Chapter 14: Tucson to San Diego
December 14, 1997 - January 10, 1998
12/14 We're still in Tucson. The Arizona Desert Museum is huge and wonderful - sort of museum, botanical garden, and zoo all mixed up together. We spent parts of yesterday and today there. We were surprised to read that it is a private non-profit corporation and receives no governmental support. They have been experimenting (successfully, in my view) with "invisible fences" - not the kind that require the animals to wear a radio collar. One kind, for small animals, uses a thin matte-black stainless steel mesh fence, supported on steel posts shaped like typical branches of desert plants. I actually had to search for this as I walked along - it really is nearly invisible in most light conditions. They have just opened a javelina exhibit surrounded only by this kind of fence. Another kind of fence, for large animals, is several electrified horizontal strands of black wire. It appeared to be attached to random branches of nearby ocotillo plants. Later in reading about it, I discovered that these are really steel imitation-ocotillo branches, artfully added to real plants. They are building a large area for a pack of Mexican wolves inside such a fence
12/15 Mt. Lemmon, 18 miles north of Tucson as the crow flies, several times that far by twisty mountain road, is 9157 feet high. The day dawned crisp and clear, promising great views, so we spent most of the day driving to the mountain and back, stopping at the frequent pullouts to enjoy the views. These aren't big mountains, but they are interesting - very craggy, with many interesting rock formations. As we climbed, the desert foliage gradually gave way to scrub oak, and then to pines, due both to the higher rainfall and the lower temperatures. Above 7000 feet, the ground was snow-covered, although just a few inches. At a little over 8000 feet, we had to give up. From there on, the roads were either closed or were narrow and icy - not negotiable without 4-wheel drive and aggressive tires or chains.
12/16 We'll leave Tucson this morning. There's plenty more to do and see here, but "we have promises to keep, and miles to go before ..."
Sitting here reading the Tucson newspaper (Arizona Daily Star), we've realized how much we learn about the general attitudes in a city by reading their newspaper. We've already formed strong opinions about which of the Sunbelt cities we'd be willing to live near. The Tucson paper is very parochial - very little national and international news. The business section is almost non-existent, and has almost none of the national and international financial news. The sports page had nothing on the international tennis and world cup soccer scene. The local news deals with the price of copper - a major industry here. Interestingly, the Peanuts comic strip is in Spanish, all the other comics are in English. Why?
San Antonio had a much thicker paper, but also a much less parochial attitude. It was full of news of politics, sports, business and finance, from around the world. It's a bigger place, but that's not the whole difference. This paper had twice as many cartoons as most others, and two crossword puzzles (a major bonus for Helen). Houston had endless pages of news about the oil industry. In Baton Rouge, the lead story was about a new type of sugar cane harvesting machine. Some papers have detailed weather information, including a graphic showing the overall national weather picture. Others have only very abbreviated and local weather information.
One thing we keep forgetting when selecting an RV Park is to check the location of the local airport. Our current park is just a mile from Tucson International Airport and just a few miles from an active Air Force Base. It can be entertaining (for a while) to watch groups of pilot trainees practicing synchronized low-speed Immelman turns in their jet trainers, but the thunder of widebody jets taking off every few minutes and the abrupt blasts of afterburner noise on the fighters quickly gets annoying - particularly at 4 AM.
We got a late start from Tucson and headed west on I-10, finally turning off on to I-8 before Phoenix, after following I-10 all the way from Florida. The desert changes as we drive. Today, it got progressively drier, and the variety of foliage diminished greatly. Except for the higher elevations near mountains, western Arizona had almost no cactus, just low scrubby bushes and occasional tufts of grass. As we approached the Colorado River (the Arizona-California border), the desert began to show evidence of past cultivation - mile after mile of really barren ground, with faint linear signs of having been plowed, separated by decrepit irrigation ditches, often with a big "for sale" sign. Why has this land been abandoned? Perhaps the water supply has diminished? Then, as we got closer to the river, the fields were currently under irrigation - green as far as we could see in all directions. Many of the crops were unidentifiable from the road, but we did see iceberg lettuce being harvested - a seemingly endless supply stretching off to the horizon.
