RV Rampage USA

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PART 1

Packing up and arriving.

Aaaah, the Travelblog. It’s been a while. It’s exactly ten years since we last set off ‘on a biggy’ (ten years!) and since the world seems to be heading rapidly towards hell in a handcart, we thought we’d better see a bit more of it before some crackpot obliterates it forever.

We’d set our sights on a US roadtrip some time ago, figuring that it would be about the cruisiest holiday we could manage with two little ‘uns, without sacrificing adventure, and eventually settled on a plan to pick up an RV and drive it around California and Oregon. That was it. No pre-planning. The plan-master in chief, Jenny, had been uncharacteristically – though understandably - off the ball on this occasion, which turned out to be perfect. No timetables to chase or targets to hit. Just fun to find.

To quote Her Maj, the Queeny, 2017 had been a horrible anus for us. A right stinker. And so we were more than ready to bugger off for a while and put it all behind us for six weeks. We rented out our flat, chucked our belongings in a Big Yellow and off we buggered onto an Easter Monday flight to LA.

So brimming were we with excited anticipation of what lay ahead, not even the prospect of 11 sleepless hours of baby wrangling could dampen our spirits...which is just as well because that's exactly what we got. Before the pilot had even checked his mirrors it was clear that Betty had no intention of sleeping a wink on the flight. It didn’t help that she was clearly too big for her bassinet, though that didn’t stop us trying to wedge her in anyway, one limb popping back out as another was pressed in.

Fred was no bother though as he embarked on an impressive TV marathon. His 11 hours of back-to-back cartoons smashed the family record previously set by Grandpa Carr, who had managed about 6 hours of non-stop Yes Minister on a flight to Tunisia in 1991.

Still, with a fair amount of jet lag looming, a sleepless flight would likely give us a chance of sleeping at the right time that night, so long as we could get through customs before Trump imposed a travel ban on anyone who's ever eaten a curry.



L.A.

Our first stop was to be a groovy little apartment near Manhattan Beach where the main objective was to spend two days getting everyone's body clocks on track…

if only…

we…

could stay awake…

until dark.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

We did – hurrah!

Until five to midnight – boo!

Not even midnight. We didn’t even make it past that minor milestone before Betty decided it was morning (She was right, it was. 6,000 miles away).

Ah well.

We gradually righted our body clocks over a couple of days spent eating blueberry pancakes and playing in the Manhattan Beach sand, which – as an added bonus – comes with free blobs of crude oil which stick to the soles of your feet like a small gift from J.R. Ewing to newly arrived tourists.

Over the next couple of days we adjusted to our new high sugar, low-veg diet and chortled at the beefcakes pumping egos on the boardwalk, but one question began to niggle: isn’t Fred a bit hot? In two days of blazing sunshine, he had absolutely insisted on keeping on his hoodie and steadfastly refused to take his socks off on the beach. This led, we quickly learned, to Fred-malfunction by about 11am and then total meltdown about ten minutes later. Note to Fred if you read this when you’re older – take your socks off on the beach - it's really impractical and it makes you grumpy.

Re-aligned and beginning to relax, Day 3 saw us head to Cruise America HQ where our trip would begin in earnest. The RV wasn't called Ernest, though we did name it 'Harvey the RV'. That was after dismissing 'Wallbanger' for fear it would pre-empt a smash. Harvey was 25 feet long, about the same wide and for some inexplicable reason had a picture of golden retriever (later named Rufus) on the side door. Disappointingly the Cruise America parking lot didn't have a test track for drivers to familiarise themselves with their new massive vehicles, so instead I did my learning in the next best conditions, six lanes of Los Angeles' rush hour traffic.

It's remarkable that no-one died in those first few hours, during which only one panicked u-turn was required, as we negotiated our way out of LA, heading east to Palm Springs, buffeted by heavy traffic and winds as it got dark. But somehow we made it and Jenny duly hopped out, obeying the strict instructions that passengers (women in 100 per cent of case) should direct drivers (100 per cent men) whenever reversing into the expensive rectangles that call themselves RV parking sites.



Palm Springs

Betty was to sleep in her travel cot which conveniently filled the bulk of the floor space, while Jenny and I would switch between sharing with Fred and taking the 'penthouse' - the head-clonking cabin above the driver's seat. Between squeezing around Betty's cot and clambering into the penthouse, there was literally no space for dignity. A new normal had begun.

