Chapter 17: Stuck in San Diego
February 8 to April 15, 1997
Many of you haven't heard from us for over two months. We've been stuck in San Diego, due to the trailer accident reported in our previous mailing. (The good news is that we can't think of a better place to be stuck for two months). The trailer was functional, although it looks rather strange and is about 6 inches shorter than it used to be. With liberal applications of sheet plastic and duct tape, I made it adequately weatherproof. So we've been able to continue living in it, and even to take some short trips to the desert, while waiting to get the insurance situation sorted out and the repair shop scheduled. Since we weren't traveling much, there wasn't a whole lot to write about. We're now back on the road and, hopefully, the trip reports will happen somewhat more frequently.
2/10 Last night, we had dinner with our son Dan at a small Italian restaurant in La Jolla, then walked along the cliffs above the beach watching the big waves crash on the rocks. The city has done a nice job with the waterfront: public access for a long distance, paved walkways through grassy parks right along the cliff, with stairways down to the beach wherever practical.
2/13 In anticipation of the arrival of the Nagels, we cleaned house and rearranged and organized. This will be the first time we've had two other people staying with us in the trailer, so preparation included some head-scratching. We finally decided that we'd put our friends in the bedroom and we'll use the fold-out sofa in the living area which will make optimum use of the limited bedding we have with us (we can use our own sleeping bags). This would also give us a chance to find out if the foldout "double" bed (actually several inches narrower than a standard double) is practical for two people. (We can also make the dinette table into a bed, but it's an additional hassle.)
2/14 We looked at the storm schedule (there is a continuous procession of storms lined up in the Pacific), and decided to hit the zoo this morning, before the rain. Didn't quite make it! We got an hour of dry weather, then spent several hours walking in the rain. We returned home in mid-afternoon, soaked.
2/15 Rain was forecast all day. We went to Balboa Park to the Museum of Man - an anthropology exhibit. Afterward, Helen and Kathy immersed themselves in a big jigsaw puzzle.
2/16 Good weather is finally promised for the day, so we took the opportunity to go to the Wild Animal Park, which requires a full day, mostly outdoors. It was our second time there, and we still haven't quite seen it all.
2/17 Today, we went to the Birch Aquarium. This is a great place, but it's a good idea to do it early, before the school busses arrive, or late afternoon, after they have left. This is our second visit. We were surprised to find that just after our previous visit, they closed and emptied their largest display tank - the huge panes of glass in this nearly new facility had developed cracks. Installation of new glass was in progress, and they were using the opportunity to make some interior improvements as well.
2/18 We packed up early and headed for the desert - Anza Boreggo State Park. Last time we were there, we had identified an attractive boondocking spot in Quartz Vein Wash, and we headed directly there. It still looked good, and we were able to get the trailer a few hundred yards up the jeep trail with only a few scratches. Turning it around was a challenge, since the gravel/sand soil was fairly soft. We got it off the trail and properly positioned for good solar panel performance, with some effort and a lot of tire spinning. But at least it will be slightly downhill when we leave.
The desert is nearing peak bloom. The bright purple sand verbena is everywhere, and we found one place where it is an almost continuous carpet for several acres.
2/19 I woke early and went for a hike to enjoy the sunrise. The sunrise wasn't much - obscured by clouds in the east - but I was serenaded by a pack of coyotes. I couldn't quite see them, but from the sound, they were proceeding down San Felipe Wash, a few hundred yards from the trailer. Later, we drove around the back roads, enjoying the flowers and the scenery, stopped at the Visitor Center, and then hiked the Palm Canyon trail.
2/20 Kathy and I took a sunrise walk. As the sun rises, the shadow line marches down the mountains to the west so fast that the motion is visible. We walked down to the low point of San Felipe Wash, then along it for half a mile or so. We saw fresh coyote tracks, and bighorn sheep tracks that were a day or two old.
