Life was meant for good friends and great adventures. It is especially sweet when good friends join you for those great adventures. For Memorial Day this year, a couple of our favorites joined us on the road for the long weekend. We met them at Shasta National Forest, in the very northern part of California, and began our weekend of revelry. We hiked from Castle Lake to Heart Lake, catching up on life and enjoying the beautiful views of Mt. Shasta.
Also known as that time I took my in-laws to a nudist colony.
Ryan is obsessed with the Eastern Sierras. He’s been a couple of times on fishing/camping trips with his buddies, and he raves about it every time he returns. So when Ryan’s parents were coming to join us on our adventure for a couple of weeks, he really wanted to take them to the Eastern Sierras for part of the trip. We drove our little caravan of campers up from Joshua Tree to the Eastern Sierras, which is an area of central California that falls on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountains, close to Yosemite and Sequoia National Park but on the other side of the range. It is a beautiful, remote part of the state where the mountains fall straight down into a beautiful open valley. It’s difficult to get to, which is why it remains relatively unspoiled and off the beaten path – perfect for us!
In addition to chronicling our adventures, I thought I’d make this blog a bit useful as well. And so this begins a series of campsite reviews for the places that we are camping. We’ll start with Black Rock Canyon Campgrounds, in Joshua Tree National Park, California.
Of course for a review to be useful, it’s got to be conducted along some sort of metric, it needs to be accompanied by photos and it needs to be personal. I’ll only review campsites that we stayed in for 2 days or more, so that in fairness we stayed long enough to get a general sense of the place.
Not to be outdone in funky-ness or prickly-ness by the Joshua Trees, the Cholla Cholla Cacti are really something to see in Joshua Tree National Park. We stopped by the Cholla Cholla Cactus Garden on our drive to the south of the Park and I have to say that it is one of the strangest places that I’ve ever been. All of a sudden there is a huge collection of these relatively short, skinny, spiky cacti – they are few and far between anywhere else in the Park so far as I can tell, but they grow in abundance in this one spot. Again – this is one bizarre national park! This cactus garden is another favorite spot of mine here in Joshua Tree.
THERE CAN BE FEW THINGS IN LIFE AS WONDERFUL AS SITTING AROUND A ROARING CAMPFIRE MAKING MEMORIES AND S’MORES WITH THE BEST OF FRIENDS.
Well we have certainly gotten off to a slow start on this trip! And that’s just fine by me. One of my goals for this adventure is to slow down and take my time and enjoy the present without worrying about what the future holds – whether that’s two days into the future or two years into the future. And so after a couple of days in Big Sur, we headed south to San Diego, where some of our favorite friends live. We dropped the camper in front of their home in Cardiff, headed for a late night dinner at Pizza Port in Solana Beach, and the next day we were off to Florida for a few days. Our nephew was being baptized, and conveniently we are temporarily retired and so we have all the time in the world to head back to the East Coast for such a momentous life event as a baptism! Ryan and I have always said that no matter where in the world we live, we will make it a point to not miss the important family events, and that includes the time that we are on this road trip.
Ah, sunny Florida
Home Sweet Home
Well it’s official, we are off on the grand adventure. On Tuesday, we moved out of our apartment, took the final boxes and Ryan’s road bike to the storage unit, said farewell to a few friends who wanted to send us off, and we drove out of San Francisco. Not before stopping at Comcast to return our modem of course. No matter how romantic I’d like to make this trip, there are the practicalities of life to deal with. Like dropping off the modem.
One of my favorite things about San Fransisco is how many great places are close by for quick get aways! This year for our anniversary we hopped over the bridge for a weekend getaway at Cavallo Point, a beautiful hotel tucked away right under the Golden Gate Bridge just north of the City. The hotel is housed in an old army post called Fort Baker and the buildings were built in the early 1900’s, and renovated and reopened as Cavallo Point resort in 2008.
For Labor Day weekend, we headed south to San Diego to visit one of my besties from law school and her husband, who have newly relocated from New York to San Diego – quite a change for them! I haven’t ever been to San Diego, so I was looking forward to exploring a new part of California and looking forward to seeing two of our favorite people in their new home. Lots of people have said that we’d love San Diego – it’s a bit of a mix of California and Florida, where we grew up. While we were only there for a couple days, I’d say that I agree. Beachy and laid back like Florida, but with California’s mountains and the Pacific that I love so much.
We drove all the way from San Francisco to San Diego – unfortunately not along the beautiful coast, but through the dusty middle of the state, down the 5. Particularly dusty with the terrible drought we are in. We of course brought our furbaby Coconut with us – if we can bring her somewhere, she always comes with us, and she loves a good roadtrip, especially if she can stick her head out the window. The drive was long but not too bad and we were so happy to finally get there without too much traffic.
Coconut – the ultimate road tripper
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