Leaving Tucson we only drove 45 miles or so south to get to the Cieneguitas National Conservation Area, just outside of Sonoita, Arizona. Christine had found reference to the spot using FreeCampsites.net and it looked like it had good potential as a free boondocking site. The plan for the next week or two was to find a quiet sunny spot where we could hang out with Jim and Julie some more while getting work done and putting the new solar setup to the test. Mission accomplished!

After scouting out the gravel roads in the Mazda we settled on a spot in the Cieneguita Camp Area, a sweet little section of the grasslands that has some established spots but looks like extremely light use. We oriented Horton broadside to the south while J&J manuevered into a spot nearby. Settled and happy!

The next day I set about crafting some tilt bars for the panels. Now, you can buy some custom bars from AM Solar, the same vendor we got the rest of our equipment from, but they will run you a pretty steep $40 / set. $40 * 4 panels = $160 worth of tilt bars…really? Thanks to a tip from Nina on her WheelingIt blog we knew that we could easily and inexpensively craft our own. Picked up some aluminum stock from Home Depot along with some bolts and wing nuts for a total cost of $40 or so and set to it. As a bonus, I was able to cut the bars and drill the holes using power tools driven off the inverter and then happily watch the solar panels push that power right back into the batteries. Sweet!

The rest of the two weeks went by pretty quickly and mostly uneventfully. Julie, C and I were doing some work during the days, while Jim busied himself learning how to build solar cookers and then putting them to use to bake goodies for everyone. At night we shared dinners and played Social Security (also called Pegs and Jokers). J&J learned how to play this down in south Texas with Julie’s parents and since we didn’t have a board Jim and Christine crafted us one out of foam and Q-Tips, turned out pretty damn awesome!

Jim and I also managed to work in a hike up to the summit of Mt. Wrightson; we could see it from the campsite and I couldn’t get it out of my head.  9,450 at the summit and the route we went was 6.75 miles to get there with 4,000 feet of elevation gain. Jim cruised on up like the mountain goat that he is, me though, it was  a bit more of a struggle. It had been quite a while since Jim had whipped both C and I into shape back in Glacier and a few months of laying around in the flatlands hadn’t really done much for my conditioning. Jim as always was a good sport about it though and kept me company during my breaks (I think he secretly likes having a fat guy on the hike). Once we made the top (some of us sooner than others) it was all worth it though, fantastic views!

The time flew by, warm sunny days and cold nights. With full tanks and no place within 30 miles to dump them we opted to pack it up and head on over to Columbus, NM and Pancho Villa State Park. Christine and I were there last year for Camp Furlong days and were looking forward to return visit and some more homemade gorditas and tamales.

Oh, the solar is a fantastic success. We left the inverter on all day powering our laptops for work, fired up the microwave at will for a latte or warming leftovers and ran the furnace to stay warm. With the tilt and the cool mornings the charger was always into the absorb stage by the time solar noon rolled around but we did fire up the microwave to see what we could put out at peak and saw 46amps flowing in. Awesome!

Also, check out Jim’s write up of our stay here.

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Time for a little catch up.

After getting our new solar system installed we moved just an hour or two down the road to Oro Valley, a Tucson area suburb. Not surprising for us but maybe for others in the park, it was snowing as we pulled in. Yep, snowing, in southern Arizona. What can I say, if we come, there will be cold. Jim and Julie understand, and even gauged how close we were to arrival by when it started snowing. But hey, it made for an amazing view coming into the valley. Our destination was Catalina State Park which sits just at the base of the Catalina mountains. Now somewhere in the back of our minds we might have known that there were going to be mountains but we weren’t prepared for the grandure of the view rolling in. Flat land with the periodic dip down for a wash as far as we could see right up until the range started reaching for the sky. Add in a little snow to decorate the peaks and we could hardly keep our eyes on the road for the last 15 to 20 miles of the drive in.