We stopped for the night at Yuma, Arizona. There are miles of RV Parks, some of them with space for 1000 RV's, most of them nearly full. This one little town must have a significant fraction of all the RV's in the country. Looking through the directories, we found that very few of the RV Parks had comfortably large sites. One would think, with all the hundreds of square miles of desert in all directions, that land would be cheap and sites would be spacious, but it ain't so. At Blue Sky RV Park, we finally found a pull-through site long enough for our rig, but barely wide enough to open our door without hitting the adjacent rig. (We completely forgot about KOFA Ko-Op, an Escapees park about 7 miles south of Yuma. We'll check it out on the way back through here)
12/17 Most of the morning was spent looking through directories and trying to select an RV park in San Diego. We finally chose DeAnza Harbor Resort, on the north shore of Mission Bay, and called for reservations. They had plenty of sites for one night, but when we asked to reserve a site from now through Jan 2, they had only two sites available (out of a total of 250). After they assured us that we could cancel anytime, for a modest cancellation fee, we went ahead and booked a site for 16 days, sight unseen.
Leaving Yuma, we crossed the Colorado River and entered California, and were soon driving through a region of huge sand dunes and almost no plant life. For the first half of the trip, I-8 stays within about 10 miles of the Mexican border, sometime less than half a mile from the border. The Border Patrol presence was obvious, even to the extent of a roadblock on I-8, where they looked over the occupants of each vehicle.
We came back into irrigated farmland in the Imperial Valley, and saw water being used almost profligately - huge sprinklers throwing water high in the air and some fields flooded until water was standing on the surface (it didn't look like rice). The population density is very low - very few towns, none big, and almost no dwellings outside of the few towns.
As we moved west, we climbed through a substantial range of mountains, with the road topping out at 4100 feet above sea level (we had been less than 100 feet above sea level near the Colorado River.) The many continuous miles of 6% grade were our first serious test of our towing ability. The truck performed nicely, pulling strongly going up (easily maintaining 55 mph in third gear), and the exhaust brake did its job coming down. In third gear, I touched the brakes lightly on a couple of the steepest sections, when the speed edged over 65 mph. Dropping to second gear would have held us to a slower speed than we wished to go.
San Diego County is huge - the eastern border is near the high point of the mountains, half way across the state.
DeAnza Harbor Resort is quite pleasant. The sites are quite small (ours is 25' x 42', constrained by fences on three sides), but that's to be expected in the middle of a big city. It's clean and quiet, and has competent, friendly, management. Our weekly rate is $20.80/night - not bad, considering the location. We're on a small peninsula sticking out into Mission Bay, so there is water on three sides. Our trailer is about 200 feet from the western shoreline, where we have a nice view. The sites are completely paved with blacktop, but there are lots of evergreen trees, softening the "parking lot" image.
12/20 Balboa Park is a nice surprise in the middle of a big city - all kinds of neat stuff. It's 1.5 miles square. I can't think of another city that even comes close to this kind of green space in the central city. There are 11 museums within the park. We wandered into the Timken Museum of Art. It's tiny as art museums go, but they have some nice things, nicely displayed. Many of the buildings are quirky relics dating from the Panama-California International Exposition in 1915-16, Moorish and Spanish Renaissance-style exhibit halls. The municipal gymnasium has a huge and well-maintained gym floor, shared by many activities. We'll go back and do some of the other museums, and of course the zoo, after our daughter Leata arrives, next week. Later, we circumnavigated San Diego Bay - across the bridge to Coronado, down the miles of beach along the strand, almost to Mexico, then back up I-5.
12/21 After dark, we drove up to a park at the highest point of La Jolla, a few miles north of our trailer. Nice view of San Diego extending in three directions - the bays to the south, the coastline stretching off into the distance north and south, the continuous river of lights moving along I-5, and the dark loom of mountains against the sky glow in the distance.
