Trod Bogs Sadly – Oddstray's Blog

The last time I was hereabouts was in 1999, on the motorcycle. I’d never heard of the ‘Lost Coast’ and completely bypassed it (which was probably a good idea on a sport bike).

Since then, we’d read about it and were curious to see what this Lost Coast was about.

So we headed out to Ferndale to explore further. As soon as we found the road to the Lost Coast, we understood why it was lost. The road surface was appalling! It was like it was designed to keep out foreigners. Even with our stout Xterra, it was jarring for about 80 miles all around the way – even through the Humboldt State park.

But, you know, this place is beautiful. With ocean vistas, farmland and Redwood forests, it’s, according to B, like Wisconsin has been transplanted to the CA coast.

That there just about says it all. Willits to Fort Bragg, an ever twisting and turning road (Hwy 20).

Then Hwy 1 to Legett. I’d done this stretch before on the motorcycle in 1999, coming the other way, but I didn’t remember that 22 miles of hairpin bends from the coast up to Hwy 101. Towing a trailer, interesting.

We took a good part of the ‘Avenue of the Giants’ Redwood Alley, so to speak, and that was a change in pace.

Tomorrow, we head for the ‘Lost Coast’ for an explore day.

As B sez: zig zag zig zag respite zig zag zig zag respite really pretty

We had thought about staying at the Yolo Fairgrounds while visiting with family in Woodland.  But, no toilets/showers. No bueno.  Dixon Fairgrounds seemed to have toilets.  But it still was just a fairground parking lot.

So we decided to sacrifice nearness for a better place.  And found what is so far the best campsite of this trip, at Solano Lake County Park.  The campground stretches along Putah Creek (bro-in-law shared chuckles over the Creek’s name).

There were many peacocks and peahens wandering throughout the park, and a peahen with two peababies decided to explore our camp site. Aww, cute!

We took some really windy and wiggly roads today over the hills past Berryessa, Clear and Mendocino Lakes. S hasn’t seen any of this part of California before, and was in awe.

Tonight we’re overnighting at Willits KOA having failed to find our first-choice of Golden Rule RV Park.  We’d stay another night to ride the Skunk Train, but the entire KOA has been reserved for some beer company’s weekend outing (shame we can’t stay for it).

It was a longish trek for us to drive up to where we are now – at Brannan Island State Recreation Area. This is near Rio Vista, in the Sacramento Delta. It’s a sleepy kind of place, surrounded on three sides by water, and looking a bit unloved. Windy in the afternoons, but otherwise totally copacetic.

The horror was that we had to spend a $15 toll on a road (160) to go way high up in the wind on a bridge that was a single lane over the water. All my (S) danger alerts got triggered – what if we got blown off the bridge? I hate like heck to be confined to a single lane where there is no ‘out’. Anyhow, white-knuckling it got us through at about 30 mph with a huge build-up of traffic behind us and signs warning us not to pull off. Eventually, there was a turn off and I could let all those frustrated motorists pass.

Things improved considerably thereafter.

We arrived at Lake Nacimiento late yesterday morning. It seemed fairly empty, and we had a nice sort of isolated spot – we thought.

But it filled up and filled up and by 7pm we were surrounded on all sides. We still had a nice little plot of land to ourselves, though. The trouble was, everyone treated it as a doggy walk. Oh well.

As the sun began to set we saw a deer right close to our trailer eating the only green grass for miles (irrigated). We had spotted a group of deer earlier, on the other side of the road. This one was bold, but cautious, as far as possible keeping out of sight of humans.

We decided to bring the bread machine on this trip, or at least, B did. I was a little skeptical about the weight of all that stuff and whether it would be practical to use it to make white french bread, as the machine can only be used for kneading the dough; the raising and baking must be done separately. We have a really tiny cheapo Black & Decker toaster oven with us and I, again, was skeptical whether it could do the job.

You be the judge.

I made some tuna salad and we had it for lunch as an excuse to eat some fresh baked delicious bread.

We drove into Solvang to see what was there.  It was, um, interesting.  Unique.  Nothing like Copenhagen.  Frankly, fake.  Pretty, though.  Pleasant to walk around.

The center of town is mostly shops and restaurants.  The museums are a few blocks farther out.  The one we reached wasn’t yet open.

They did have a statue of a young girl, reminiscent of the little mermaid statue in Copenhagen.

Just outside Solvang is Mission Santa Ynez.  Which B has at long last learned is Saint Agnes (to us English speakers).

Lunch at the Chumash casino turned out to be great value, because we have enough left over for supper.  Plus, they have free wifi, so we could update our phones. They do make the ‘self-parking’ visitors take the long way around, though!

Well, there we were, thinking that we’d got through the worst of LA traffic relatively unscathed, with only a few slow-downs on the 405.

On the 101, at a place called Seacliff, between Ventura and Santa Barbara, I (Simon) heard a ‘pop’. Not terribly loud, but it was there. The obvious WTF moment ensued, and then the trailer’s Tire Pressure Management System (TPMS) went berserk, and we pulled over to the shoulder, got out and had a look.

Flat on the curb (kerb) side. The alloy wheel looks OK, as the tire didn’t come off the rim.

And the big message is that the TPMS saved the wheel, as there was no difference in handling, and the ‘pop’ wasn’t terribly loud.

So, we called AAA, and after a while, ‘Peter’ the tow guy showed up. I dropped the spare, and he had it torqued up in no time and we were on our way. Basically, we lost an hour.

We could have changed it ourselves, we have a jack, but better we have AAA. (why buy a dog and bark oneself?)

But holy heck, turn that wheel over and what do you see:

Complete sidewall separation! Tire failure in a big way. We’ve kept these tires religiously at 50 psi, but the wear pattern on the tread looks like over-inflation, and there’s this inner edge wear which doesn’t look good.

I asked Peter what he thought, and he said it was probably the age of the tire (2013).

Guess where we are going next: to get 3 new tires.

We’ve had this domain ‘oddstray.com’ for lo these many years – and hosted it locally, then  on friends servers and later on commercial servers. It’s been mostly for the purposes of providing a constant email address, independent of whatever ISP one is currently using.

Until a couple of years ago. We had been using dyndns.com for email forwarding, but it started to get crazy expensive. So we moved to NOIP.com. Problem in a nutshell is that they are willing hosts to a bunch of email spammers, so they got blacklisted by our real email hosts, RoadRunner, and email was delayed or never got delivered. No criticism to RoadRunner on this one, as we tried many, many times to get it sorted out. NoIP.com was simply completely unresponsive, but continued to take our money.

But now, WordPress has picked up the challenge, and is our new domain host. All for not very many dollars. Try checking out oddstray.com or sending an email to simon@oddstray.com.

Progress is a relative term.

May 17, 2016

Our site at Hueco Tanks Campground, near El Paso, TX

‘Pictographs’ overlooking our campsite, near El Paso, TX

Sunset with moon, Yuma, AZ

Tight quarters at Yuma State Prison, Yuma, AZ

Solitary, at Yuma State Prison, Yuma, AZ

Frolicking in the Colorado, Yuma, AZ