Catalina was set to both be a reunion, with our friends Jim and Julie of ImperfectDestiny, as well as a meeting with virtual friends Tricia and Keith of Geeky Explorers and Tommy and Danielle of Our Mobile Love Affair. Jim and Julie were the first fellow travelers we met way back in February of 2011, just a few weeks into the beginning of our journey. Tricia and Keith are fellow former Georgians whose blog we had been following with interest as they worked through the process of pitching all their stuff and moving into a motorhome. Tommy and Danielle were travelling last year on an extended trip when they ran into our then virtual and now real life friends Matthew and Nancy of Gigantor and the Whale (now back on the road!). Similar to how Jim and Julie told us about Matthew and Nancy, Matthew and Nancy told us about Tommy and Danielle and that is how these mobile road connections work it seems. While we were hanging out in the desert south of Ajo we found out that all three couples were going to be in Tucson at the same time and we knew what our next destination had to be.

Our five day stay turned out to be super busy. First of course there was all the time spent hanging out with friends new and old. We had dinners and happy hours and hikes in the Catalinas. We had a great time catching up with Jim and Julie and making new friends of Keith, Tricia, Tommy and Danielle. And let’s not forget getting to see our girl Star again, Samantha, Tricia and Keith’s sweet German Shepard, and “The Mountain Shih Tzu”, Tommy and Danielle’s amazing little hiker.

Then there were the errands. At this point Christine and I had been in the boonies, 100% boondocking since leaving San Diego back on January 13th. One of the things we love about Horton’s gigantic proportions is that it provides us with the ability to pack in extra supplies and food. But after four weeks out in the deserts Horton’s vast storage areas were looking pretty bare.

We set a new personal record for Costco spending, visited some of the local stores, hit up a Saturday farmer’s market and on the morning of departure made a last minute run to Bev Mo!

Just like that the time was gone and we had to clear out. Christine and Jim had put their planning heads together and found us a new potential spot south, into the grasslands (yep, grasslands) of southern Arizona. Off we go!

Editors Note: This stay was the first time ever, I think, that I didn’t actually get my camera out and make some photos. So, with the exception of the last photo of Tommy and Danielle I resorted to combing the web for other examples. The first two beautiful shots from Catalina came from Kevin on Flickr, see more of his photos on Flickr. The Mountain Shih Tzu, well, I stole that from FB but I don’t think T&D will mind. Next stop I did actually take a few..I’ll try not to let this happen again

Let me just take a short cut and say, if you are looking to justify solar from a strictly financial standpoint, forget about it. It just doesn’t work, at least not for a long time. Take for example our two weeks in Ajo just before we got our install done. We stayed on BLM land, free camping, only two costs, propane for heat, cooking and refrigeration and diesel for the generator. Out of those two costs, solar could remove only the generator. When we’re boondocking, even while working all day, we run the generator generally once per day to float and potentially for a couple of short sessions to heat something in the microwave or whatever. In our two weeks in Ajo, we burned 10 gallons of diesel, so figure that at $40. Multiply that out by 26 two week periods in the year and you pretty quickly realize that even if we boondocked every single day of the year (which we don’t) it would still take years to pay off the materials side of a solar install.

Harder to quantify though are things like quality of life or our personal environmental impact. Environmental payoff we truthfully didn’t give a lot of thought to other than that burning less diesel fuel would be a good thing. Quality of life though is an interesting one. We don’t like running the generator, its noisy, both inside for us and outside for our neighbors. It stinks outside and results in us closing all the windows on the exhaust side of the coach. Then there is the constant management of power. We would avoid using our inverter, only running it long enough to charge the laptops and then running on laptop batteries as long as we could. We thought about it frequently and if we were in a campground we would have to manage our schedule to ensure we got our one generator charge in daily. Once we added the solar system however, we found we are able to run our inverter all day long (when working), use our microwave in the morning to heat milk for our morning lattes and fire up pretty much anything we want when we want. The removal of the stress of managing power and replacing it with the ease and silence of solar was worth the cost to us.

For those interested in the technical details our installed system is as follows:

• 4 150 Watt panels (600 watts)
• Morningstar TriStar 60 amp Controller (60 gives us expansion room)
• Bogart Engineering TriMetric 2025-A Battery Monitor

Panel wiring was done with UV resistant 10 gauge wire into a combiner box on the roof. From the combiner box down to the controller we used 4 gauge wire. The controller was mounted in the bay directly beside the batteries and wires for both the controller and the battery monitor were run back up through the same route into the bedroom for the remote screens.