12/23 The Flower Fields at Carlsbad Ranch is a mildly interesting stop - and could be very worth while at certain times of the year. Tens of acres of flowers are grown on a hillside, facing the ocean. These are being propagated for wholesale distribution. Only one species was in bloom at this time of year. A mile or so away, we passed, but couldn't enter, 35 acres of greenhouses, where most of the poinsettias sold in this country get their start - they are shipped as vegetative cuttings to other growers all over the country, where they are then grown to market size.
Nearby, Quail Botanical Gardens proved to be far more interesting. They have extensive, and beautifully displayed, collections of cactus, aloe, fruit and nut trees, palms, and a whole array of other types of plants from around the world, specializing mostly in species that can live in semi-arid warm climates, but also including water-loving plants in some sections. One area had a sizeable artificial waterfall, cascading 100 feet or more down a steep hillside into a series of ponds, almost buried in tropical vegetation. We didn't leave until it was too dark to see, and Helen wants to go back there for another day.
12/24 Zoo day! We were there for five hours, tired ourselves out walking, and didn't see anywhere near all of it. We probably don't need to say much about it, since it's world-famous. This is the place to go to see giant pandas, kiwi birds, and many other very rare species. They have a major breeding program for quite a few endangered species. There is at least one species for which every known specimen in the world can trace its ancestry back to this zoo. The animal display areas are mostly built into the sides of the canyons that meander through the zoo grounds, surrounded by well-maintained dense and varied tropical foliage
12/25 Christmas dinner with Dan and Leata at the Catamaran Hotel, located on the west side of Mission Bay, on the narrow strip of land between the bay and ocean. They had a special Christmas buffet - one of the best spreads of food we've seen. A nice view of the bay and cheerful competent service made this a wonderful place to enjoy a family dinner. After dinner, we spent an hour on an imitation Mississippi stern-wheel riverboat touring part of the bay, just at sundown - a pretty sight. This portion of the bay is mostly wide sand beaches in front of beautifully landscaped luxury hotels, a huge yacht club, and some condominiums.
12/26 Another afternoon at Balboa Park. Dan and Dave spent the entire time in the Aerospace Museum. It's fairly small. The collection of planes is mostly limited to small single-engine planes from about 1918-1940, and many of these are reproductions. The entire collection was lost in a fire in about 1978, and the museum is slowly re-acquiring a new collection. But the amount of background material - small exhibits, analysis of people and companies in the industry, etc, was large and we could easily have spent longer. I particularly liked the focus on engines. Several exhibits showed the development of a particular type of engine over a decade or more. It appears that the overall advancement of aircraft was paced more by engine power-to-weight ratios and reliability than by development of the airplane itself. Given enough power, anything will fly - as evidenced by the last of the WW2 Navy fighters, which could climb straight up with no need for wings, until they ran out of fuel or air.
Helen and Leata wandered through several of the smaller museums - apparently nothing memorable. At dusk, we all saw the Omnimax film "Alaska" (another of those fuzzy wide-angle films shown on a planetarium dome.)
12/27 Mexico Day! We drove to the border and took the shuttle bus to downtown Tijuana. This might have been a mistake. Coming back, at 5 p.m., we had to stand in a long line waiting for a bus, then got only standing room on the bus, then stood while the bus worked its way through a long, nearly stationary, line, to customs. We could have walked it faster, with probably no more time on our feet. Central Tijuana is a crowded, busy, cheerful, reasonably clean, tourist bazaar. We were constantly hassled by street vendors - old men selling gold necklaces, little children selling candy, barkers trying to lure us into the bars and stores. Every street corner had a burro, painted with zebra stripes, hooked to a brightly colored wooden-wheeled cart. The idea is that you sit on the zebra, wearing various scraps of peasant costume that are provided, and have a photograph taken. They didn't seem to be getting much business. The price of everything is negotiable. A few blocks away from this central area, the quality of the streets and buildings degenerates and it quickly became obvious that we were in the Third World. We found the public market, a large, mostly open-air area of small shops selling all manner of goods, and enjoyed walking through. There were many fewer tourists - this seemed to be mostly for natives. Little of the produce was labeled, and we had fun trying to identify it. The dried peppers were in huge mounds, overflowing out on to the sidewalk - dozens of varieties at low prices. We saw large quantities of prickly pear fruit and leaves, papayas, and various unidentifiable fruits. The oranges and grapefruit were imported from the U.S.!
