Indian Flats
Indian Flats campground is an isolated place. About 7 miles North of Warner Springs, CA along a choppy, twisty road, we’d been there many times in the Westfalia camper. This was the first time using the Xterra. Quick comparison: for getting there, there is none, the Xterra blows the VW out of the water in terms of handling, sure-footedness and performance; for ‘style of residence’, oh, we do miss the convenience of the Westfalia.
But here’s a thing, it’s early fire season hereabouts. There’s only one way out of Indian Flats in the VW, because it probably couldn’t cope with the gnarly dirt/rocky road over to Chihuahua Valley Road westward. But the Xterra can, and that’s a comfort thing.
Anyhow, the place was deserted except for us, and it was oh, so quiet, not even aircraft to disturb us. Idyllic.
And brunch at the Orchard Restaurant at the Santa Ysabel Casino for $9.09 for two (Country Breakfast). Outstanding.
Keyless Entry
The Xterra comes with a keyless entry remote control – and a key. Together they are cumbersome, in your pocket, purse, whatever. The Nissan Rogue comes with a combined key/keyless entry control. The Rogue key is on the left in the photo, and the Xterra combo is on the right.
Guess what? For less than $20 each from eBay, you can buy a blank Rogue key, and we paid our local Nissan dealer $100 to program 2 keys to work with our Xterra, and now we have not only the working Rogue keys, but the originals as backups. Sweet 🙂
Attribution: original idea but our approach does not cannibalize the original keys.
We have a garden!
Yes we do. And it is a community garden plot, rented from the county for $10 a month. The photo shows it as it was handed over to us. Key features are that it is protected from wild animals via the top, bottom and sides, has premium soil, drip irrigation and no extra charge for water. Yay, San Diego Parks. As a bonus, it’s located in the ‘historic’ Penasquitos Adobe Ranch property. This is a little outpost of rural California as it was 50 years ago, in a sea of bedroom communities. More later…
Tacos Sabrosas (Tasty Tacos)
Oh my. Oh my.
We last tasted these guys about 10 years ago. Since then, there has been alleged ‘drogas’ hell in northern Baja California, and B.’s work had banned her from visiting. A little while ago, that ban was lifted, and we ‘tested the waters’ with a quick trip to Tecate and its Zocalo. So far, so good, the natives were not restless.
This time, we were double experimenting. Renting a simple 4×8 foot trailer from U-Haul, and seeing how that works for camping (at Potrero), and testing out how it is to sleep in the back of the Xterra.
Short answer is i) U-Haul enclosed trailers don’t work very well, as they keep tipping up as you try to work with whatever is inside, and ii) sleeping in the back of the Xterra works just fine 🙂
But, and this is a big but, all of this pales into obscurity. View this image:
These guys have the best, and I mean the best, fish and shrimp tacos anywhere to be found. Period. Full stop. Less than $2 each, with a table tray of salsas, limes, onion, cabbage, mild and medium and hot sauces.
Holy cow, these are the pinnacle of tacos (her indoors insisted I remove ‘dog’s bollocks’)!
And then I had a tostada with shrimp ceviche. Oh, man.
The alert reader might have noticed . . .
The alert reader might have noticed that we recently have been talking about traveling in our Xterra. Earlier in this blog, we were traveling in a Vanagon.
For two people camping, the Westfalia camper conversion has not yet been equaled! We’ve even comfortably taken two-week trips. And there are single people and even couples who live full-time in VW vans.
But a 1987 Vanagon is an old vehicle. It’s not old enough that we could do roadside repairs, even if we had the tools or the roadside on which to do it. But old enough that our mechanic has given up on trying to find parts and diagnosing its various geriatric ills. The day we decided not to go to our favorite remote campground in case we got stuck there and needed some repair was the deciding factor.
Our next plan is a travel trailer. In the foreseeable future, we’ll be getting to a situation where we can be traveling more extensively (that is, both of us retired). So we started hunting ultra-light travel trailers. The Lance 1575 is currently intriguing us …
We also hunted for, and found, our tow vehicle. We didn’t want a pickup truck, and we didn’t want a behemoth. And, off-road capability is a wanted asset. The candidates were Jeep Liberty and Nissan Xterra. Jeep Liberty is discontinued! Ergo the Xterra.
But the trailer … we live in a condo. We have no place to park or store a trailer! We’ve been researching storage fees, which range anywhere from $50 to $$$$$$$. For the cost of storage, could we just rent a trailer when we wanted to go out camping? Turns out, not so easily. It’s summer, and they’re in high demand. They typically rent for a week at a time, rather than a night or a weekend.
Which brings us back to our Shake Out, Shake Down.
Shake Out, Shake Down, Part II
Well, it turns out that we are carrying a whole pile of legacy stuff from the VW that we don’t really need, much of it heavy as heck.
We headed back home from Dos Picos, having slept well, and having been only grossly annoyed by the selfish wails of the 6 year old in the adjacent camping spot at 5:30 am. (Note to self, go where other people aren’t)
After a freshen up, we headed out to Cibbets Flat (http://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/cleveland/recreation/camping-cabins/recarea/?recid=47426&actid=29). This is a delightful gem of a place in the Cleveland National Forest with a creek (Kitchen Creek) running through it that, in our previous experience, never ran dry.