All equipment was purchased from AM Solar and the install was done by Marvin of Precision RV Service. We were very happy with the quality of work that Marvin did and especially thankful for the time he spent with us before and after the install to make sure we knew what we were getting and how to live with it.

All of this was inspired and guided by Nina and Paul of WheelingIt. If you are interested in doing something similar I highly recommend Nina’s four part series of posts on their process, we leaned heavily on their experience and resources. Thanks Nina!

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After leaving Quartzsite we made a beeline down to some BLM land located just south of Ajo, AZ. Ajo is a quiet little town just north of Organ Pipe National Monument. There is a large mine in town that is no longer operational and its obvious that the town has seen better times. But there is a pretty good grocery in town, a nice little bakery with fresh doughnuts and best of all a small little shop that sells homemade tortillas bagged up and still warm!

Our first week in the area was really quiet. After arriving and spending one night in an easy access spot just off of Darby Wells Road we went out scouting and found a super spot, more private and isolated but still with strong 3G. We settled in and spent our days working, reading and enjoying the sun. We took daily walks wandering out across the desert and spent our nights huddled inside hiding from the illegal activity

The second week was a bit more active since one of our new friends from Quartzsite, Kirk, came by to set up camp with us for a few days. Kirk of course brought along the famous desert Tiki Bar so we set it up in the middle of our camp area and made sure to enjoy a few evening happy hours. The Super Bowl was a bit of an adventure, we first tried to go to a small casino down the road that had proudly boasted to me on the phone of their three TVs. That proved to be a bust but we eventually found the Ajo bowling alley that had a nice little set up so we got to enjoy the second half there. You can see Kirks take on the excitement here.

After Kirk packed up and headed back to the snow at home in Colorado we finished out our stay much as we began it, quiet days of sun and warm weather with a mix of work and relaxation. We did make one day trip down into Organ Pipe and enjoyed touring around there a bit. If we get back to the area though I think we’ll stay down in the park a few nights to better enjoy it without the trouble of driving all the way in. After a great two weeks+ we packed up and headed out for Casa Grande where we planned to meet up with a solar installer to finally pull the trigger on adding some panels to Horton.

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We’ve just settled in to a relatively empty piece of desert south of Ajo Arizona after a couple of weeks of overload at the Rubber Tramp Redezvous in Quartzsite. For the past year we’ve been travelling around, mostly by ourselves. We spent a couple of weeks with Jim and Julie back in February, then some time caravaning with Chris and Michal through New Mexico in March, then a month with Jim and Julie again in July before meeting up with Matthew and Nancy in September. Beyond those encounters though, this has been a time spent mostly with just ourselves. The last two weeks at RTR were nothing like that. Not only was it Quartzsite during its busiest time of the year, but there were all these interesting new people to spend time with.

We initially read about RTR last January when were were new to the road and spending our time in south Florida. I remember thinking at the time that it looked like fun and that it would be nice to be out there in the desert when the event rolled around again in 2012. Despite all our unplanned adventures, or maybe because of them, that worked out.

The Rubber Tramp Redezvous is an annual event and this year marked only its second happening. The group of people involved however, have a much longer history. The genesis of the group started with a Yahoo group centered around living in vans, VanDwellers as they say. That group still exists but has spread out onto a forum hosted at CheapRVLiving. We found out about the group through Jenn and Johnny of HitekHomeless, a couple of former technology geeks who before us escaped their cubes and hit the road. Well before we had departed on our own adventure, their blog was one of the ones that provided us with inspiration.

Jenn and Johnny were attending again this year and since we had recently been working on a side project together we thought it would be a good opportunity to meet in person. We also were interested in the event itself and despite being nervous about our acceptance in a group of people centered around living in vans we were determined to give it a shot. We shouldn’t have worried, the group is open to all sorts of road dwellers, full time or not, in vans or cars or trailers or class Cs or even a giant beast like Horton. And really, despite the differences in living accommodations, many of the challenges remain the same and the solutions are applicable across vehicles, they just differ in scale.

