Trestlemania at Gaviota State Beach

Not every beach day is perfect

Overcast in Ventura County, California

Local flora

So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, good night

RVSue bought a house with her sister. She and her canine crew will be traveling only occasionally.

JustinCredible got an apartment and is selling his amazing purple Class B van. He’s tired of the limits and demands of mobile living.

Vanholio! is moving into the rental property he owns because it needs repairs and because he misses his peeps.

Nomads often become settlers again, and my emotions are mixed. They’re free to decide how and where to live and what makes them happy. I don’t begrudge them that. But it feels a little like friends moving away—which is ironic seeing as how I’m the one who keeps disappearing down the road.

I love my nomadic life. It’s perfect for me. But not for everyone, or not for the rest of their life. I try not to think about the day when health or other circumstances force me back into a building, back to being in one place. Yet some nomads are eagerly looking forward to the day when they can return to normal life. And some are surprised when they find themselves craving the thing they were once happy to abandon.

I grew up being taught there was just one way to be happy. And that path eventually made me miserable. So here’s a toast to whichever path leads to your bliss.

At least it wasn’t on my shoe

Hello, other Southern California

The snow was an interesting surprise, but the beach really grabs my heart. It’s great to be able to have both in the same day.

Hello, Southern California

Those clouds that were creeping over the ridge yesterday evening? They dropped a couple inches of snow on the other side of the ridge last night. In May. Cool.

I lived in Newport Beach, Huntington Beach and Long Beach, so it’s easy to forget Southern California isn’t all beaches and suburbs. Traveling helps me remember that. And surprises me sometimes.

Someplace new

The San Jacinto Mountains make a dramatic backdrop for Palm Springs. I’ve driven past them dozens of times but never ventured up into them. It was one of those things I kept telling myself I was going to do. Eventually.

“Eventually” was yesterday. Google Maps guided me from I-10 and through several of the Palm Springs golfing communities to Highway 74—a.k.a. the Pines to Palms Highway (though I was going palms to pines).

The Forest Service has a small campground at Pinyon Pines, near the highway’s summit. Only $8/night. Half that with my interagency old fart card. I put $5 in the envelope because I didn’t have change.

Clouds from the coast were curling over the ridges. It was dramatic. It made me feel like I was much higher and farther from civilization, even though the village is only a hundred yards away. It was going to be a chilly night so I added my sleeping bag to my usual down quilt. It was a good night. I have reservations elsewhere for the rest of the week, so this will be just a one night stop. But I’ll be back. Eventually.

Complaint department

One of my close friends is sufficiently self-aware to know she has a tendency to slip into negativity, and that it’s not good for her emotional health or for the people in her life. So each May she declares No Complaining Month for herself and anyone who wants to join along.

No Complaining Month isn’t about having nothing to complain about. It’s about resisting the urge to broadcast your complaints to anyone who’ll listen. And it’s about trying to remember the positive things instead of beating the dead horse of things that piss you off. No Complaining Month doesn’t expect perfection. It only hopes for improvement. At least for a few weeks.

So I’ll see how far I can get through May before I post a complaint. I think I've got most of them out of my system already, but we’ll see.

Splat

In hot, arid climates, bug guts dry almost immediately upon impact. The washers and wipers are useless because the guts are hard as epoxy. Gas station squeegees just shrug in resignation. Removal requires something like a high pressure car wash or a razor blade. In a way, it’s better than slow drying bug guts that just smear into a larger mess when you hit the wipers.

First dibs

I know some nomads who run online businesses or telecommute. During the work week they set up in a campsite with sufficient web access then use the weekends for travel, recreation and chores—pretty much like non-nomads do.

I’m lucky. I don’t need to work. At least not for the time being. That means I tend to move place to place during the week then get settled into a weekend spot by Friday morning, before the weekenders show up.

