliance with Length Of Stay & Other Requirements.

RVs in this one were not too crowded-together, for which we thank Southern California desert hilly terrain.

We have been in others that somewhat resemble a parking lot (think of the unappealing-to-us Grand Haven State Park). We broke out the grill and Debbie picked up the tongs to prepare dinner. 

The site map shows us the hundreds of spaces, and describes the services at each: 30 amp power or 50 or none at all, sewer hookup or not, water hookup or dry, etc. But the reservation is just, "yes, you can stay here, but does not reserve a specific site. So we learned to “drop the toad” (unhook our towed car) going in.  That allows one of us to do a thorough reconnoiter then radio the coach, rather than trying to maneuver the big RV up and down all the aisles. In Soledad Canyon we found a shaded spot with 30 amps and both wet services. We called it “Home Base” for a few days.

From there we launched our Honda side trips, watching the few surfers at Ventura Beach on a coolish day (no sexy bikinis in sight) as we played Beach Boys music (and remembered with a certain fondness that that Little Honda only had two wheels, three gears, and a headlight “so we can ride my Honda tonight!”) We touched the sand there, which is a West Coast First for John, who remarked his disappointment that we drove all this way to find that the Pacific smells exactly the same as the Atlantic: rotting sea critters. Since it's an aroma he grew up with next to that other ocean 3,000 miles back over there, he was happy.

Driving up the coast to Santa Barbara, Debbie's internet search found Lilly's Taqueria on a less traveled street. It was in a part of Santa Barbara that Debbie found delightful. We had been directed to try this place for a “real Mexican meal”. The restaurant was simple and small, the menu board had barely a dozen entries, but the tacos were good. Marinated Pork for each of us. We each had seconds, and still walked away having spent less than $9. A seriously good lunch: 3.7 Bry Stars.

The next day, we sucked it up and drove into downtown LA. Don't think that “drive” is any kind of active verb in this town. For all its size, California's livable space seems to be relatively small. We found all those heavily Democratic votes start crowding their Priuses and barely hanging together junkers onto the many multi-laned freeways starting way far outside the city, along with a sprinkling of fat cat Republican Porsches, Jaguars, and other foreign speedsters zipping erratically among them. Mile and miles of an average speed a little above zero. Debbie has concluded the average California driver typifies the average Californian Priority Me attitude toward life: drive where I want at the speed I want until I park where I want after turning where I want irrespective of control lights and those cute little bicycle lanes that probably served as the model for the former Grand Rapids' Mayor who declared about five years ago that fully one percent of our city's population rides bikes to work year round –and that doesn't even count the fitness focused suburbanites headed for their downtown offices.

Perspective Hint:  1% of more than 180,000 people should put almost 2,000 bikes in your way to work in the drifting snow every winter weekday in GR - I don't think so!

It's nerve wracking to have to be constantly aware of who might unaccountably jump into your space for no reason but his/her own and with no warning.  No wonder everything is jammed up.   How does anybody in this gridlocked metropolis accomplish any productivity? In one neighborhood the LA city government had posted signs declaring a “Gridlock Free Zone.” We kid you not!  It's a government mandate; gridlock simply may not exist!   We've always suspected that California's government system was the epitome of American oligarchy, but--  obviously they're all smokin' something.  We had a long time to think about that, sitting there going nowhere in the illegal gridlock.

Eventually, hours later we arrived at the Getty Center Museum where John appreciated the architecture, and Debbie joined him in appreciating the floral gardens after she (alone) gazed at Van Gogh's Irises just to say she had.

 It was a neat place.

Then we “drove” to the Griffith Observatory which has been featured in many movies and was rumored to have great exhibits. We conclude that may be true for grade school kids, as one entire room was dedicated to the premise Did you know that Our Sun Actually Is A Star? Well– Yes, we did, actually, for more than six decades now. Most all exhibits were in the same vein, including the lightning that sparked from a Tesla Coil. Wowsers; 7^th grade stuff. We sat through the Spock actor's filmed exuberance of the “Leonard Nimoy Event Horizon Theater” and after 45 minutes we concluded that anyone over 19 years of age with a good education would have wasted his or her parking fee there. Live Long and Prosper.

But––

Stepping out the Observatory's front door late in the day, Debbie and John were viscerally thrilled to observe the magical HOLLYWOOD sign to our left, stretched across the hillside west in all its Technicolor ivory glory. You'd have a picture here if the sun had been on the morning side of the valley. Sorry.

But wait! There's more!

Half an hour later, our faithless GPS navigator guided us to downtown Burbank, an unknown and near mythical place with a reputation that has intrigued the two of us ever since Rowan & Martin dragged it through the punch lines weekly on Laugh In when we were teenagers. Johnny Carson had had a go at it, too, seeing as how NBC apparently saw fit to build those studios in what was a 1960s out of the way teensy town. And, now, being there--! It's the kind of thrill we imagine somebody from Utah feels when we explain there really is a Kalamazoo and that Michigan has a Hell, Paradise, and Christmas, as well. Burbank is not a laughable little burgh these days, though. It even has a WalMart. We know because we left some money there.

But Wait! Seriously...

On the way out of town, we drove past the LA River, which usually is a drought-dry concrete sluice-way, but in this year of bountiful mountain snow actually had some water in it. The LA River's concrete bed has minor fame among some online gamers from the days of Project Torque about a decade ago when Dad kept in touch with his sons by street racing our virtual cars through it. John's guessing real street racers may have done the same, though likely without the potentially fatal but spectacular wrecks that permeated our online gaming.    

From John's perspective, life is pretty much over now: Hollywood, Burbank and the LA River all in one afternoon. Whew.

And then, almost as a lesson not to give up on life, as Debbie drove us out of LA through Palmdale, headed for our next camp near Sequoia trees, John looked out of the coach window near a traffic light to see....

Ahh... That's how they do it!