I was concerned that on such a lovely weekend, the campground would be full, but, as it turned out, we had very nearly the pick of the place. Here’s where we ended up:
Neat shady area 🙂
B. hauled a huge rock from an adjacent camp site to stop the ‘Little Guy’ from rolling forward, and admonished me that I would have to put it back! Which I did, and it was heavy, brother.
Usual camping stuff followed, hot dogs for lunch and so on, and then Jill and John showed up. Ostensibly, John wanted to find out how all this ‘hook-up’ stuff for towing things works, but in reality, they were decompressing from a really truly terribly stressful week. As can be seen from the following:
After J & J left, we started a campfire, cooked steaks and had a couple of glasses of wine, and successfully watched a movie, using Bluetooth (yea).
The great thing is that the ‘Little Guy’ is a metal tent, no less, no more, and that’s the bad thing – what do you do on a rainy day?
It was fine and fun, but I don’t think that a $280 rental price for 3 nights is going to cut it compared to Motel 6. And I don’t think that a purchase price of $6,500 is going to cut it against the purchase price of a small Nomad (http://www.skylinerv.com/?q=node/97)
Shake Out, Shake Down
It had been way too long since we had been camping, and ‘her indoors’ was threatening rebellion by making black-outs for the windows of the Xterra, with the notion of sleeping on an air mattress in the back of it.
Horrified by the thought of that, I hurriedly called a trailer rental company about a pop-up camper. No go until after the 4th of July. At the last minute, (Thursday) I called http://www.littleguytrailers.net of San Diego, and they were willing to rent us the trailer you see in the photo (a ‘5-wide’) for three nights.
So, Friday morning, we trundled over to AAA to get an insurance waiver, yawn wait, yawn wait. Thence to U-Haul for a 2 inch ball for the hitch receiver, yawn wait, yawn wait. Then thence to Little Guy Trailers to pick up the little teardrop trailer, yawn wait, yawn wait. At least we got a demo of how to do things, which was helpful, since we had never done them before.
Cutting to the chase, we loaded up the Nissan with all the boxes randomly filled from the VW camper and headed out to Dos Picos campground, about 20 miles away, near Ramona, for a shake-out trip. Which was largely uneventful, except for two things:
1. We encountered Lilli (SP?) and Chrissy, on their way from Ushaia (Chile) to Alaska on a pair of Honda Transalp motorcycles. As soon as I saw those bikes, I knew that there was a story there, as you can’t buy them in the USA. I’m jealous. Check out www.reise-ecke.at. It helps if you know some German. Lovely people.
2. Fecking computers. We decided to check out B.’s Nexus 10 for movie watching, and it turned out that we hadn’t brought the OTG cable or SD card adapter/USB hub and disk. Remembering that this was a ‘shake-out’ trip, I drove home and picked up the missing pieces. Later, we loaded Nexus File Importer to see whether we could watch a movie. Doh, no way, it wanted to check the ‘License status’ online, and we did not have a connection for that device. End of session. That really sucks, Google, if you are watching. The whole point of Nexus File Importer is to overcome the lack of SD card support on Nexus devices. If we were online, we wouldn’t need it, as we could use Skifta to connect to our media library. Stop doing this sh*t, Google, it’s inane. As a follow up, when we eventually returned home, both Nexus 7 and 10 worked just fine after once ‘checking in’.
Bluetooth is cool
Our newest vehicle, a 2012 Nissan Xterra, was as lame as our next oldest vehicle, a 2005 Mazda 3, in that it didn’t have either a line-in for an iPod or similar, or Bluetooth. Yawn.
So off I went to Crutchfield and bought a Sony MEX-BT3000P (yep, discontinued, but hey that’s a great saving) and an included mounting kit, and holy crap, after torx woes (I needed a 15 and I didn’t have one) that sucker is connected to our Nexus 4 for Pandora and the iPod for music and saved radio plays. Look, no wires! (and the sound quality is pretty good)
But wtf is the deal with this? No longer can you simply swap out a DIN radio for the one of choice, you have to dismantle the dashboard to extract things like the A/C controls, air bag warning lights, hazard flashers, and re-install all that stuff in a custom panel. Kinda dismisses the idea of standard radio installations.
Never mind, I’m looking forward to rocking out with this setup.
And, oh by the way, bye-bye VW Westfalia
Sausage Rolls
Here in the US of A, sausage rolls are a rare and expensive treat, and very hard to find. We used to buy them from the Shakespeare pub ‘shoppe’, but they were kind of pricey, so I made a couple of batches of my own. I donated a couple of rolls from the last batch to a friend who is wed to a lady of UK origin. She (her Jillness) requested some more when I offered. I also asserted that they were easy to make herself, and this is what this post is about.
The basic recipe is at Epicurious, but I halved the amount of herbs, added a bit more onion and garlic, together with black pepper, tomato puree and Worcestershire sauce.
What follows is a pictorial guide to making sausage rolls. Enjoy 🙂
This is garlic, not shallots!
Meanwhile
Trod Bogs Sadly - Oddstray's Blog 
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