Base Annex. The Marine Corps western logistics (supply) command is located in Barstow and they have two facilities, the main Barstow base and the one near us, which is called the Yermo Annex. After we got settled into the RV park we just stayed in for the rest of the day.Wednesday, November 9th, we left the coach after lunch to do some geocaching in the Barstow area. We have never cached here before and there are a lot of caches around the area. We were able to get 15 new finds, with no DNFs, within a few hours and never more than a few miles from the RV park. After caching we drove over to the outlet mall, but only went into a couple of the stores. We drove into downtown Barstow and toured around a little before heading over to the Elks Lodge. Unfortunately, when we got to the lodge we found it closed up, with a “for sale” sign in front. We called the phone number we had in the Elks travel book and found it was disconnected. It appears that the lodge may have gone under. Too bad. We then just headed back to the coach where we stayed the rest of the evening.
Thursday, November 10th, Happy 236th Birthday United States Marine Corps. Unfortunately, it is a travel day, so I will be unable to fly my Marine Corps Flag today. We left Barstow about 9:30 or so and started west towards Bakersfield, California, about 135 miles away. We were on Highway 58 which runs between Barstow and Bakersfield, crossing the Tehachepi Pass at nearly 4,000 feet. The road was pretty good and there wasn’t too much traffic. We arrived in Bakersfield just after noon and got settled into the Bakersfield Palms RV resort. Since we will be here for three days, we decided to just stay in and relax for the rest of today.
Friday, November 11th, Veterans Day. Thanks to all those who serve and those who have served in the past. Today is also the only day in this century which can be written as 11-11-11. The news has been saying that hundreds of couples around the country have selected today to get married so they will never forget their wedding date. We also noticed on the geocaching web site and newsletter that there are numerous geocaching events going on today in commemoration of the oddity of the date. One of them is being held right here in Bakersfield, only a few miles from where we are staying. The event is scheduled to start at 1:11 p.m. on 11-11-11. Since it’s Veterans Day, they are holding the event in a park, near a war memorial. It all comes together.
We left the coach after lunch and headed for the event, arriving just as the organizers were starting to put stuff out. Unfortunately, the wind was blowing pretty hard and it was sprinkling on and off, making an outside event in a park a little uncomfortable. At least it was fairly warm, in the low 70's. We introduced ourselves to some of the local cachers and had some nice conversations. The organizers gave us one of their unactivated travel coins, I guess as a reward for being the only out of towners at the
event. They also passed out sheets with the location information for eleven new caches. They local caching group that planned the event had different cachers in the area put out the eleven new caches, each with eleven items in the cache to start. The event was only a “meet and greet” which took about a half hour. They took a picture of the group, which ended up being a couple dozen people, and the attendees disbanded and, I would guess, headed out to try and be the “first to find” on one or more of the new caches. FTF is a little side game of caching. Some people really get into the FTF, putting alert apps on their phones so they get a notification as soon as a new cache is published within X number of miles of their home. Our motorhome friends, John and Rita Ham, who have an RV lot in Yuma, are that way. John has hundreds of FTFs to his credit. We have about six, most of which we found by luck. Since we are not early risers, we don’t usually catch the FTFs.We decided this day that we were going to make an effort to get an FTF, so I looked over the caches that we had picked up at the event. One of them was a puzzle cache and I was pretty sure I knew the solution to the puzzle. Puzzle caches are put out and published with false coordinates on the web site. To get the real coordinates you have to solve some type of puzzle. In this case the name of the cache was “11111111111111111" and the only hint was that the last three numbers in the longitude and latitude were abc and def, based on the title of the cache. Since geocaching is a digital sport, I deduced that the title was a binary number, seventeen digits long. I got out the calculator and quickly figured out the base ten value of the number. It was six digits long, just what I needed for the coordinates.