The group was set up in a large open portion of the Dome Rock BLM camping area. Most of the crowd was clustered together, but knowing that many had solar and we had our generator we set ourselves up a bit further away so that we could run our generator without causing anyone any issues. That turned out to be a good decision for all I think, as we definitely didn’t bother anyone and we were free to fire up to charge batteries or heat dinner without feeling any guilt or stress. Our location did however set us apart from the group and I regretted that a bit.

The gathering also coincided with the annual Quartzsite Rock and Gem and Big Tent RV show. During that event the population of Quartzsite swells to some insane number and the campgrounds and BLM land fill with people in all sorts of living arrangements. We drove up from Yuma so we had to come through the large LTVA areas south of town as well as driving through the middle of the madness itself. One look was all that Christine needed, once we were set up she declared herself content and refused to go back in to town! I ventured in a few times during our stay, once before the big show started and then a couple more times after. What was it like? Madness. People, people and more people. Lots of traffic. Amazing piles of things I can’t believe anyone buys. More rocks than I ever thought to see, vendors hawking all the latest kitchen gadgets, it was crazy. I had fun….sorta

The star of the show though was of course RTR. There were morning and evening walks where folks with and without dogs took long strolls through the desert. Not only were these good for getting to know the other walkers they also provided a reason to get me out and walking in the morning, something that has lapsed since we lost the boys. Most mornings at 10 there would be a presentation on some aspect of living on the road. Whether it was solar (which we missed, bah!), cooking, water conservation, workamping or visiting Mexico for inexpensive services or just fun. All were interesting and certainly not limited in application to van dwelling. I particularly enjoyed the sessions on cooking and water conservation and the report on travelling to Mexico (particularly Baha). I think we picked up a few tricks on the water side that should allow us to extend our stays beyond the two weeks that we’ve been managing up to this point. There were nightly and sometimes morning campfires, community meals and even a tiki bar hosted by our new friend Kirk. Kirk had solar and wind powered everything and that LED lit palm tree above his bar was a beacon to Christine and I.

The event is about the people, both long time online acquaintances getting to see each other in person as well as lots of new attendees like ourselves. We made many new friends and met many interesting people with all sorts of  back stories. Some we’re similar stories to our own but definitely not everyone. It was a lot of fun, overload or not, as testified by our planned week long stay that went double that. We’re not sure what the next year will bring to us but we hope it will include the opportunity to be in Quartzsite once again for RTR 2013.

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So the rest of the stay in San Diego was thankfully less dramatic than the first five days. Once we got back home to Horton we settled in to rest up and recuperate from the hospital stay. It was a pretty quiet two weeks, we both caught up on sleep, got out for some short walks to measure Christine’s progress, did some research and even, gasp, got some work done. Yeah, that’s right…both of us…working!

We did manage to have some excitement though. Paul and Nina (aka WheelingIt) were in town and invited us along to a New Years Eve celebration they had scheduled with some other travelers who also happened to be in town. As a result we were able to meet RV travelers Bree and Matt (Operation Tally-Ho) and Yair and Ayo (Our Take on Freedom) as well as their friends Ruthie and Mel. Bree was the planner for the night and started us out with sushi at their favorite spot in San Diego. Then she stepped it up a notch and unveiled a scavenger hunt that she had put together, coordinated with a cool mobile app. We broke up into teams and took off around town looking for mechanical bulls, bald women, dead people (or their outlines), that sort of thing. Once we found an item, simply take a picture on your phone and upload. From within the app you could see your progress measured against the other teams, pretty cool. We all met back up afterwards to compare scores and ring in the new year. We had a great time…thanks Bree!

We also made it over to Paul and Nina’s one night for a fabulous dinner and time to sit and talk and get to know each other in a format other than blog posts and twitter feeds. We also ventured out to the coast one day when high surf was predicted to see if we could watch some surfers.

Beyond that, well, like we said, it was pretty quiet. We finally pulled up stakes on the 13th, Christine’s second birthday celebrated on the road. We still don’t know next steps on Christine’s health, so while we wait for some appointments to get set up we decided to head back into the desert. Next up, Quartzsite and the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous!