We spent the morning and early afternoon driving the southern portion of this huge park. A long jeep trail leads off S2 to Blair Valley Camp (a primitive campground), and to the Pictograph Trail. The pictographs, protected from the weather on an overhanging boulder, are crisp and clear, drawn with a reddish mineral. I saw no mention of their age. They are near the high point of a pass which provides impressive views into Smuggler Canyon to the east and Blair Valley to the west. It's an easy 2-mile round trip. By 3:45 p.m., we were packed up and on our way back to San Diego. We'd been a little worried about getting the trailer out of the damp sand after it had a couple of days to settle in. But it turned out to be no problem at all - the slight slope down the canyon allowed it to pull out much easier than it went in - a pleasant surprise.
We pulled into our "home" site at DeAnza at about 6 p.m.. After unhooking and setting up the trailer, we went back to Berta's Latin American restaurant, in Old Town. We just had to try some more of their unusual South American cuisine. The wine list is mediocre, but the food is very good, and unlike anything we've found elsewhere.
2/21 We dropped our friends at the zoo again, and Helen and I went to the Art Museum. In the evening, we had a wonderful dinner at the Bali Indonesian restaurant in La Jolla. I highly recommend this place. We all had their deluxe Rijstaffel - a banquet of more courses than we could count, all delicious.
2/22 I drove Nagels to the airport and spent the day catching up on paperwork, starting into our income tax returns, and generally slowing down from the slightly frenetic pace of the past week. We are now so used to the relaxed, retired lifestyle, that it seems really rushed to have only a week "to see everything". Our friends kept us hopping, and we loved it, but it was a relief to drop back to our usual slower pace when they left. We did the Zoo, the Wild Animal Park, the Scripps Aquarium, the Museum of Man, the Timken Art Museum, Old Town, the theater to see the musical Forever Plaid, three hikes in the desert, lots of scenic drives, and dinner out nearly every night. That was in addition to two 1,000-piece picture puzzles done by Kat and Helen. And we did all this in the worst weather we have seen in southern California. They didn't get one day of the sunny weather that is typically southern California! It poured while we were at the zoo, and was drizzly and cloudy most of the other days.
2/23 Helen spent most of the day with two doctor's appointments, shopping, and running errands. I stayed at the trailer waiting for a call from the insurance adjuster. It, of course, came during the only five minutes that I was out of the trailer. Anybody know of an answering machine that I can add to a cell phone?
The next big El Nino storm hit, as scheduled, in early evening, with the wind getting very strong. It rained off and on all night. Several branches and a continuous hail of seedpods from the nearby eucalyptus trees hit the trailer. The trailer next to us was hit by a rather large branch, but seems to have suffered no damage. The branch was blocking access to their truck and almost blocking the trailer door. Another neighbor hooked his truck to the branch this morning and towed it across the street into an empty site. The storm sounded terrible from inside, but everything that hit us was small and there is no apparent damage. The total rain accumulation wasn't a great deal - good news for the soggy hillsides and over-full reservoirs.
2/24 The last rain came about dawn, and then blue sky began to appear. We're supposed to have several sunny days in a row - for the first time in a month or so. The newspaper is still full of disaster stories. The ocean is eating away the coast, destroying houses on the bluffs. The edges of the mesas are sliding into the canyons, taking expensive houses with them Streets are still flooded. The southwest corner of DeAnza Harbor Resort, where we are staying, had considerable damage. The mobile homes adjacent to the water are expensive and elaborate, decked out with covered patios, awnings and elaborate landscaping. Last night's storm ripped the aluminum patio roofs and awnings off most of the houses in the whole row. Meanwhile, tornadoes have been ripping across Florida. There's a spectacular newspaper photo of a pile of jumbled up RV's near Orlando.
2/25 I spent a good bit of yesterday and much of today phoning the insurance adjuster, waiting for his calls, and visiting a promising RV repair shop.
