A new day, another day to take to the road …
This Sunday (2-23) completes a week in Southern California at the home of an old college friend, his wife, two (adult) kids and two small dogs. Quite the domestic scene it is! It’s trippy to be in a home where (a) people get along, (b) people like one another, (c) people communicate in functional and healthy manners, (d) people relate!
It’s the complete opposite of my childhood home environment and a wonder to witness and partake off for a short spell!
Today I begin the trip northward to the Bay Area to visit another old friend. Since I’m a girl with a shoestring budget, no job and no home, motels are out of the equation.
However, I am a girl with a Subaru, a sleeping bag and enormous expertise at plugging through life, resourcefulness and research so I’ve already done my extensive homework about where I might grab 40 winks in the next coupla days.
The problem — ONE of the many problems! — with California is that ***everything is so damn expensive!*** Example: Tent camping on a slot of land in state campgrounds costs $20 on the cheap and more commonly $35-40. For a night on dirt!!! The national campgrounds are a little less but not by much.
Lordie I hate what this state has become! And as a native of California (which I write with no pride), I’ve ever right and authority to say so!
So the trick is to locate Bureau of Land Management lands where dispersed camping (aka, boondocking, free camping) is permitted, hence that’s where I focus during my online research. Tonight looks Stayover Spot looks likely to be in the Carrizo Plains … a vast wide-open space in central-southern California known by few, appreciated by fewer and superb for solo venturing.
It features old preserved Indian paintings on rocks, expansive carpets of colorful wildflowers (where there’s rain – California’s in a major draught presently) and — particularly exciting to me — the San Andreas fault! Yes, that very one that stretches across the state and is responsible for many a quake!
Evidently there are places in the plains where one can view it at ground level. How cool is that?!?
Aside from these geographical features, ain’t nuthin’ out there save a small educational center (which will be closed today), thus it’s imperative to gas up and procure supplies like water or food before entering (nearest station is like 50 miles away). The nights are still chilly — around freezing — and the prairie so vast that solitude is if not a certainty at this time of year, then at least extremely likely!
It’ll be an adventure! I’m sans camera save the one on my cell phone. However, news is that there’s zero reception out in the “middle of nuthin'” so will see how that goes. Too, many of the roads are dirt and/or pretty rutted and, I read, the Carrizo Plains are NOT where you wanna be in a rainstorm! Evidently when it rains, it REALLY rains, turning the roads into impassable troughs of mud — yes, even for those folks with SUVs who are so arrogantly convinced that their cars are impenetrable and immune to mud, snow & ice. Note: THEY’RE NOT! And yet the snobbery arrogance continues … {sigh}.
Anyways, that’s where it’s at this Sunday in Thousand Oaks, Southern Cal. Off I venture into, literally, the wild blue yonder of the Carrizo Plains. Photos to come perhaps when I re-join civilization. Toodles.
Allelujah, Arizona! 