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Well, the last post left off with us packing up in Anza-Borrego and heading into San Diego. There was a little background missing from that post however. You see, part of the reason we had spent so much time back in Joshua Tree was because Christine had been making some trips into Rancho Mirage to see a cardiologist. She had been experiencing increasing shortness of breath and a rapid pulse, beginning on uphill hikes and progressing to happening even on a short walk around Horton. So, we were going through the somewhat long process of testing first driving in from Joshua Tree and then driving in from our spot in Anza-Borrego. We had decided that we wanted some more information and so made a trip into San Diego on Friday to see an internal medicine doctor. He was concerned enough to refer us to another cardiologist and send us over to the hospital at 4 0′clock on the Friday before Christmas to get an echocardiogram.

We rushed over through San Diego traffic to get to the hospital before they shut down and got the test done. The cardiologist called Christine immediately after the test, which didn’t show any problems, to give her some details, schedule a angiogram and pass along his cell phone number. Cell phone…really? That made two doctors in a couple of hours who had given us a cell phone number to call them on. In our experience, a pretty unheard of scenario.

We made the trip back to the desert with the intention of moving in to the San Diego area Saturday morning so that we could be closer in for an appointment with the cardiologist on Monday and the angiogram on Tuesday. Things didn’t go quite like we planned. We did manage to make it in to a San Diego area park but from there we went straight into the hospital to get Christine admitted. Her symptoms had really started to go downhill and just walking from the front to the back of Horton while we were pulling out of our spot was enough to put her in a lot of distress. Thus began our five days of sun and no fun in San Diego (though to be fair we might just call it six cause that Friday of appointments and hospital visits wasn’t much fun either!)

The next four days would be a haze of fear and fatigue with the occasional humorous and frequently disgusting moments provided by Christine’s various hospital roomates thrown in. After we got settled in our first room the doctors and nurses descended. It was at this point that we learned our first lesson.

Lesson 1: Brent is a wuss! (Especially when it comes to needles)

You see, I knew that whenever I gave blood I had a tendency to fade to black. I had always assumed that my reaction was due to the loss of blood, not the sight of a needle rooting around inside my arm seeking blood. Standing by Christine’s bed watching first the blood sucker pulling vials and then another nurse root around trying to get an IV in it became clear what the real problem was. Luckily, despite the full sweat, fading vision and loss of hearing I managed to make it to the foot of C’s bed before I hit the floor!

Christine was later hauled off for some more testing while I worked on trying to get her into a room with no roommate. All the rooms, except for the isolation rooms, had two beds so any respite was likely to be temporary but anything to get away from the alarm on her current roommate’s sleep apnea machine.

Lesson 2: C is grumpy and mean in hospitals!

Once we got moved into the new room C settled down to sleep and I crawled in to the tiny hospital bed to keep her company. She subsequently kicked me out indicating that sleeping with 8 wires coming off her body was bad enough without having to share her scant space with me! Second lesson learned.

Christmas day and Monday were for the most part just waiting days. All the tests that Christine had had up to this point had shown a healthy heart and lungs and no visible blood clots. That left the doctors thinking it was most likely going to be Primary Pulmonary Hypertension, a condition with grim outcomes. Her angiogram was scheduled for Tuesday morning and would definitively determine whether it was PPH or not. In those two days of waiting we learned several new things.

Lesson 3: Brent is a weepy little bitch!

Faced with the doctors high percentage assessment that we were looking at PPH I found out what its like to fully consider the loss of the person you love most in this world. It is simply terrifying.

Lesson 4: Hospital food is every bit as bad as you hear it is

Between Christine and I there was a close race between what was the worst meal there. I tended to think it was the meatloaf with the gelatinous, slightly opaque brown gravy sitting there jiggling on top of it. Christine, who actually had to eat this stuff and not just taste it like I did, went for the chicken salad with some weird orange substance in it. There was one pretty good meal for Christmas lunch, turkey and dressing, as well as some pretty decent salads and good fresh fruit. The rest was bagged rolls, bagged apple slices, soft overcooked vegetables, tepid water for tea, lemonade served in a container that too closely resembled a urine specimen cup and sad little plates of egg whites. None of that was helped by the total absence of salt since they had her on a cardiac diet.