2/26 We towed the trailer up to RV Specialties, in Miramar, to get a repair estimate and then meet with the insurance adjuster. I had a favorable reaction to the place - the manager showed me around the repair floor, showed me some work in progress that was similar to what will be needed on our trailer, and generally convinced me that it was a competent place. I also talked for a while with the carpenter. He is a SKP, with a Rainbow Drive home address. In his spare time, he is completely rebuilding a bus for himself and his wife to live in. He took me on a tour of his rig. It looks like a 40 footer, and he has raised the roof a foot or so. It is beautiful inside - solid cherry cabinetry, a Jacuzzi, wall-to-wall carpeting throughout, a two-ton air conditioner in the basement, and a bunch of other nice touches. He told me that re-registering the bus in California would have cost something like $6000/year, and that in Texas, it is more like $600. It is essentially complete, except for exterior paint, and he said that he has about $90,000 invested (plus his own time, of course). It looks like its market value is several hundred thousand.
3/4 Today, we delivered the trailer to the repair shop and moved into a beachfront condominium in Pacific Beach. We're on the 10th floor, with an entire wall of glass overlooking the ocean. The insurance company is paying most of the bill, so we'll be spending less than the RV Park was costing.
3/13 We've been relaxing - a little sightseeing, a little walking the beach, a lot of just hanging around. We spent a lot of time with the binoculars, watching fishermen tending nets, navy ships parading in and out of the harbor, hundreds of surfers all along the beach, thousands of bikers, skaters, walkers, joggers, and skateboarders, parading up and down the boardwalk.
3/14 With our son Dan, we attended our first international soccer match - the US team vs. Paraguay. We had excellent seats, and it was a fairly exciting game, ending in a 2-2 tie. I hope we can manage to be near a television set during some of the upcoming World Cup this summer. We keep getting reminded of the closeness of the border - it's the first time we've sat in a sports stadium eating tamales instead of hot dogs. Soccer is much bigger in the rest of the world than in the U.S., so as is typical, the crowd was disproportionately immigrants. There was even a small but noisy group of Paraguayans, waving huge national flags.
3/15 Finished packing, abandoned the condo, and headed for Los Angeles. The 11 days in the beach condo was very nice - comfortable, peaceful, relaxing. We found a small EconoLodge, centrally located in Hollywood, that seemed clean and pleasant. But they only had a room for one night. We took it anyway, since we wanted to be at a 3 p.m. concert, and were running out of time. I'd recommend the EconoLodge for anyone who wants to stay in this area - $48 for a clean large room - queen sized bed, free parking inside a gated area, rooms opening on an inner courtyard with swimming pool, central location, convenient to museums, movie studios, etc. It's in AAA Map'n'Go.
In the afternoon we attended the final concert of the Los Angeles Bach Festival, at the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, performing the first three cantatas from the Christmas Oratorio and the Magnificat. (Amusingly, the well-known soprano "echo" aria, #39 "Flosst, mein Heiland" from Cantata 4 was interpolated into the latter part of Cantata 3).
This festival has a long history - 65 annual concerts, and has been sponsored by the church for that entire period. The building is impressive - a huge 1933 gothic revival structure, expensively built and well-maintained, obviously a very affluent congregation. It's too large and too live for Baroque music, however. The performances were good. The interpretations by director Thomas Somerville were satisfying, sometimes exciting. The orchestra (modern instruments) and large chorus (about 54 voices) were competent. It's hard to say anything more positive than "competent" because the very live acoustics blurred detail to the point where fine nuances of performance were lost. The chorus is the local church choir (which probably has a professional core group), augmented for the festival by additional community singers. The soloists were a mixed bag - perhaps being the section leader/soloists for the church choir. Some of the eight soloists were excellent, but several were inadequate to the challenge. At one point, the Evangelist started a recitative in the wrong key, couldn't recover, and sang in violent dissonance with the orchestra until the end of the (mercifully short) section. As we travel around listening to other groups, I'm more impressed than ever with the quality of soloists that the Rochester Bach Festival was able to attract during the 25 years that I sang with them.
