Santa Rosa

The rally ended on Wednesday morning, and we barreled up the coast to Santa Rosa to spend a couple of days with my brother Tony, aka "Stone" (I don't know why he's "Stone", don't ask) and his wife, Lorraine, aka "Lo." I was hoping we'd drive up along the coast, through San Francisco, and over the Golden Gate Bridge so I could stop and walk in Muir Woods, one of my favorite places on earth. Alas, Steve wanted nothing to do with the traffic craziness in The City, so we took a slightly more roundabout and less congested route inland, going over the San Raphael Bridge into San Quentin, through Petaluma, and up to Santa Rosa. We spent a nice evening with Stone and Lo, catching up on each others' lives, at a fun little Italian restaurant called Nonnie's in quaint downtown Santa Rosa. The next day, we met Stone out at Michel Schlumberger Winery in Dry Creek Valley for our own personal tour and wine-tasting. Stone has been at the winery for about 13 years, working his way up from grunt to pretty important. His current title is winery biologist and assistant winemaker. He knows everything there is to know about the operation, and is passionate about winemaking and sustainable farming. No pesticides are used. Unlike neighboring wineries that till up the soil and use Round Up between the rows of grapes to get rid of weeds, Michel has a flock of sheep that roams the vineyard, cropping the weeds down and depositing natural fertilizer as they graze. They have beehives and a bee garden to attract bees to pollinate the grape blossoms, and an organic vegetable garden that attracts "good" bugs to eat the "bad" bugs. The winery is beautiful, and the wines that come from it are premium--from $20 to $100 a bottle. We not only got to taste some, but got to take some with us--a generous gift from Stone.

Monterey Bay Aquarium.

The aquarium, located right on Monterey Bay, is absolutely wonderful. The tickets, at $29.95 for adults, are pricey, but even Steve had to admit that they were worth every penny. Each display was more beautifully done than the last. Around every corner was something that took your breath away. Steve's favorite was Makana, a two year old female albatross, that was rescued from the ocean, unable to fly because of a dislocated carpace (bird wrist) that will never heal. She is on display at the aquarium, and is very cool. She looks like a huge seagull, but her wingspan is more than six feet across, and she is one of the smaller species of albatross--some of them have a wingspan of 12 feet! Her name, Makana, means "gift" in Hawaiian. My favorite was the new "Secret Life of Seahorses" exhibit, that opened a few months ago. Look closely at the photo that looks like plants. Steve walked right by it, not realizing that they weren't plants, they were sea dragons!!! They have beautiful green, wavy fins that look like leaves, and thus are expertly camoflauged in the ocean. I could have stayed at the aquarium all day.

Laguna Seca

Finally, we got to the Skinnie Winnie Rally. It was held at the campground at the Laguna Seca racetrack, which is located about halfway between the cities of Salinas and Monterey. While apparently not all that well-known in America, it has an international reputation. It is a SCRAMP venue, which, I think, is the 3rd tier down--Formula 1 and NASCAR being numbers 1 and 2. SCRAMP stands for Sports Car something-or-other, and there is a sports car, classic car, or motorcycle race almost every weekend during the season. The track director came and spoke to our group, and donated two pairs of tickets for the final race of the year, which was held Sunday, October 11th, a couple of days after our rally ended. The tickets were valued at $125 each, and the people who won them were very pleased.

The rally was pretty loosely organized--a short talk or seminar in the mornings, ample time in the afternoons to explore the Monterey peninsula. and pot luck dinners each evening. Dave Kuhlman, one of the organizers, made arrangements for a tour of a family-owned business that restores vintage cars. Some of their restorations have won gold medals at the Pebble Beach Concorde, arguably the most prestigious vintage car show in the world. Steve, most of the other guys, and a few of the wives (I passed), had a great time ogling the cars in various stages of restoration.

The highlight for me was our visit to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Details are in another post, because Blogger has a limit as to how many photos you can post per entry.

On Toward Laguna Seca

We left Yosemite through the south entrance (exit?) so we could stop at the Mariposa Grove, where the giant sequoias are. We spent about an hour wandering through the lower grove. They are awesome in the true sense of the word--not quite as tall as California redwoods, but with a much more massive girth, with thickly furrowed trunks. Their bark is so thick that it can withstand fire;many of the trees we saw had blackened lower trunks but their foliage, high above the fireline, was green and healthy.