With that information we set out to locate the cache. We got to the coordinates and within seconds had found the cache under a bush. Yea! I got the answer right! We were, indeed, the first to find and got a nice 1921 silver dollar as the FTF prize. Most cachers put something in the cache when they place it as a prize for the first to find. When we put out our caches in Pahrump earlier this month I put a dollar bill in each cache for the FTF. After finding the cache we put the coordinates in for one of the other new caches, hoping that we might get another FTF. This one was a few miles away and we found the location pretty quickly. The information indicated that the cache, dedicated to the Apollo Eleven moon mission, was located up in a large tree alongside the road. We looked and looked, but couldn’t figure out where it might be. Just as we were about to give up, one of the other cachers who had been at the event arrived. He was a young kid, so he climbed the tree and found the cache way up out of reach. Once he got the cache down we told him that he earned the FTF, but when we opened the cache we found that there had already been three others there. Oh well, can’t win them all.
Since it was still rainy and windy, we decided that was enough caching, so we set out to do some shopping errands. First stop was the local Camping World store. Camping World is Nirvana for many RVers. There is not much in the way of RV supplies or goodies that you can’t get at camping world. What I originally wanted to get were some new mats for our outside steps, but I ended up with about $100 worth of stuff. Pretty hard to get out of Camping World without at least a hundred dollars of stuff. Fortunately, we only get to one a couple times a year. After camping world we hit Walmart and then Costco for groceries and goodies. Once we had all our supplies we headed home for the rest of the night.
Ironically, when Jackie sat down at the computer to log our cache finds into the web site, she found that neither of the caches we found had been published yet. Until they are published they don’t have an official cache number and can’t be logged. We will have to wait, probably until tomorrow, before we can log and get credit for our finds. We decided that since there were so many events scheduled for today that the people that reviewed and published new cache requests were probably way behind. We will eventually get credit for the finds.
Saturday, November 12th, we left the coach after lunch to do some geocaching. Although it is cool and overcast, there is little wind and it doesn’t look like rain. We cached for several hours around mostly east Bakersfield and finally quit at a dozen new finds. It was a bit of a rough afternoon though, we ended up with four new DNFs too. I think two of them were just gone, but two may have been there and we just couldn’t find them. Oh well, Jackie says it keeps us humble.
After caching we went to the Bakersfield Elks Lodge. This is an old lodge, Lodge 288, chartered back in the 1890's. They have a very large building, but it has a commercial restaurant in the front that is a lease from them, and a couple of large ballrooms that they rent out. Their actual clubroom is fairly small. There were half a dozen people in the bar and they were quite friendly. We have never visited Bakersfield before, so we got a lodge pin for our banner. We had a couple drinks and visited with folks for about an hour before heading home for dinner and TV.
Sunday, November 13th, was another travel day. We left Bakersfield and started southwest towards Oceano, California, on the coast. I took Route 166 across the coastal range of mountains between I-5 and the coast. The trucker’s atlas shows it as an authorized commercial truck route, one of two that comes out of the Central Coast to the Central Valley. I have been on the other one, the one that comes out of Paso Robles, many times, but I have never been on this one. This one has some fairly steep grades and curvy sections, but it wasn’t too bad. Just had to concentrate a little more. I always like to stay on roads are designated truck routes with the coach to avoid surprises, like low clearances or super tight turns.
One thing that occurred is just after we got started I was going from one freeway to another in Bakersfield on a tight cloverleaf interchange and the crock pot that Jackie had on the stove with our dinner cooking slid off onto the floor. I was driving and couldn’t see the mess, but I could hear Jackie behind me swearing for fifteen minutes while she cleaned up the mess. Fortunately, the roast we had in the pot didn’t come out and she was able to rescue most of the veggies, so we will still have dinner when we get to Oceano.
We pulled into the Pacific Dunes RV Ranch a little after 1:00 and got our spot. We have never been to this park before, didn’t even know it existed until we joined the membership program that has it on it’s list. We usually stay at Elks Lodges when we are in this area, but we can get this park for $23 a night and have 50 amp full hookups where the Elks have
30 amp and no sewer for $20. This way we can stay the whole ten days we are going to be here in one spot instead of having to move periodically to dump the tanks. The park is great, we are about a half mile from the ocean and have a great view of the dunes. We can’t see the ocean, but we are sure getting the breeze. After we got parked we set up and just stayed in the rest of the day.Monday, November 14th, we awoke to a nice, cool Pacific beach day. After lunch we headed out to do some local caching. We had one cache that had come up on my query as new, so we headed for that one first with hopes of getting the FTF (first to find) for the cache. The cache was in Arroyo Grande, close to the RV park, near an old bridge across a creek that runs through town. Unfortunately, we were unable to find the cache. The information for the cache, as well as the hint, would lead one to believe that the cache was somewhere near or on the bridge, or the creek, but the coordinates on both of our GPS receivers were taking us in a different location. We looked for a while but finally gave up.