3/16/98 Moved a few miles from the EconoLodge to the Ramada Inn, still in Hollywood. The Ramada is newer, fancier, has more services, and is considerably more expensive. But we're not any more comfortable - in fact somewhat less so, since we have to negotiate a slow elevator and a long corridor to get to the room. Otherwise, a lazy day.
We picked this spot because it was central to some sightseeing we wanted to do. It turns out to be a few blocks from the movie studios, so the entire area is movie-oriented. Every restaurant is decorated with old movie posters, The motel advertises several kinds of tours of the studios, etc.
Los Angeles seems to have an even larger and more diverse immigrant population than the other southwest cities we've been in. We've driven through huge areas where we saw practically no signs in English - we've seen Spanish, Arabic, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and at the moment we seem to be in a mixed Mexican/Filipino area - just down the street is a row of Filipino stores, including a couple of interesting looking fast-food joints. The food looked good, but none of the signs were in English, and none of the food looked familiar. Perhaps we'll get up courage to try it for lunch one of these days.
The hotel currently has a large tour group of Tunisians, mostly 20-somethings, with a smattering of families with older parents and young children. It's fascinating to be surrounded by these kids in trendy California clothing, all chattering in Arabic.
3/17/98 We spent the morning and early afternoon at the Los Angeles County Botanical Garden in Altadena. It is large, has a wide variety of plants, and is quite well-kept. It is surprising to see something this nice operated by a local government - in this case by the County Parks Department. The place is overrun with peafowl. When a peacock decides to display and erects his huge tail plumage, it has to look for a large open place, which tends to be the center of a pathway, thoroughly blocking the path. We had a surprisingly good lunch in the Peacock Café, within the park - excellent food, large servings, and moderate prices. Helen had a "Chinese" chicken salad which was innovative and delicious. Dave had a huge sandwich of ham, roast beef, two kinds of cheese, and lots of tomato and lettuce. We then went to the Descanso Gardens in La Canada Flintridge. This is a 160-acre garden site, featuring huge camellia and rose collections , lots of annual beds, and (surprisingly) a large collection of lilac shrubs.
In the evening, we had dinner with friends at the Athenaeum - the faculty club at Cal Tech in Pasadena. The building is impressive - limestone exterior, huge rooms with coffered wood ceilings, wide-plank hardwood floors, with a warm and comfortable feel in spite of its size. Albert Einstein lived upstairs in this building while at Cal Tech. The food was excellent, and considering its quality, moderately priced. Some of us ordered Caesar Salad and Chateaubriand. Both were prepared at the table, with considerably flourish. The place is intended for leisurely eating and conversation. When you reserve a table, it is yours for the entire evening, so there's never any pressure to leave. The after dinner liquor list was extensive: for example, it had something like a dozen different single-malt scotches, including a 16-year-old Laguvulin.
3/18/98 Map'n'Go isn't a reliable guide to the operating hours of the museums, as we found out again today. Los Angeles County seems to be juggling the hours of all its attractions, and some of the museums are only open a few days a week, and then only for limited hours. We started out to go the Art Museum, but it wasn't open. Page Museum, next door, wasn't supposed to be open, but actually was, so we went there. The Page is a small museum located adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits, and dedicated to the discoveries made there. It's well done. The museum laboratory, where they clean, examine, classify, and reassemble the artifacts from the pits, is visible from the museum, through a glass wall. They have skeletons of woolly mammoth, two kinds of mastodon, saber-toothed tiger, a huge lion, a giant ground sloth, a camel, a horse, a dire wolf, and a human. All were removed from the tar pits, and date from 11,000 to 14,000 years ago - just before the last ice age. In a number of cases, they have reconstructed what the animal looked like and have a realistic model to compare with the bare bones. The animals apparently stepped into the water-covered tar pits to drink or to escape predators, and got stuck, eventually sinking into the asphalt.