The opposite of this is the situation in places like the dispersed camping areas around Flaming Gorge. Locals will bring up a trailer one weekend and leave it there to save their spot until the next weekend. Since the camping limit there is 16 days rather than the usual 14, they can leave the trailer there again and pick it up after the third weekend.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a network of these people who just rotate campsites among themselves, holding them for the entire season. That would be a lot of work.

Nothing derails my plans faster than making them public

Explore the entire length of US-191! Yeah! It’s a plan! It’s an adventure! I got all the way from Douglas to Safford, a mere 125 miles, a third of a tank of gas when, whee, here came a monkey wrench. A very pleasant one, but a monkey wrench nonetheless.

I got a message from a friend/former coworker in Santa Ana, California. He’s retiring. There’s going to be a party. In Santa Ana. A lot of people I haven’t seen in a while will be there. In Santa Ana. Five-hundred-something miles away.

I don’t want to miss it.

So either a trip to the Coast and back becomes a really long “rib” in my original plan, or I make a new plan.

Up, up, up

Having wrapped up a couple of days at Stockton Pass, I decided to explore Highway 366 on the north slope of Mount Graham. (Well, mostly on the north slope, until it crosses to the south side near the 9,000-foot summit.) The atlas showed seven campgrounds and numerous trailheads. The Forest Service site listed the campgrounds as “temporarily closed.” I figured I could at least drive up and see what it was like.

The campgrounds appeared to be open and in use, so maybe the ranger district is just slow updating their listings. The sites were thickly forested, which means great shade but bad solar exposure. I knew the nights would still be subfreezing this time of year. Not for me. But the views were great.

Taking a pass

Between Willcox and Safford, Google Maps showed a line running west from US-191. A line thick enough to mean it was paved. A line that seemed to stop in the middle of nowhere.

I zoomed in. Highway 266, along the south slope of Mount Graham. It doesn’t just stop, it goes to the town of Bonita. And an Arizona State Prison. Then it becomes a smaller road.

Hey, most of that along there is National Forest. I wondered if the satellite view would show some boondocking areas. Zoom… scroll… scroll… mmmmmmm… no… scroll… scroll…scroll… There were none that I could see, but there was a campground.

I looked up Stockton Pass Campground on the Forest Service site. Free (free is good), open year round, about 5,600 feet up (it wouldn’t be too warm), a variety of trees, vault toilet… horse corral… It sounded promising.

FreeCampsites.net had a review. It said the toilet was old but clean. What more could I ask for.

The campground road got a little, um, rustic after it crossed a cattle guard. Ruts, washouts, et cetera. To the left was a parking area, the old-but-clean toilet, and a sign that said Group Camp, along with notices it was reserved. To the right, over even more rustic single tracks, was the corral and some boondocking-ish areas. That’s where I found my spot.

It was quiet until Friday evening when people started arriving at the group camp, and that was just the sound of vehicles thumping and bumping along the road. No big deal.

The drawback? No cell service. I spotted towers on a ridge, but with my binoculars I could see they weren’t cellular.

I decided to hang through the weekend. Better to hold onto the spot I had than to compete with other weekend campers for a new spot. Meanwhile, I’m making notes of things I want to look up on the web when I have access again—like what’s the word on that campground I saw in my atlas? And what’s the forecast for Alpine AZ?

Both sides now

Two years ago I spent some time on the eastern side of the Chiricahua Mountains. It was really nice. Yesterday I went to Chiricahua National Monument on the west side of the range. It’s known for its hoodoos.

It was nice to get up out of the typical southeast Arizona desert and up into forests of oaks, sycamores, cypress and pines.

I managed to snag a reservation at the small campground. It was odd that there was no check-in procedure. Just drive to the campsite with your name on it. All my fellow campers were quiet and though there were bear boxes in which to lock up your food, there were no sign of bears. In the middle of the night I heard what I first thought was a brief patter of rain on the roof, but it was just stuff from the trees. Oh, yeah. It has been a while since I camped with anything overhead.