Making Our Way to LA

It should probably become a running joke that I leave too long between posts. But this has been an especially long time and with no good reason. I've had plenty of downtime. Just not the will. I'm going to break this up into 2 entries as well - there's just too much to tell, and I don't want you to feel like you are reading an essay for school.

So, we drove down and stayed in Santa Maria for a couple of nights at a county fairground. We have found this part of California to be particularly devoid of affordable places to park the RV. The county fairground was a pretty good deal, it just turns out that Santa Maria isn't a highly desirable place to visit. We learnt later that it is home to the tri tip - an undersung cut of meat in England, but over here in Central to South California it is don. It is a fatty piece of meat from the sirloin, but when cooked/barbecued slowly, all the fat melts into the meat and leaves a delicious flavor sensation.

After Santa Maria we headed on down to Santa Barbara - a place we had heard great things about. The journey there was a bit harrowing, and Dave and I have agreed on each other's strengths. I'm good at city driving, Dave is good at narrow, windy roads. Dave was driving through Santa Barbara, and we ended up at the tiniest roundabout I've ever seen. I will set the scene - Dave had been driving for a couple hours and the steering wheel was squeaking like crazy. This alone is enough to set him off. We approach this tiny roundabout - the only way to get out of a tiny parking lot. Without exaggeration, he must have had to

An entrepreneurial way to make money on a Santa Barbara Beach

execute a 12 point turn to get the rig around this thing. I am trying desperately not to laugh, I really was trying as I could tell Dave was not in the mood to see the funny side. Then I made eye contact with a woman who had been watching us the whole time. That was it. I nearly hurt myself trying to bite my lip to stop laughing. The whole thing was such a farce. Luckily he just looked straight ahead and ignored me. We ended up pulling up in a parking lot and asking a guy with a very homemade looking RV where was good to boondock in the area. Turns out he had been in that parking space for at least a couple of years. When he found out we were full timers and not just renting our RV he opened right up and told us all the good places to go. Santa Barbara has obviously seen a lot of people trying to camp on the street for free as there are signs everywhere telling you that you can't. We managed to find one street that they had missed and plonked ourselves pretty centrally in Santa Barbara. We went out to an English pub and had a few drinks and then hunkered down for the evening. Santa Barbara is beautiful, and it is full of beautiful people. I imagine the cost of living would outweigh its beauty though.

As we had been in cities for a while, we felt the need to retreat back into the woods. We ended up at a massive, well organised camp ground situated around a reservoir. As we are traveling just as we come out of the tourist season, places are pretty empty. However, on this particular day, there was a cycling race taking place along the road that led to Lake Casitas. This was a winding, narrow road and there were a lot of cyclists on the road, mostly riding three abreast. When you're in an RV, as I'm sure you can imagine, trying to navigate around a bunch of cyclists is pretty harrowing. But I managed it and got us there in one piece - the cyclists were ok too!

We rolled up to a great spot and had lots of space between us and anyone else camping. Until a convoy arrived carrying a huge latin family. We watched them set up, then play football (English style) and crash balls into RV's. We put them out of our mind for a while and ended up chatting with our neighbor. He was there with his daughter, who was on the other side of the lake with her school rowing team. We ended up chatting all evening, and it's always nice to spend an evening waxing away the time. While we were chatting, the large latin family were talking very seriously, and it kind of looked like the last supper gathering. We went to bed
and didn't think too much more of it. Our new friend, however, was in a tent and apparently had to endure a whole evening of raucous noise. The toilets the next day looked as though they had been used by a pack of rabid wolverines. They threw away their rubbish, mostly, but left all the tables in a row, which they had dragged over from other campsites. If you have never seen a camp host - the person who is going to have to clean up any mess you leave - I should tell you that they are old and usually disabled in some way. The camp hosts all gathered around the mess and had a chinwag, smoking cigars and riding aloft in their golf buggies. I never saw what came of this meeting, but I'm sure it was momentous.

Bin Squirrel

That morning, the guy in the tent came over and gave us his details, said we were welcome to park up outside his house in Orange County if we ever needed to. We were touched by such a generous offer, and it was only one day before we decided to take him up on it. Before we left we decided to go for a walk around the massive campsite. We came across  our first wild tarantula here! Towards the end, we came across a ground squirrel stuck in a large dumpster. It looked scared and tired, and my heart went out to it. We set it up with a makeshift ladder to be able to get out and walked away to let nature take its course. I still hope he made it out.

We felt a bit weird taking Mike (our newly acquired friend) up on his offer so soon, but if you don't ask, you don't get. We got a really friendly reply telling us they'd love to have us. So we set off, a bit unsure of what we were going to encounter. As we were early, we decided to go to the beach. We first had an extremely overpriced deli lunch. We then went down to the beach, called Sunset Beach, and settled down with a bloody mary (dutch courage). I got a bit carried away with the camera and took far too many pictures. I can't decide which are the best, so you can look through all 20!

We decided it was time to face the unknown. We pulled up at the house and introduced ourselves to what we would learn was an incredibly welcoming family. Mike has a wife and 3 daughters, whom we had learned all about when we were camping. We were offered beer and dinner, the best way to impress Dave and myself. We chatted to them through the evening and the next, and we thoroughly enjoyed our time there. We were roused one morning to what we initially thought must be some sort of practical joke. It sounded like someone was mowing our hair it was so close. We looked out the window and realised we were surrounded on all sides by a gardening company. It's a small price to pay for free camping and new friends, it was just rather unexpected. Then again, I'm sure the gardeners weren't expecting to have to work around a 30ft mobile home either. Priscilla was coming to pick us up to take us to the Ivory Tower, so we made arrangements with the Burneys (our new friends!) to come back and cook them a meal to thank them for everything they had done.


We have started to think about opening our own business. Food trucks are all the rage and we have been coming with ideas for a pie truck - good old fashioned English pies with a creative twist. I guess this is just an explanation for one of the pictures in dropbox - we tested our first pie, homemade crust and all. You know what? It was actually damn good!



The next leg of the journey is a bit of a departure from our usual tale, so I'll leave that for the next entry.

Piccies!!

Santa Maria & Santa Barbara
Lake Casitas