After our unsuccessful efforts at the FTF, we drove to nearby Grover Beach and picked up Jackie’s cousin, Pia. Jackie had talked to her this morning, to let her know we had arrived in town, and when she mentioned we were going caching Pia said she would like to go with
us. She follows our Facebook entries as well as our blog, so she knows how much we like caching. She said it intrigued her and she wanted to see what it was all about. We picked her up and headed out for some caching. We ended up finding ten new caches in a couple of hours and Pia spotted at least four of them before we even did. She displays a natural talent for caching and we encouraged her to consider getting a GPS and getting into the hobby.We then dropped Pia off at her house and drove to Pismo Beach to visit with Jackie’s aunt Donna. Donna and her late husband Barkey have lived in Pismo Beach since the early 70's and built one of the first houses on the hill overlooking the town and the beach. They subsequently built a number of houses in town and Donna was big in real estate in the area for
many years. Barkey, who was Jackie’s uncle on her mother’s side, died a couple of years ago, but Donna still lives in one of the houses they built overlooking the beach. Donna, who is in her eighties, has her grandson Corey living with her, helping her with day to day living. We had a very nice visit with Donna and Corey, along with Corey’s girlfriend, and we set up a sort of “schedule” of things we would like to do with Donna and the rest of the family over the rest of the week we will be here. Just after sunset we left Donna’s and drove back to our coach, stopping at the Oceano Elks Lodge on the way. Had we not joined the RV park membership that gave us access to the park we are
staying in, we probably would have stayed at the Oceano Elks. They have a large RV park right next to lodge and we have stayed there many times in the past. As I said earlier, however, they charge $20 for a site with 30 amp and no sewer, while we are getting a full hookup 50 amp site for $23. Kind of a no brainer. We had one cocktail at the lodge, looked at their schedule to see what was going on, and then headed to our RV park. We are staying only a mile or so from the lodge. Tuesday, November 15th, we decided that this would be a “chores” day. I had a fairly large to-do list and wanted to get some of it done. I changed all the water filters, repaired a sewer valve, put on new step covers, and did all my periodic maintenance checks on the coach. I was done by mid-afternoon and had a very productive day. Jackie got some of her “to-do’s” done today as well.
Wednesday we left the coach after lunch and drove into Grover Beach to do our laundry. After laundry we spent an hour or so walking around the Pismo Beach outlet mall. We then went back to the coach for an hour or so before heading to the Oceano Elks Lodge for spaghetti night. From past visits here we knew that the Oceano lodge has all you can eat spaghetti every Wednesday night, and it is yummy. In the past the place has always been packed, so we went about an hour early to have a cocktail and get a table for our group. Jackie’s aunt Donna and cousin Pia, and Donna’s grandson Corey and his girlfriend Wanda, are all coming to have dinner with us. As it turned out, really needn’t have come early because there were only a few dozen people for tonight’s dinner. In the past we have always been here in this area in the spring or early summer. We learned that the winter crowds are much smaller. Nonetheless, the food was still great and I ate way too much. We had a great time visiting with all of Jackie’s kin, and had a great dinner too. After dinner we drove back to the coach for the rest of the night.
Thursday, November 17th, we left the RV park right after lunch and drove about 15 miles north to San Luis Obispo. San Luis Obispo, or SLO as it is known locally, was first settled by the Spanish explorers who traveled up the coast from what is now Mexico. The mission, the fifth established on the California mission trail, was founded in 1772. The city was incorporated in 1856 and is the county seat of San Luis Obispo County. The city is home to California Polytechnic State University, also known as Cal Poly. We spent several hours doing some geocaching in the SLO area, getting seven new finds with one DNF. After caching we spent an hour or so walking around the downtown area window shopping.
