Orange County’D!
Well, we’re nearly at our destination. By the time this update is loaded, we’ll be relaxing in an air conditioned, large, comfortable room at the Anabella hotel in Anaheim. Today we travelled from San Simeon State Park (which we do not recommend to anyone to stay at), which is about 1 1/2 hours north of San Luis Obispo. Currently we’re passing through Santa Barbara, where there is bumper to bumper traffic right now. Apparently Sunday is a busy day for driving. Darryl’s singing, Andy’s giving a running commentary of everything on his mind as it happens, and I’m sitting in the back, amused at both occurrences.
So, San Simeon State Park. It originally seemed like it would be a good place. We drove in, it seemed far enough away from the highway that it wouldn’t be too noisy, we signed in, they gave us our campsite number, and we drove to find it. We booked this site about 3 weeks ago. I expected to have a decent looking site. As it was, we had barely a square patch to put our tent up on, they didn’t bother to try to level out the sites at all, so everything in the park (as far as we could see) was on a hill. And the car was further away from the campsite road than our tent was. Not all the sites had such terrible acreage, there were some sites that had tons of room around them. But ours, the one we booked 3 weeks in advance….nope. Nothing worth doing if this is what we got out of it. And there was no privacy. Well, there was a small bush. And some dead grass. And the car blocked the immediate view of the people on our left side. But only if we were in the tent. There might have been a small tree. Basically, it sucked and I wouldn’t spend my money there again.
On the other hand, the KOA in the Redwoods forest, just north of Crescent City, was about the coolest campground that we stayed at. It was so neat. It’s hard to describe. It’s like they cut a path into the heavy forest, made just enough room for a tent, table, and fire pit, and left everything else as it was. We were nearly completely secluded from everyone else, there were tons of trees and tons of underbrush, we were close to the bathrooms and water, and it was quiet. I’ve never camped in anything so natural before. It’s too bad we had arrived so late, as it would have been awesome to explore the campgrounds more. Not all KOAs are so nice, though. The one in Petaluma/San Fran North wasn’t extremely nice. Crowded, no privacy, and the people previous to us left chicken bones throughout the campsite, so there was a higher density of wasps around the site. We’ll see what our last 2 campsites are like on our way back to Canada. It’s crazy to think we’ve already been gone a week. Only 2 more! It’s happening so fast. A year in planning, and it just zooms by as it happens. At least we’re enjoying it a lot. It’s been a lot of driving, but at least it’s been pretty driving, and adventurous. I’ve learned something about Darryl (I think he learned it about himself too): windy mountain roads are enjoyable. While I enjoyed it, he’s also found something enjoyable in it too. Andy just sleeps anywhere near a cliff if he can help it. We took some video yesterday of the crazy road and awesome ocean view, we’ll probably try to edit the strips together when we get home and post it somewhere (Adam, you haven’t bothered Andy enough to try to figure out the pictures on the site).
Anyway, that’s about it for now. We’ll be enjoying the beaches of Orange County soon enough. Anyone have other exciting news to tell us about?