Upon leaving Yosemite, we had two more nights on the road before getting to the rally at Laguna Seca. We spent the first one at an Army Corps of Engineers campground at Eastman Lake near Raymond, CA. We forgot to take a picture of our campsite, and it's too bad. Our site overlooked the lake and we had the whole loop to ourselves. It was off season, the camp host had left the previous day, and there was only one other campsite occupied in the whole campground. I walked the dogs down to the lake, and they had a great time racing around the meadow after rabbits on the way there. We spent the next night at Coyote Lakes County Park, near Gilroy. Gilroy touts itself as the Garlic Capital of the World. Apparently, it used to be, but, according to my brother Tony, a garlic afficienado, that is no longer the case. At their annual Garlic Festival, most of the garlic is imported from China. The two pictures at the top of this post show our campsite and the lake. It was prettier than it looks, with lots of wildlife. The deer grazing by the lake wandered right by our campsite, followed shortly afterward by a flock of wild turkeys. There were cranes and herons on the edge of the lake, and a huge hawk.

Yosemite

Yosemite is as beautiful as I had imagined, a gorgeous as all the pictures you see of it. The Valley itself isn't very large, so you are always in pretty close proximity to all the famous views. There is a paved bike/pedestrian path that loops all around the valley, bout 12 or 13 miles worth. You can get to all the trailheads, campgrounds, and visitors center by bike. We rode our bikes all over one morning, and then took the dogs on a long walk another. Late September is a great time to see the park, as far as I'm concerned. Although a couple of the waterfalls and seasonal lakes are dried up, I didn't miss them. I also didn't miss the hoards of visitors that overrun the park during the summer months. We hiked lower part of the Mist Trail--the one that goes to Vernal and Nevada Falls, and ultimately to the top of Half Dome. You don't have to be a mountain climber to summit Half Dome. There is a hiking trail that goes up the back side, with a set of parallel cables, sort of like a ski tow without the pulley, to help you get up the last bit. Even going up the "easy" way is a 4000 foot elevation change. They call it a day hike, but at 10 to 12 hours, it would be a long day. I got Steve to snap a pic of the restroom at the Vernal Falls footbridge because it was the most scenic spot for a restroom that I'd ever seen.















We stayed two nights at the Crane Flat campground, about 16 miles from Yosemite Valley, and one night in the valley itself when a spot opened up. The campgrounds in the valley are by reservation only, go on sale five months in advance,and they fill up within minutes.

Bear are everywhere in the park. Each campsite has a locker for food and toiletries, and your food is never to be left out or more than an arm's length away from you. If you store your food in your vehicle, it must be out of sight; bears know what coolers look like, and will break into your car to get at them if they're in sight. I actually got to see a bear! I was walking along a trail between two loops of the campground, and about 50 yards ahead of me, a bear came out of the woods, stopped, took a good look at me, and headed up the trail in the same direction I had been going. Very cool! And yes, I did turn around and go back the way I had come.

California, Here We Came!

Phew! We've been more than a week on the road, and this is the first chance I've been able to use the computer. The first couple of days, going across Nevada, there was no internet service at all. When we finally got to somewhere where we could theoretically get on line, we discovered our aircard had broken (again!) and so we couldn't connect. We are now staying in a very civilized campground with Wi-Fi, so I'm finally able to blog. Maybe. On our Colorado trip in July, I blogged faithfully, but kept getting error messages from blogger.com when I tried to post them, even after we got home. I will try to catch everybody up and keep my fingers crossed that it actually makes it into cyberspace.

The Royal Palms pulled out of the driveway Fridaymorning, September 25th. The excuse for this trip (as if we needed one) was a Skinnie Winnie rally in Laguna Seca, CA, near Monterey. We had attended a rally with this group last summer on the Oregon coast and really enjoyed it, and thought it would be fun to hook up an hang out with our old friends again. While we were at it, we thought we'd stretch it out and poke around central and northern California. I'd always wanted to see Yosemite, wanted to visit my brother in Santa Rosa, and then just wander around for awhile. We'd figured out a tentative route, made some campground reservations, and were ready to go. Then, the week before we were to leave, Steve decided that he really wanted to attend another rally in Farmington, New Mexico, as well. It was happening just a week after the Skinnie Winnies, and he figured we could just make it. No, it doesn't make a lot of sense, but hey, why not!

Yosemite was our first destination, and the usual way to get there from here is I-80, a straight, albeit boring, shot across Nevada. Steve wondered aloud about trying I-6 through Ely and Tonopah, noting that it was shorter and could possibly be more interesting and scenic. Again--why not? Ely was our first stop. I found a great NFS campground up in the mountains south of Ely called Big Springs. The campground had closed for the season (host gone, water turned off), so it was free. Large shady sites and only one other rig in the whole place. It had miles and miles of marked trails for hiking, mountain biking, and cross country skiing, and we spent a couple of hours in the morning before we left exploring on our bikes, the dogs running happily alongside. The photo with the motor home is our campsite. Pretty, huh!

