Advertisement
Published: December 20th 2017
After almost 6 weeks of Tortuga travels in the Southwest, we're finally within a stone's throw of Mexico! We were quite surprised to find that Christmas is in just a few days, so have found ourselves rushing around since we arrived in San Diego to get lots of admin tasks done before we cross over on Thursday. Anyway, to backtrack a little, we left Arizona towards the end of November and spent three nights at Lake Mead, in Nevada. We stopped briefly at the Hoover Dam on the way to camp, to admire the engineering marvel that holds back the Colorado river - well, Ken admired it while I spent most the time trying to find a public bathroom and a place to refill my water bottle!! Some things never change....
The dam is what creates Lake Mead, and it's a huge body of water and very popular with recreational boaters, paddle boarders, kayakers etc...The campground was pretty nice and we were able to walk down to the lake each day and let Goldie have a swim in the icy water. Ken was brave enough to take a quick dip himself, while I goaded him from the shore! The area
itself is not particularly peaceful due to the constant drone of helicopters passing overhead, taking sightseers for a tour over the dam, but we still enjoyed our time there and the weather was beautiful. We had also entered the Pacific Time zone, which meant that it was dark even earlier - by about 4.40pm, which was a bit of an adjustment! Luckily as we moved further west, the daylight hours became slightly longer again, and it's now light until a little after 5.15pm.
We knew there wasn't much of interest between Lake Mead and the central California coast, so we did a couple of long driving days to reach Vandenburg air force base, near Lompoc. Now I know it doesn't sound very adventurous to say we stayed at a military base, but this one has real advantages, particularly its access to cheap laundry, great showers, and most importantly a beautiful private beach that extends for miles and miles, and is completely empty. Goldie absolutely loved it and we went down there every afternoon to romp around in the surf and collect shells and stones. Goldie almost disgraced herself by swimming out after an injured cormorant, and we had visions
of "Have you seen this dog?" notices being distributed around base, with a photo of Goldie dragging an endangered seabird out of the ocean. Luckily we were unobserved and were able to continue the beach forays!
Many of you will have heard of the terrible wildfires causing devastation throughout central California right now, and these started just about the time that we were thinking of moving south to Santa Barbara. But even from 100 miles away, we could see the thick smoke in the air, so we drove out to the coast to Morro Bay and enjoyed a few days of mountain biking at Montana de Oro state park. It turned out to be a great place for meeting other travelers, and we enjoyed sharing our campfire with several interesting folks each night, including Cyrus, a retired Hollywood cameraman; Mark, a chef who works on one of the shark diving boats that Ken used to inspect in San Diego; and Connef, an engaging and thoughtful male nurse from the Philippines, who now lives in Santa Barbara.
We were a little disappointed at not being able to explore the Santa Barbara area, but the fires were increasing in size
Erm...how do you pronounce this one?!
I saw this sign somewhere in eastern California and managed to get a photo from the car as we whizzed by!every day and are even now still nowhere near being contained. So it made sense to head directly south to San Diego and get ready for our first overland border crossing. Both of us have travelled pretty extensively in Latin America, but this is the first time that we'll be taking a vehicle with us, so there are a few things we've had to do, such as buy Mexican car insurance and make copies of all our documents so that we can purchase a temporary import permit once we're in Mexico. We would have liked to spend more time in San Diego, catching up with all our friends, but it's tough to find anywhere affordable to stay with Tortuga here, and we're also ready to start exploring Mexico and beyond, which is the main purpose of this trip. We did get to meet up with our dear friends Dennis and Xu, and Ken enjoyed a lunch with his good friend from the Sportfishing Association of California, also named Ken! But to everyone else we missed, we're very sorry that we weren't able to see you this time around. And a big thank you to Scott and Sabrina, for so generously
agreeing to store our mountain bikes and biking gear in their garage for the foreseeable future!
So wish us luck as we head into Mexico....we'll try to post another blog within a couple of weeks, but the rough idea is to head to Ensenada first, and then over to the Sea of Cortez, working our way down through Baja to La Paz, where we will then catch a ferry to the mainland. Here we go!
Merry Christmas! ~ Fi (13 photos attached - scroll all the way down to see them all)
Advertisement
Tot: 0.221s; Tpl: 0.022s; cc: 12; qc: 64; dbt: 0.0753s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
mum and dad
non-member comment
Lovely blog
How lovely to read your blog and to see such great photos. You both look so happy and well and so rewarding for you to store such happy memories of Goldie, at this late stage in her life. She is obviously loving every minute. Long may she continue to do so. Hope to make contact around Xmas. M and F Xx