Some of the tar pits are still exposed, with the surface gently undulating from the methane gas that works its way up from deep in the earth in erratic spurts. It's kind of startling to see these bubbling cauldrons of tarry goop on a main street practically in the center of Los Angeles. One pit is still being actively excavated, and has a viewing platform where tourists can watch paleontologists grubbing around in the tar (nobody working when we were there).
The Autry Museum of the West is a strange place - it can't quite decide whether to be a real museum or a Hollywood extravaganza. About half of it is about how things really were, and the other half is about how Hollywood went about portraying its own idealized version of the west. We found another couple of nice Bierstadt paintings - still our favorite portrayals of western landscapes.
3/19 We spent today at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in Pasadena. Had dinner this evening at the Gardens of Taxco in West Hollywood, which serves a fixed menu with a few choices of entree "Mexico City family style" - a multi course meal in a pleasant setting. I had a chicken mole pablano which was *very* intensely flavored - delicious. Helen had a chicken and shrimp dish that was fairly subtle.
3/20 Spent quite a while in the large Los Angeles County Museum of Art. They had a Bierstadt. But what really sticks in our mind is a wonderful little piece of Pre-Columbian pottery: a walled soccer field, with two differently-uniformed teams competing. Spectators were sitting on the wall watching the game. Jackets and other clothing had been removed and draped over the top of the wall. Wonderfully detailed, with realistic faces. The whole thing was only about a foot long.
3/24 Our second try to go to the Getty museum was successful. On our first try, a few days ago, we discovered that parking at the museum was only by reservation, and that it took about two weeks to get a reservation. Then, we located a shuttle service starting from a nearby Holiday Inn and went there, only to find that the Holiday Inn parking lot was full. We then located another shuttle service, operating from a private parking lot on Constitution Ave, just off Sepulveda. Parking was no problem, but they informed us that the Museum had just called and shut off access for the rest of the day - they had reached capacity. So we went home. This time, we got to the Constitution Ave. lot about 10:30 am. A shuttle ($10, including parking) took us fairly promptly up to the Getty entrance. Then we stood in very long lines, being marched from place to place by a big brawny black drill sergeant yelling through a powered megaphone. After half an hour or so of marching around in the hot sun, we finally were able to board the shuttle up the hill to the museum. They run a little automatic electric railroad shuttle, and also a procession of small busses, to get people up the hill. We arrived in the museum at about 11:30, and decided to immediately get lunch before the restaurants filled up. Good choice. The restaurant was already full, and operates by advance telephone reservation only. The café was just beginning to fill up. We went through the cafeteria line fairly quickly and found a table. Good food. By the time we left, there was a long waiting line standing outside in the sun.
The museum itself got steadily more crowded as the day wore on. By the time we got to the fifth building, (late afternoon), a waiting line had formed. We stood outside for about 15 minutes waiting for enough people to leave so that they would let another group in. This is by far the most popular part of the museum. It contains a large collection of French impressionists - including Van Gogh's most famous "Iris" painting.
In general, the collections are moderately interesting, although we quickly got tired of room after room of Louis X? furniture. They had a special exhibit on art as archeology - meaning what we can learn about ancient civilizations from their art. Besides a bunch of Roman marbles, they had a large projection TV video that talked about Emperor Trajan's forum, the forum most of Rome's public building design was based on for centuries. The video showed a virtual reality fly-through of how the forum looked in its heyday, moving us through the spaces, giving the feel of being in the original building! It was impressive. For Dave, one of the most impressive exhibits was an extensive display of the planning, design and construction processes for the Getty Center itself. The North Ridge earthquake happened part way through construction. It provided a good "dry run" for the design. The architects were able to analyze the minor damage, and make a number of modifications to minimize future problems. The complex includes the museum and space for several Getty foundations, and is over half a million square feet of office and museum space, and an equal amount of support space (archive storage, underground parking, etc.) There is no American art whatsoever, no contemporary art, and no attempt to be comprehensive. They cover certain historical periods intensively, and ignore others.