Every Thursday night there is a farmers market/street fair held on the main street through downtown SLO. We have been to this event on past visits to the area and found it quite a lot of fun. They close the street down at 5:30 and the fair starts around 6:00 p.m. Just before six we went into Mother’s Tavern, one of the local restaurants, for dinner. I had fish and chips and Jackie had one of their burgers. We had a very enjoyable dinner and a couple of drinks before leaving the restaurant and spending another hour or so walking the street fair. We had a very enjoyable day and evening. After finishing the fair we stopped at a grocery for some supplies and then drove back to the RV park for the rest of the night.
Friday, November 18th, another beautiful coastal day. It was cool and breezy, and there were clouds on the horizon foretelling the possibility of rain, but it was still nice. Jackie spent a couple hours in the morning preparing her signature Halibut chowder for Saturday’s dinner with her aunt and the rest of the family. She always like to make the chowder the day before so it has time to set. After lunch we went out to do some local caching. We managed to get seven new finds, with one DNF, in the course of a few hours. In the process we discovered a very tiny park in Arroyo Grande where the old, early 1900's jail, was located. Aptly, the park was called Hoosegow Park. We also got a cache with a difficulty rating of 4, which is pretty high. They are rated 1 - 5 in both difficulty (finding) and terrain (location). The cache was very tiny and actually out in plain sight, just very well camouflaged. We have never seen a cache quite like this one before. It was made to look like the common wire and lead seals that you see on utility meters and boxes. Very clever.
After caching we went to Jackie’s cousin Pia’s house for a little while just to visit. I helped out with some computer stuff and showed her how to get some really neat games to download. After our visit there we went to the Pismo Beach Moose lodge for a cocktail. The Moose lodge in Pismo is located only a couple hundred yards from the beach, right in the downtown area. They have a real premium piece of real estate. The clubroom was small but nice. The bartender could have been a little friendlier, but some of the people at the bar talked to us. We had a couple of drinks and then headed for home, picking up a pizza for dinner while on the way.
Saturday, November 19th, we just stayed around the coach until about 3:30 when we packed up the Halibut chowder and sundry supplies and went over to Donna’s house. We had a wonderful visit with Jackie’s family and a great dinner of chowder. Pia put together a salad and between that and the rolls we had everything we needed. After dinner we spent
about 90 minutes playing a game called “Catch Phrase” with the family. This is an electronic game that we bought a year or so ago after playing it with a group of friends at an RV park. The game brings up a random or word or phrase and then you have to give hints to the other players to get them to guess it. It is a cross between password and charades since you can give verbal as well as physical cues. Some of the words a phrases are very obscure and we had a good time. There are a lot of laughs from a game like this. About 8:30 we left Donna’s and went back to the coach for the rest of the evening. Sunday was an interesting day in some respects. It had started raining in the middle of the night, sometime right around midnight. Off and on it was raining really hard and the wind was blowing pretty good too. About 4:30 or so I got up to use the bathroom and while I was up I went out into the living room to check for any obvious signs of leaks. Leaking water is the bane of every RVers existence, and we have had a few in the past. While we were in Pahrump we had some water leaking out of a ceiling light in one of the living room slides. I thought at that time that it might have been caused by the guy that washed the coach using his power washer and forcing water into an area that it would not normally go. Unfortunately, I found that the same fixture was again leaking water onto the coach. Not a lot of water, but enough to be a concern. It was clear that the slide had a leak somewhere. I took out the light fixture to avoid any electrical issues, and put a towel under the leak to soak up the water. I then went back to bed.
When I got up later, about 7:30, it was still raining and it was still leaking from the slide. I had to remove the second light fixture in the same slide because it too was leaking a little. When Jackie got up, and the rain had stopped for a while, we pulled the slide in. It can’t leak if it’s not out in the rain. I tried to examine the caulking on the seam along the top of the slide, the one I suspect has developed a hole, but I can’t get to it without dismantling the whole decorative fascia on the interior of the slide. I decided we would wait until we get to Fresno later in the week for that job. Fortunately, none of the other areas that have leaked in the past were wet, so my fixes on those areas are still holding.