12/28 Aquarium Day! We went early, and it was a good thing we did - it got quite crowded later. The Birch Aquarium is at Scripps Oceanographic Institution, on the U.C. San Diego campus. As part of a working research institution, this aquarium had quite a different flavor that others we've toured, presenting ongoing research as well as tanks of pretty fish. It's short on glitz - the tanks are small compared to the new mega-tourist attractions like Baltimore - but the information density is high. A museum of the early days of oceanography is adjacent to the aquarium. This has early instruments, models of the early and current Scripps research vessels, and an interesting tutorial on research methodology, oriented toward elementary through high school classes. Their most amazing research "ship" is a slender 390-foot long vessel which is towed to a research site, and then rotated from horizontal to vertical. One end is weighted and sinks 300 feet underwater. The other end contains the research facilities and rises 90 feet in the air, converting from a boat to a very stable stationary buoy.
I enjoyed watching a real-time monitoring station for the California network of earthquake measuring instruments. While I was standing there watching, an earthquake occurred, inland 100 miles or so. It appeared that there typically are a dozen or so each day in southern California - mostly with a magnitude near Richter 2.0. A continuously updated CRT display showed the location of each, and any one even could be selected from a list of recent events for a detailed display of information.
Later, we drove along the coast from the university through La Jolla. What appeared to be a herd of seals in the water turned out to be black wetsuit-clad surfers waiting for the perfect wave. They didn't appear to be having much luck. La Jolla is a pretty town, built on steep hillsides along the beach.
12/29 Helen and Leata spent time wandering around Old Town. The official reason was that Leata was shopping for a San Diego sweatshirt. They greatly enjoyed the outdoor music and colorful shops. Dave spent the day at Dan's apartment, enjoying getting connected again - not only unlimited use of a real phone, but also enjoying Dan's high speed cable modem. The latter is apparently around 10 megabits/second in both directions, and makes websurfing a real delight. At times I had my laptop running on the phone line, processing Email while I was simultaneously using Dan's machine to search the Web for needed information. When Dan moved here last spring, he limited his apartment searching to the small section of the city where this special Internet connection is being test marketed by the local cable company. He needs the fast net response time - he was on the winning team in what might be billed as the NetTrek world championship.
12/30 Wild Animal Day: The expedition today was to the Wild Animal Park - part of the San Diego Zoo, but located about 30 miles northeast, on 2200 acres of foothills. Breeding herds of several endangered species are happily multiplying here, in spacious enclosures. Some large enclosures have mixed herds of several compatible species from the same general part of the world (all are from Asia, India, Africa), giving a feeling of naturalness. It isn't really natural - the predators are carefully segregated. Many areas can be viewed only from the park monorail (included in admission price), which winds along a hillside where one can look down on substantial vistas teeming with animals. Other areas can be visited on walking trails, allowing a closer view. We walked by the giraffes at feeding time, and the food was being divided up among the tourists, each of whom would timidly hold a piece of food at arm's length, while a giraffe reached out with that incredible prehensile tongue and neatly extracted food from hand.
In the evening, Leata and Dave played some table tennis and Dan played some badminton. Both clubs meet in adjacent areas in the municipal gymnasium in Balboa Park - a nice facility.
12/31 Beach Day! We drove up to Oceanside, ate lunch on the beach, and spent the afternoon hanging out, watching the surfers and the assorted (very assorted) beach people. Helen and Leata each found a few interesting shells. On the way to the beach, we stopped at Mission San Luis Rey, and discovered it is still an active church - a funeral was in progress and we couldn't get in. Later, on the way back from the beach, we stopped again. The 1798 church has been nicely restored. Some of the extensive mission buildings have also been restored.