Lesson 5: Hospital roommates are…undesirable

Christine went through three before we lucked out and got moved into isolation. It’s a hospital, so of course, everyone is sick and everyone is going through something, so sympathy and compassion are certainly called for. All that doesn’t mean that you want to share a room with them however. Two of the roommates were brief. The first was an old lady with sleep apnea. She herself was perfectly pleasant but her machine was LOUD. There was the constant sound of air as it blew air at her which was one thing but when she would stop breathing it would set off a loud alarm that was maybe three feet from Christine’s head, not so nice.

Then there was the lady that neither of us actually saw. She arrived somewhere around 3 AM Tuesday morning and immediately set to yelling at the nurses for her pain medication. That went on for some unknown period of time before she got up and apparently just walked on out of the hospital.

The roommate that Christine had for the longest period was an old lady, we’ll call Kitty, suffering from diabetes and kidney failure who could no longer get up and move around on her own. Keep in mind these rooms are pretty darn small, Christine was against the outside wall in both which was definitely the better bed to have since it gave her some measure of privacy and a view out the window. Going in and out of the room as well as going over to the bathroom required you to walk past the other bed in the room, so that person had much less privacy. So, we were lucky. But, the area was small and the curtain between the two beds was probably not much more than two feet away from Christine.

Kitty was an interesting creature. She was alternately mean and then creepily nice to the nurses. The nurses by the way, were saints. Kitty was never happy with her meals and would whine and complain to the nurses until she got something that she wanted. She needed to go to the bathroom frequently and required help to do so, sometimes she didn’t make it. So the nurses were doing what nurses do, helping her out as best they could, moving her or cleaning her up but that didn’t stop her from snapping at them. Like I said, she was very sick and we both definitely felt sympathy for her, but still, having some of that going on few feet away was less than pleasant.

Kitty was also a little funny though. She didn’t like the leads to her heart monitor and so was constantly pulling them off. This was less funny in the middle of the night when her activity resulted in nurses constantly coming in and out to put them back on but during the day when we could hear the tearing sound of them being removed and see them plop down on to the floor mere minutes after a nurse had put them back on her, well, that was what we had for entertainment.

Kitty’s most memorable moment and the origin of her nickname was when she had one of her flips from mean to nice. She had just finished snapping at one of the nurses and was whining about wanting a back rub to another when a new nurse came on shift. This nurse was in the process of giving her her back rub when in a creepy little voice she called out….”Kitty likes that!”. We just sat on the other side of our little curtain and giggled.

Lesson 6: Having MRSA history can be a positive thing

The morning of the angiogram we had a new nurse come on that noticed that Christine had a MRSA infection several years ago. This had been noted the first night but since it was so long ago no one was worried about it. Our new nurse and hero Tracy knew that despite the time period protocol required Christine to be in isolation. From then on getting in and out of the room was a bit more of a pain for everyone but guess what, no more roommates for Christine! We spent the day of the test on our own and that night got moved into an isolation room where I even got a cot and was able to just spend the night there.

Relief

Happily for us all, Christine’s angiogram results came back negative for PPH!!! Relief and happy tears all around (and an I told you so! from Christine). We spent the rest of Tuesday and most of Wednesday recovering from the procedure (lots of pain and subsequent exhaustion for C), meeting with the doctors including one new one and trying out a new med to alleviate some of her symptoms. Tuesday night we celebrated with pizza smuggled in to the cardiac ward (doctor ordered her to increase sodium intake so hey…I was just following orders!) and Christine was finally able to get some decent (for a hospital) sleep. Late Wednesday afternoon they turned us loose since with the elimination of PPH the doctor felt she was no longer in a sudden death scenario.

Christines symptoms persist and we’ve still got work ahead of us to try and determine what’s going on but we’re ecstatic to have PPH ruled out and to be home in Horton. We’ll spend at least another couple of weeks here in San Diego meeting with her doctors before determining what our next steps will be.