The buildings themselves, although designed by Richard Meir who has impressive credentials, have a curious lack of cohesion. Even though all buildings share the same type of stone and off-white panel façade, they look like a random collection of buildings plopped down on the same mesa, and then adorned with a randomly attached set of strange-shaped balconies. In addition to the parking problem, there is a severe lack of women's rest rooms (there's a big line of porta-potties just inside the entrance to the grounds, and a warning to use them before getting on the shuttle to go up to the museum), and hardly any drinking fountains. One has to go outdoors to go between some sections of the museum, so when it is raining, they have big baskets of umbrellas at each exit. Dumb mistakes for a world-renowned architect who has already done half a dozen major museums.
In the evening, we went looking for a steak house, with the help of AAA Map'n'Go, and ended up at Lawrey's Prime Rib in "restaurant row" in Beverly Hills. We'd never heard of it, and didn't realize it was famous until we got there. But this place has been a landmark since 1938, now has branches in Chicago and Dallas, and was the originator of the nationally marketed Lawrey's seasoned salt. The building is impressive - lots of old wood, high ceilings, upholstered wing chairs at some tables. We had an excellent meal (prime rib is practically the only choice - but who would want anything else?). A 1995 Ridge Geyserville Zinfandel blend, although very young, was big and luscious and lived up to my memory of an earlier vintage of this wine. The service was competent and flamboyant, with house salad mixed at the table, prime rib carved at the table, warm fresh bread, and hot Yorkshire pudding. The deserts looked gook too, but we were too stuffed to try them.
3/25 A lazy day - run a few errands, catch up on paper work, catch up on RV-T Email. Helen got a haircut.
3/28 We're near San Simeon. We left Hollywood the morning of the 26th, and stayed close to the coast where possible, spending the night at Lompoc (where did that name come from?), a few miles from Vandenberg Air Force Base. We enjoyed the scenery, when we could see it between rainstorms. The local headlines in Lompoc were that another Iridium satellite would be launched that night from Vandenberg, leaving only three launches to go before the Iridium system (a worldwide wireless communications system using many satellites in low-earth orbits) can begin to operate. It's not yet clear whether this will be an affordable communications path for full-time RVers. The rumors are that it will initially run at 4800 bits per second, and cost somewhere around $2.00 per minute.
On the 27th, we continued north, on U.S. 1 where possible, enjoying the views. At several points, we crawled slowly around temporary detours in a solid line of traffic, where mudslides or flooding blocked one lane of the highway. The mountains are a brilliant uniform green after all the rain.
We stopped at the San Simeon Pines Seaside Resort, between Cambria and San Simeon 805 927-4648, and will stay two nights, Friday and Saturday (maybe a third night too). We're close to Hearst Castle, where Helen will visit tomorrow. It's a lovely spot. We're in a pleasant room with fireplace, under a row of 100-foot Monterey Cypress trees. Just across the small road is a path along the cliffs above the ocean. The cove just south of us is home to several sea otter families. Sea lions and seals are also common along this section of coast. Tomorrow, I'll go looking for them while Helen is at the castle. We'll stay here at least one more night. It's not clear where we'll head next. Highway 1 is closed just north of San Simeon - a big chunk of it fell into the Pacific. We'll have to detour back south 10 miles or so and then head inland if we decide to go further north.
This area is teeming with wildlife. We've seen deer, raccoons, and hordes of ground squirrels. At one point as we were driving along the coast, we saw dorsal fins and pulled in to one of the frequent parking areas along the cliffs. There was a large group of dolphins cavorting just at the edge of the surf zone. I counted a dozen, and there may have been twice that many. They had probably found a school of small fish for lunch. Occasionally, one would catch a breaking wave and surf shoreward for a few seconds, apparently enjoying the ride. Others sporadically jumped clear of the water.