1/1 Desert Day! An RV-Talk friend had recommended a loop drive through eastern San Diego County. We started out to follow this route - from I-8 up through Ramona and Julian, then across the Sunrise Highway and back down to I-8, about a 150-mile round trip from Mission Bay. Dudley's Bakery in Santa Ysabel is as advertised - a big, busy, tourist attraction in the middle of nowhere, with a large assortment of breads and pastries. We bought a sampling of each, and enjoyed both. The Julian Pie Company - another locally famous spot - was closed on New Year's day, so we can't report on the quality of the pies. The used bookstore in Julian is unusually nice for a small town. Prices are high, but the books are in good condition and are mostly organized, making a search fairly easy. We bought several books to replenish our shrinking supply of new reading material. We then changed plans, and decided to head down into the desert to the east.
We followed route 78 to Anza Borrego Desert State Park. This was partly a scouting trip to see if we could camp out here with our big trailer. Route 78 from Julian down to the flat lands would be a fairly exciting descent with the 35' trailer - steep, with tight turns - but I'm now willing to try it. The posted signs say "not advised for trailers measuring over 30' kingpin to axle". When we got back, I measured ours, and was surprised to find that this distance is only 20'. So we are officially blessed, and will probably do it in late January or early February.
The State Park has several campgrounds. I had a talk with the ranger at Tamarisk Grove Campground about trailer size. He explained that the published size limit for Tamarisk Grove is 21' because that is the size of their smallest campsite. He said they will not turn away anything that will fit into available sites. We found exactly one out of the 27 sites which would accommodate our 35'. This campground has running water (which is labeled as unsafe to drink), but no hookups. The entire park, with very few restrictions, is open to primitive camping. Backpackers can go anywhere, but there are numerous places where a truck/trailer or large motorhome could get well off the road (100 yards or more). We drove into one such place, at the mouth of a small canyon. The soil is a coarse gravel/sand mix that seemed quite firm - the truck didn't sink in significantly, and the axle loading on the trailer is about the same as the truck. An established (but not necessarily marked) spur road can be used to access a campsite unless it is marked closed - they just don't want vehicles messing up untracked desert. The spot we looked at was on the fan of alluvial gravel at the mouth of a small canyon, among scattered ocotillo, cholla, creosote bushes, etc.. There was room for quite a few RV's, but it was completely empty when we were there. This is, of course, flash flood country and it would be comforting to have a weather radio along.
At Borrego Palm Canyon campground, there are 52 sites with full hookups, mostly pull-through sites. Most would accommodate our 35' trailer, and the published restriction is also 35'. There are another 65 sites with no hookups, and a few of these would also accommodate large rigs - a few are pull-throughs. This park is on flat desert, but is directly adjacent to a steeply rising mountain face. There is a hiking trail from the campground up a nearby canyon.
1/2/98 Leata flew home early this morning, and we'll relax for a day or two. She left at the right time - it started to rain while we were driving to the airport, and rain is forecast for the next couple of days. Laundry, accumulated little projects around the trailer, a bunch of year-end business things, and generally just hanging out.
1/3/98 More puttering around the trailer. It rained off and on all day, and neither of us set foot outside. I spent several hours compiling statistics for our first six months of travel. In six months, we've stopped overnight at 64 different places, with an average of 2.8 days at each place. The longest stay in one place was 18 days, the average 2.8 days, and there were 26 one-nighters. We've traveled 19,230 miles total of which 12,505 was towing the trailer. When towing, we've averaged 205 miles per day. The longest day was 405 miles, the shortest was 20 miles.