If you've ever driven I-80 across Nevada and thought it was the most barren place on earth, you are wrong. I-6 is, believe it or not, even worse. Once you leave the Ely area, which is quite pretty, things quickly deteriorate. Flat, barren, brown, and dusty. No plants, not even desert plants. A few not especially nice-looking mountain ranges off in the distance. We got across Nevada as quickly as we could and spent the night in a hot, dusty, overpriced campground ($20 no hook ups) near Bishop, CA, because Steve was sick of driving and there weren't any better options.

From Bishop, we drove north through a cute town called Lee Vining, and stopped for coffee at a place called Latte-Da. They had yummy homemade pastries as well as drinks, and we each had a slice of chocolate poundcake, chock full of chocolate chips and laced liberally with espresso with our coffees. We stopped at the visitors' center at Mono Lake just outside of town and got camping and hiking recommendations from the ranger for some NFS campgrounds on the way to Yosemite's east entrance over Tioga Pass. Thus it was that we spent my 61st birthday at Saddlebag Lake, elevation 10,087 feet. It's a 20 site campground just above a beautiful blue-green lake ringed by 1200 foot peaks. There's a water taxi that will take you (and your dogs!) across the lake to hike the 5 mile scenic Twenty Lakes Loop, or backpack into the wilderness, but we got there too late to do that, so instead opted for the around-the-lake trail (also 5 miles). It was a flat, easy trail, which was good, because at that altitude, even hiking from the lake up to our campsite got me huffing and puffing. That's Steve and Ellie taking a break, and a view of Saddlebag Lake. I still haven't figured out how to get the pictures where I want them in a post--they mostly end up on top, and out of order. Sigh.

Next day, it was on to Yosemite. I'm going to try and post this now, and finish catching up later. Photos in the next post. Steve is off with the camera somewhere.

Over and Out

We're home! As usual, I kind of lost interest in blogging towards the end of the trip. Or else got preoccupied with the logistics of it all. We packed up last weekend and left the Ajo area to spend the weekend with our son, Chris, in Tempe. We parked the Palms in his driveway and hung out with him and his new girlfriend, Sharon, all weekend. Low key, but lots of fun. We went to a restaurant called RigaTony's for dinner Friday night; it was wonderful--a small, local chain similar to Olive Garden, but even better. Saturday night, Chris hosted a barbeque for friends, and we spent the afternoon shopping for ingredients for the skewered chicken tenders Sharon was going to make. Some of them were fairly exotic (have you heard of galangal--I hadn't!), so Chris took us to LeeLee's. It's an Asian/international market in Chandler, and if they don't have it, you don't need it, and it probably doesn't exist anyway. Sharon was moved almost to tears when she found the specific brand of lime pickle that she loves and hasn't seen since she moved from New York to Tucson several years ago. The produce section had every imaginable and unpronounceable vegetable, fruit, and melon known to man; the meat department, along with familiar and unfamiliar cuts of meat and whole frozen fish, featured a wall of fish tanks holding sea bass, tilapia, and catfish. Theoretically, you could pick out the exact fish you wanted, and they'd net it, kill, it, and clean it for you before you left the store.

After Chris's, we drove to Sun City West and stayed with my parents. We had made an appointment at Al's RV Service in Glendale, about 12 miles away, to get the levelers fixed. Al's is one of the two places in Arizona that has a certified HWH master mechanic (Utah has none!). They quickly determined that the levelers failed for one of two reasons--a bad computer chip in the control panel or one in the motherboard, both quick fixes once you had the very expensive part. They called HWH in Iowa, who, amazingly, said they would cover it, even though it was out of warranty. The only thing we had to pay was $45 to have the parts overnighted from Iowa to Al's. Once the parts arrived, it took Al five minutes to determine which chip was bad and another fifteen to unscrew the control panel and pop in the new chip.

We took two days to drive home, staying at our favorite Cedar Pockets Campground in the Virgin River Gorge, about halfway. Because we were coming back to winter, Steve wanted to avoid as many mountains as possible, so we went home the Las Vegas way rather than the Flagstaff way we came down in January. The only bad thing about this route is having to drive the freeway through Las Vegas, always nerve-wracking and jammed with fast-moving traffic. Steve consulted some maps, and found a road that wound around the west side of Lake Mead and dumped us out on the north side of Vegas near I-15, but avoiding the downtown Vegas freeways. The "short-cut" was a very scenic, quiet, good two-lane highway. We will definitely use this route again.

We came home to snow flurries, with a fair amount of the white stuff on the ground. We've started the tedious business of unpacking. Not sure where or when our next trip will be. We're expecting our second grandchild in mid-July, so any summer trip would have to be after that. We'll keep in touch.