The motel owner says there is a resident mountain lion - living in the pines part way up the hill behind the motel, and that the lion occasionally comes out and sits in the middle of the pasture below the trees, watching the world go by. Lions have also been seen within the village of Cambria, a mile south of the motel - probably feeding off the fat raccoons which come into town to scavenge the garbage cans.
3/30 We left the coast on the morning of the 30th, and drove the narrow state highways (mostly SR 46, 155 and 178) and back roads, heading almost due east from the coast. East of Isabella Lake, SR 155 came over a pass at about 6000 feet, and we found ourselves in real winter for the first time this trip. The road was clear and mostly dry, after a day or two of sunshine, but the roadside drifts were fresh and deep.
We spent the night in a motel in Kernville (Barewood Motel, which seemed to be the only modern motel in the area. It was a little too modern - having a digital phone system to which we could not hook our computer modem). Next day, we continued on over the mountain passes into Death Valley. It's a big place, and we could only see a few highlights in the two days available to us. We hiked Mosaic Canyon, and drove north to look at Ubehebe Crater - created in a massive eruption about 3000 years ago. We also walked around the grounds of Scotty's Castle. That used up the daylight, and we headed back to the motel Storm clouds were gathering over the valley, and it rained off and on while we were driving. As we were preparing for bed, we listened to a Coyote chorus tuning up in a field behind the motel. It rained again during the night - hard enough to wake us up. It's a fairly rare experience to be rained on in a place that only gets 2" of rain per year.
4/1 I'm writing this in a motel at Stovepipe Wells in Death Valley National Park. Accommodations are rare in the valley. There is one motel at Stovepipe Wells, and another at Furnace Creek. Several campgrounds area available - but they aren't fancy and don't have hookups. One, at Stovepipe Wells, appeared to have some hookups which may be recent additions since the campground guide was published (but we didn't go in and check to be sure). Boondocking is allowed, but you must be over 2 miles from a paved road, campground or area marked "day use". The unpaved roads are rough, so the National Park as a whole is not very RV-friendly. The motel we are in, in spite of a high price paid for a "deluxe" room, has no television or phone.
We spent the day driving generally southward in Death Valley, detouring for the various sights along the way. A one-way loop to the East from SR190 passes through eroded bluffs of many different colored minerals - a rich pastel "Artist's Palette". The Harmony Borax Works has been partially restored, and has interpretive signs relating the history of borax mining in the area. "Mining" is a bit of a misnomer: in this particular mine, chunks of borax-containing white deposits were simply picked from the surface of the dry lakebed by crews of Chinese laborers. A stationary furnace provided heat for large vats in which the borax was partially purified. It was then carried, in specially built freight wagons, 186 miles to the nearest railhead - using the famous "20-mule teams". This transportation problem eventually made the mine uneconomical, as richer or closer deposits were discovered.
On the way over the mountains to the southeast of the valley, a small but intense thunderstorm overtook us. We saw the brightest rainbow of our lives - a full semicircle with both ends visible, with a second, less intense, full rainbow outside it. We stopped and spent some time trying to photograph it (the film isn't developed yet.)
The night was spent in Baker, where SR127 crossed I-15. This little town is trying hard to make itself attractive to tourists, with an interesting modern building housing a tourist information center, adjacent to "The World's Highest Thermometer", showing the current temperature in bright lights 40 feet or more in the air. More importantly for RVers, the town provides a large, free, overnight parking lot for trucks and RV's, conveniently located across the street from a fairly good restaurant - the unfortunately named "Bun-Boy Restaurant and Motel".