The rain went on and off all day. We had originally planned to go to the big swap meet in nearby Nipomo, but with the wet ground, cold wind and continuing rain we decided to just stay in for the day. We spent the day playing games and catching up on TV shows.
Monday, November 21st, we had an early lunch and then went out to do some more caching in the local area. Today we were able to get an additional seven new finds, one of which was our 3,100 find, a new milestone. We also got a cache that we had tried to get last year when we here but couldn’t figure out a way to get into where the cache was. Today we stuck to it, found the right way in, and got the cache. After caching we stopped at the store for some supplies before heading back to the RV park.
One of the other places we stopped today was the Pismo State Beach Butterfly Grove. This grove, located just off the beach on Highway 1, is one of many Southern California Monarch Butterfly wintering sites. Every winter hundreds of thousands of Monarchs leave their
winter homes in the north and migrate south to wintering sites in the southern U.S. and Mexico. The migration actually spans several generations of butterflies and the ones that leave the wintering site in the Spring will not be back. Nonetheless, every year they flock to the same places as their ancestors. Scientists are still trying to figure out how and why the Monarchs come back to the same places every year. In the past, when we have come
to Pismo Beach in the Spring or Summer there were no butterflies. This is the first time we have been here in the Fall, when the butterflies are coming in. They hang in the trees in huge groups. Tourists flock to the site when the butterflies are in residence. This was the first time we have been able to see the phenomenon. Pretty cool. About 4:30 we left again en route to Jocko’s Steak House in Nipomo, a small town about 10 miles south of the RV park. We have been to Jocko’s on a couple of other visits to this area and it remains my favorite, all time steak house. The steaks here are better than any
I have had, anywhere. We met Jackie’s family there, including Pia, Donna, Corey and Wanda, along with Rod, a friend of Pia’s. I had a ribeye and Jackie had lamb chops. They cook all their meat on an open BBQ fueled with only oak wood and the flavors are to die for. The meat is all prime and is super tender. The guys that work the grill also really
know how to cook the meat. Jackie likes her meat charred rare, and she is more often than not disappointed. Never here. I like mine blue, which is basically raw with just a little browning on the outside. Along with your meat you get salad, potato, beans, dessert and coffee if you want it. Jackie’s complete dinner, which was so big she took half of it home, was $20, my 20 oz. Ribeye was $27 and I took half of it home too. Jocko’s is on Thompson Street in Nipomo, California, just a little bit north of Santa Maria off highway 101. There is no finer steak place and I highly recommend it to anyone who is in the area looking for a good meal. After dinner we drove over to Donna’s house where we visited with the family until about 9:30 when we finally went back to the coach for the night.
Tuesday, November 22nd dawned a cool but clear day. I spent a little time in the morning cleaning up stuff outside the coach in preparation for a travel day on Wednesday. Mid afternoon Jackie’s Aunt Donna and Cousin Pia came over to the coach for a visit. They had some family issues to talk about, so I just stayed in the back on my computer while they visited in the front. Later in the evening we all had dinner in the coach. Jackie fixed chicken enchiladas and all the other Mexican side dishes. It was great. After dinner we visited some more with Jackie’s family until about 8:00 when they left to go home.
Wednesday, November 23rd, our stay in Oceano has come to an end. We packed up the coach and left about 10:00 to head northeast about 160 miles to Fresno, California. Jackie has a niece that lives there with her husband and kids. The drive was uneventful, although there was quite a bit of traffic on the road because it is the day before Thanksgiving. We arrived
at the Fresno Elks Lodge about 2:00 and got set up in their RV lot. We have a very nice grass site overlooking a small lake. Pretty nice view. The sites have 30 amp and water, no sewer, but we are only going to be here for five nights, so we can handle the lack of sewer. It has been a couple of weeks since I published a chapter, so this seems like a good spot to break it off and get it on line. The next chapter will be another couple weeks. Until the next time, stay happy and smile. A smile is the light in the window of your face that tells people you're at home. See ya!