1/10 Another week has somehow vanished. We've enjoyed it here, and have been extending our stay a day or two at a time. I was pleasantly surprised to find the excellent facilities at the San Diego Table Tennis Club. They use a section of the San Diego Municipal Gymnasium in Balboa Park - large, recently renovated, brightly lit, and room for their 15 top-quality tables. They are open for four hours every weeknight, plus part of Saturday afternoon. I played several evenings, initially feeling very rusty but gradually recovering some of the skills. It's a friendly club, very welcoming to visitors, who can play for $1.00 per evening.
They say troubles come in threes, and I've just confirmed it. The night before last, I drained the sewage tanks and discovered that something was leaking - even with the valves closed, there is a steady drip onto the ground from some hidden place up in the valve plumbing. Yesterday, the truck brakes started making horrible noises. And last night, when we were preparing for bed after a day of heavy rain, we found a corner of the bed soaking wet (fortunately, on Helen's side J ). And we're out of time here - the campground management informed us that our site has been booked by someone else for a month, starting tonight. There are other sites free for a few days, but as long as we've got to pull up stakes and move, we might as well move to new scenery. This was further complicated by my son's car dying - I drove him to work Friday morning, and had planned to help him get the car to a garage on Saturday morning. Meanwhile, a package that we've been eagerly awaiting had arrived at Dan's apartment with the Friday mail, required a signature, and of course no one was home.
Yesterday, I was fortunate to find a Dodge dealer who could take the truck without an advance appointment, and some of the brake work was covered by the warranty. We rented a car for the day and got some other things done. The truck was ready shortly after 5 p.m.. But I got caught in a traffic jam in I-8 spent 40 minutes sitting on an entrance ramp, and didn't even come close to getting to the dealer before they closed. The sewage plumbing and roof leak will have to wait until the next campsite - the roof will have to be thoroughly dry before I can work on it, and DeAnza says we can't do any repair work here anyway. Helen carried the wet bedding down to the laundry and ran it through the dryer, while I got out the duct tape rigged an inside rain gutter to channel the water to a pot on the nightstand next to the bed. It seemed to work. There was more heavy rain during the night and this morning, but we got a good, although short, night's sleep. Today's advice: NEVER run out of duct tape - it will fix almost anything.
This morning was a mad rush: Get to the post office at 8:30 to pick up the package before it goes back out on another delivery truck. (But the delivery slip had the address of the wrong post office. They sent me to the correct post office, which turned out to be closed on Saturday. I wandered around back of the building, through the "no trespassing - employees only" signs, found an employee, showed him the delivery slip, and explained my problem. With a puzzled expression but a cooperative attitude, this guy vanished back into the building. A few minutes later, another employee showed up with my package. I'm impressed.)
Then off across town to return the car and recover the truck. At least the traffic's not too bad on Saturday morning. It's now late enough so I'll probably have to pay for another day's rental. In response to a routine "how was everything" query from the rental clerk, I explained that streaky windshield wipers on a rainy day, and an inoperative dome light on a dark night, weren't too pleasant. She then erased the extra charges for time and gas (I was too rushed to fill the tank) and charged me only a single day's rent. The day looked brighter. I walked the few blocks to the truck dealer, picked up the truck (new disk pads, replaced one rotor, replaced a leaky rear brake cylinder, replaced rear brake linings (saturated with brake fluid), and headed to Dan's apartment to get his car taken care of and get one last batch of Email, arriving back at the trailer at 11 AM. Checkout time is noon, and the new occupant of our site had already been to the office asking when the site would be free. We wheedled an extension to 1:00 p.m. and madly started packing up.
It's amazing how long it takes to pack up after a long stay (we've been here almost three weeks). Everything seems to migrate out of its assigned place, and we begin to forget just how it all fits back where it belongs. We were hitched up and moving by a few minutes after 1:00, but still needed a grocery stop before heading into the desert. All the stores we were aware of were in crowded neighborhoods, with relatively small parking lots. So we dropped the trailer in a city parking lot at Mission Bay Park, and drove to the store to stock up for a week or so away from civilization. We finally got on the road at about 2:30 p.m. - the end of a long, pleasant stay, and the end of this chapter.<