4/2 We've been calling the repair shop periodically, and are now assured that the trailer will be ready for us by the end of today. So we drove straight back to San Diego, arriving at 4 p.m. to pay the $10,900 bill (all but the new carpet covered by the other guy's insurance). It looks great. The lower half of the entire street side and rear end fiberglass siding is new, and it exactly matches the 10-year-old upper half. They even duplicated the original striping. The new carpeting (industrial-quality, with padding) feels luxurious - much better quality than the original, which was getting almost threadbare in front of the sofa.
We towed the trailer back to De Anza to begin the process of cleaning out the construction dust (surprisingly little of it) and reloading the contents. This was also an opportunity to reorganize our "stuff", for the first time since we started traveling 10 months ago. As a result, we're now a bit better organized and seem to have more storage space. The next few days were mostly occupied in planning, organizing, and doing a number of little repairs and upgrades. We did have to tow the trailer back to the repair place once, to get a list of small things attended to - mostly an improperly hooked up water inlet connection and some seam caulking that hadn't been done properly. The repair shop had been unable to find replacements for some broken bedroom drawer latches (new drawer fronts have different dimensions than our old ones). I managed to repair the old ones by scavenging parts from some new latches that were a different size, but had the identical little plastic sliding latch component to those which had broken.
4/10 Our inaugural trip for the reassembled trailer was a short one - a 2.5-hour drive to Anza Boreggo State Park, with our son Dan who lives in San Diego but hadn't been there yet. This is our 4th trip there during the winter and spring, and it has been very interesting to watch the progression of desert flowers as the season advanced. The sand verbena is mostly gone now, but many new flowers have appeared, including some really intense large pink flowers on one variety of Cholla. Since this was Spring Break for the San Diego schools, we didn't even try for a space in a campground. Rather, we went back to a boondock spot we've used before, in Quartz Vein Wash off SR 78 in the middle of the park. Last time, we had the entire canyon to ourselves. This time, there were two other families tent camping further up the wash, out of sight and hearing - we didn't even know they were there until our second day. So even on what may be the most crowded weekend of the year, Anza Boreggo has plenty of opportunities for quiet, fairly isolated, camping.
4/12 The drive back to San Diego was uneventful.
4/15 While in Anza Boreggo, the trailer lost water pressure. I discovered that the check valve in the external water inlet had disintegrated, and was letting most of our water run out onto the desert floor whenever the pump ran. I cobbled together some hose fittings to block this flow, getting us through the weekend. On Monday, I stopped by RV Specialists for some free advice and found that the check valve is not separately replaceable - it is an integral part of the assembly which also contains the water tank filler and overflow vent, behind a little door. The good news was that a dimensionally identical replacement is still manufactured (but not locally stocked, of course). I got one ordered, with a promise of next-day delivery from the distributor. On Tuesday afternoon, I installed the new panel fairly uneventfully.
Then, Tuesday evening, I suddenly realized that those puddles of fresh oil that I'd been noticing in parking lots were coming from our own truck. The automatic transmission, which had just had its routine service last week, was pumping a slow but steady stream of fluid onto the ground whenever the engine was running. Early Wednesday, I took it back to the dealer, somewhat irately expecting to find that they had not properly re-installed the transmission oil pan after servicing it. The experience with the dealer was good - they were polite and prompt, taking me without appointment and getting the truck up on a rack immediately. But they weren't at fault - we found an oil cooler line bent, and the connector leaking. It now seems probable that it was hit by a rock, somewhere along all those rough desert roads in Anza Boreggo. We in fact were aware of bumping a rock on the way out of our own campsite, although I was pretty sure that it just touched the front wheel suspension, and these oil lines are tucked up well away from the road. In any case, a new oil line and connector had to be trucked down from Los Angeles, so the service ended up taking all day. With a bunch of errands needing to be run, and Helen having a scheduled doctor's appointment, I ended up renting a car for the day. Not a cheap experience!
But everything works again, and we're pretty well packed up and stocked up to hit the road. Tomorrow is the big day - we hope to leave San Diego for the last time this year, heading generally for Yosemite National Park, and then the San Francisco area.