Palm Springs was a great place to start, not least because the RV park had a pool which for a long while - in spite of the incredible natural wonders that followed - remained Fred's highlight of the trip. We took the 'aerial tramway' (a spinning cable car - spinning!) high up to the Mt. San Jacinto State Park - then back down again to discover an even greater wonder, the famous Palm Springs Date Shake...a milkshake with the magic ability to keep a four year old unbelievably compliant.



Joshua Tree National Park

Armed with this potentially priceless new knowledge, we headed deeper into the desert to the Joshua Tree National Park, a truly beautiful land of weird, wonderful and spiky desert plants. Before we would leave, three of the four of us would have experienced first hand the spikiness of these plants. In fact, we'd barely arrived before I - clutching Betty - bounded into some low hanging branches of a Joshua Tree and nearly lacerated the two of us to bits. Lesson learnt.

In spite of this early setback, the Joshua Tree NP was a big hit: big desert night skies, beautiful walks and the fortuitous discovery of two more four year olds - Tyler and Logan - camping next door - happy respite for Fred from the tedium of hanging out with the rest of us. Unfortunately - although not surprisingly given our experiences in LA - the desert heat proved a bit much for one little boy. On a walk in admittedly stifling heat, a minor disagreement culminated in Fred looking Jenny in the eye as he poured our only water into the desert sand. To give the wee man credit, it was a spectacular move - brave yes, utterly foolish, but pulled off with such aplomb.

'People die in the desert doing that kind of thing' scolded Jenny. And we frogmarched Fred back to the RV....about 6 minutes away.



Yosemite

Cooler climes were needed and we sacked off ambitions of visiting Death Valley for the fear it would be the death of us. Instead, we braced ourselves and embarked on a mega drive towards Yosemite: 13 hours on day one and another few the next day. If we'd underestimated the scale of this vast country before (we had), this was the way to learn it. Several hours of being buffeted by cross winds as we took on the Mojave Desert finally gave way to slightly more blossoming, then less barren rolling landscapes, followed by rolling green hills, then oil wells alongside orange plantations, It was a very long day.

By 4pm the following day (Monday) we were in Yosemite National Park where the fresher air and ludicrously photogenic everything felt like we'd found a place to stop for a while. And we did. We unpacked all the food from the RV into a bear proof box (Fred taking great delight in ferrying every food item himself) then settled down to read that visitors in high sided vehicles didn't need to bother doing what we'd just spent 20 minutes doing. Ah well. We didn't want to disappoint the lad so we left everything but the bare, first-thing-on-the-morning essentials (COFFEE!) in the bear proof box.

Three days became four as we lucked out with the weather and had a beautiful time there. It was chillier at night but beautiful most days, and although the little legs prevented us from doing any major walks, we filled our time with walks to various waterfalls, other waterfalls, and a few waterfalls, which we knew were a hit with Betty as she kicked her legs around like an epileptic disco dancer every time we came across one. (Come to think of it, maybe that meant she was terrified. Ah well, we'll never know)

Jenny and I were discovering at this point that any ambitions we had of truly exploring some of these places were going to be a little limited. We were absolutely fine with this - lots of cups of tea and quality time hanging out with the kids was fine with us. But we still felt a tad pathetic when our neighbouring campers returned from their days hiking high up on the plateau, or scaling massive waterfalls, while we'd facilitated two naps and bought some marshmallows.

On leaving Yosemite we paid a visit to Tunnel View - where the ludicrously photogenic view back down the valley looks suspiciously hyper-real. But it's not - it just is that picturesque. Though it's worth bearing in mind - when viewing photos of the valley - that among those giant sequoia trees there's a frighteningly efficient bus service doing never ending loops around the valley floor....something the local Indian tribes would have no doubt considered worth dying for.

Anyway, back to Tunnel View. In short, we fucked up and took our massive RV up an increasingly precarious, narrow - and decreasingly familiar - road...with very steep edges. In these situations there's always a few minutes between thinking something's not right and voicing it. Then there's another minute or two before you decide to do something about it. All the while you're driving deeper and deeper into trouble. And so it was that finally we decided, with both kids asleep, to attempt a daring three point-turn on a stretch of road about 2 feet wider than the RV, with a drop of several hundred feet behind us.

Jenny hopped out (as per RV manual instructions), and signaled like a woman possessed as I gingerly conducted a 333 point turn, knowing full well that if I ballsed this up, poor old Jenny would be standing on an empty bit of mountain road watching her entire family disappear over the edge of a cliff.

Steady

Does

It

Minutes later and with an audience (queue) of cars from both directions, we got Harvey pointing back down the hill and no one said a word for quite some time.

Time for some civilisation. San Francisco was looming...but that will have to wait for the next update...



(By the way, lots more photos on the next page)

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