Oh, really can’t say enough for our experience with Dr. Brunsting and Dr. Phillips, they are incredible. Also, the nurses at Scripps Mercy were super compassionate and caring during our entire stay, amazing people doing an extremely difficult job.

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We left the Joshua Tree area and headed southwest towards Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. Yep, we thought we would be heading further east, over to Arizona weeks ago but here we were, moving west again. First stop was into an RV park for a couple of nights. We had tanks to empty, tanks to fill, laundry to wash and needed to make a trip to the San Diego suburbs to pick up a package that could only be delivered Fed Ex.

Our first day into San Diego was, well, unlike what we had been led to expect from San Diego. It was cold, very cold in the mountains going in, and very, very wet. We made our required package pick up before heading over to Stone Brewery for lunch. We ate in the brewery’s restaurant and enjoyed a beer. Christine enjoyed her food, mine was far less than stellar and overall the place was a little too fancy and pricey for us. The beer was fine, honestly though, outside of a couple of their brews, we aren’t huge Stone fans. We were a little bummed out so skipped on the tour and headed out for a few more errands.

During the errands though we noticed a couple of things. One, there was a chance of snow in the mountains that we needed to cross to get back to Horton. Two, there was another brewery just down the road that we thought might just pick up our mood. We found Lost Abbey on Google Maps so we didn’t even check to see if they were open before heading on over. When we arrived at the warehouse, the door was open and there were no hours posted so we headed on in and found the bar. After standing for a bit a guy on a forklift stopped, informed us they were closed but said he would be happy to pour us a beer. We chatted him up a bit and got our brews before he jumped back on the forklift and went to work. It wasn’t until 10 minutes later that we noticed that the picture of the brewery’s head brewer posted behind the bar bore a striking resemblance to our savior on the forklift. Cool! We hung around a bit watching people work while we sipped our beer before heading back over the mountains to Horton, properly cheered up from our otherwise uncheery visit.

After two nights we bailed out of our RV park and staked out a prime boondocking spot overlooking the Carrizo Badlands. We scoped it out during the drive into San Diego, ensuring one, that we could get Horton down the single track dirt road that led to it and two that we would be able to pull a decent Verizon signal from the spot. Everything worked out as planned and we parked with a private view out over the badlands and Canyon Sin Nombre.

While in our location we had great sunrises and sunsets. We had snow on the mountains behind us, were buzzed by Navy helicopters working their nap-of-the-earth skills, including a double formation at night, we both got a little work done and in general just enjoyed the peace and quiet.

We also made another trip into San Diego to meet up with new friends Maria and Brian from The Roaming Pint. We had a good afternoon getting to know them as well as sampling another area brewery, Coronado Brewing Company.

We bailed out of our spot on Christmas Eve and headed on in to San Diego.

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Today marks the beginning of our fourth week in the Colorado Desert just outside the southern entrance to Joshua Tree National Park. We arrived here three weeks ago intending to stay through the Thanksgiving day crowding of the parks before moving on towards Arizona. Somehow, those few days turned into the last three weeks. We’ve moved Horton twice, once to go get water and a second time with the intent of moving on but ended up getting water once again and coming right back to our spot. I guess something about it just keeps pulling us back.

Its not hard to figure out what we like here. We spent the previous three weeks struggling down the California coast trying to find available and affordable campgrounds and this place is free. We spent the previous two months moving, frequently, this location allows us to relax and sit still for a while. Not since we left the Bozeman area back in July have we been so completely isolated and it’s a grand feeling to open the windows in the morning, step out the door for a walk or spend the day sitting in the sun reading and not see another person. There is a family of coyotes living near by that we see frequently. There are jackrabbits bounding about during our walks. There are hummingbirds buzzing by feeding on the flowering shrubs. Almost exclusively sunny and warm weather, endless blue skies and bright stars at night. What’s not to like?

Despite all that, I THINK we’re going to finally pull out tomorrow and move down to Anza-Borego State Park for what should be a similar experience in a different location. Its been a good time here though. We spent a little time in Joshua Tree driving through and admiring the scenery. C hasn’t been feeling up to hiking so just a short visit really. Our good friend Greg was strangely spending two days working at a motorcycle track 25 miles down the road from us and so was able to become the second official guest in Horton for a couple of nights. We made several trips into the Indio, Thousand Palms, Rancho Mirage area for shopping and an afternoon movie. We satisfied our curiosity about what LA looks like up close. We’ve veg’d out and had Breaking Bad and The Wire marathons. We’ve rolled through several books and we’ve discovered that we can get by boondocking while working (yes, C has been doing some work, Sugar Mama!).

Great quiet times!

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After leaving the Monterey area our plan was to make the drive down to San Luis Obispo where we would stay for a few days, long enough to see the town, visit the coast and to arrange a trip down to Ventura to visit our friend Greg. Before we left C spent a lot of effort looking around the area trying to find a good campground that wasn’t ridiculously expensive and we had settled on El Chorro Regional Park. Their website listed that they had some walk in sites and that there was plenty of availability. The truth however, was not so sunny. Once we got there we found that while there were lots of open spots, of the reduced set that would fit Horton every single one of them had incoming reservations. Bummer!

We got set up in one that we could have for a couple of nights and settled in until we started hearing noise from the softball fields near by. Wandered down there in the dark and hung around watching a couple of different rec games being played. The next morning we drove down to Morro Bay and got to watch a group of otters playing in the waters just off shore. C was feeling a bit under the weather so she rested up for the rest of the day while I ran into SLO for some errands. While I was there I saw that their weekly farmer’s market was being set up so I hung around to browse through that a bit before leaving. Seemed to be quite the event there, lots of fresh produce like you would expect but also a ton of food stalls, several with large portable wood fire grills set up. Pretty impressive market and liked what I saw of the downtown. Hope to stay a bit longer next time.

We hadn’t managed to get in touch with Greg for a meet up the next day so with our checkout deadline staring us in the face we decided to brave Friday afternoon LA traffic and head on over towards Joshua Tree. The trip from SLO to some BLM land just outside the entrance to Joshua Tree was over 300 miles away, a much further drive than we tend to do normally. Add to the distance the fun of skirting through Los Angeles area traffic and we knew it was gonna be a long day.

We had read on a few forums that some people recommend getting up in the middle of the night to tackle LA so we gave that some consideration. In California you can park in a rest stop for 8 hours so we figured we could pick one on the way down, stop until 10 PM or so, drive through to the other side to another rest stop and get some sleep. After watching traffic maps for a couple of days we decided that wasn’t really necessary, there were little groups of red, lots of yellow but really, it didn’t look that bad. In reality, it kinda was.

In some ways we were right, the amount of full on stop and go, red, traffic was not all that much. Sure we had slow downs, and yes we stopped a few times but it wasn’t like being stuck on an Atlanta Interstate during rush hour after an accident. The problem though is that the traffic, even when moving, is crazy heavy. People everywhere, coming on, coming off, constantly boxed in by cars and semis. The lanes are super narrow and the on ramps are nearly non-existent. The kicker though, is that it goes on FOREVER. Seriously, from well outside the city until we got all the way over and back on to 10, probably 100 miles or so, it was non stop heavy traffic. No rest stops, no where to pull over and take a breather, constant.

Once we finally got clear and on to I-10 it was pretty smooth sailing traffic wise. Then the wind kicked in! Luckily the lanes were wider but man, did it start to blow. When we got to Thousand Palms, 60 miles or so from our planned stop, we saw a sign for a Flying J and decided it was time to call it quits. The bad side of the Flying J stop was that they didn’t have RV parking away from the semis so it wasn’t a noisy and not really restful night. The good side was that we found we were only a few miles away from Paul and Nina over at WheelingIt. We’ve been following Nina’s blog since early on in our trip and while we were close to them in Oregon we hadn’t yet managed to cross paths. C was still feeling bad so only I got to go visit but had a great time spending a couple of hours getting to know each other in person. Hoping we’ll get to meet up again later on!

The next morning, we fueled up, topped off the propane and took a short trip down the road to find a place to park in the desert.