Hey there. I’m in a cafe called Epic Cafe in Tucson, near the University here. It is eery how similar this town’s kids and art scene seems to be to Portland, ambitious, driven, and yet still a small city. But its nice. The weather is nice too… SUN SUN SUN. Today we’re heading out to find some neat thrift stores, take pictures of Airplane Graveyards, and find a campsite in the mountains nearby.
Last night we found ourselves staying at the fabulous 😉 Flamingo Hotel on the strip outside of town. NEat sign, nice old movie theme, each room had old movie posters all around it and a theme, a LOT of westerns apparently were filmed here back when Cowboy and Indian flix were the big new thing. My favorite quote from the poster on the way to our room was “Hombre means man, and Paul Newman is Hombre”.
So I’m still catching up obviously, but I hope that this brings you closer to us in our travels. We are full of life and having a great time. Our next stop is… uh, Roswell ? New Mexico, and then, uh, Austin? We’re not sure right now. The sun is getting to my head, in a good way. Encourages a slow down certainly.
So anyways, I am still writing out the larger panorama of the trip which you can read below, the next part. I hope to repolish all of this writing and pictures and put it into an interesting book. I admit, its rough right now, but with some time I will be able to hopefully make the trip live up to what it feels like… to some extent.
Also, I have more pics HERE, enjoy!
In short San Luis Obispo, while charming, kind of left us with something to be desired. Or probably more precisely, we had some really high expectations for it. It is more or less a peaceful college town, with prevailing frat party atmosphere. The time we spent at our campsite was ideal, long afternoons on the beach, making mobiles and painting, eating grilled salmon off the campfire. We spent two nights at a simple but tantalizingly close to the ocean site called Montana De Oro. And then we headed south again.
Our initial impression of Santa Barbara was fantastic, wide streets with people walking everywhere, our first palm trees, and sun everywhere. It doesn’t take long there to realize how well off the general population is. Grandparents dye their hair and wear designer jeans, and the fancy shmancy restaurants line State St, the main strip of the town. There is plenty to check out on foot in the area, my favorite city park so far being the coy ponds there. Its a fantastically landscaped small park with a living pool, surrounded by palm trees, grassy areas and native plants. We sat on the edge of it and watched the turtles bask in the sun and even approach us, hungry for treats from human friends. The coy fish in the pond are huge and peaceful. We could have stayed there for hours.
Our home-base was about 25 minutes northeast of town at a charming 50’s style county campground called Lake Cachuma. It sits around a dammed lake, with hundreds of oak tree lined simple campsites. There is a general store there, and a marina, and its the kind of place that feels like it has had its heyday, a kind of destination for RV living, with plenty of family campsites. Our site sat just at a spot where you could watch the sun set over the placid lake, with a tiny little trail winding down to some good sitting rocks. The only hindrance was the wind, in the time we were there it was constant, strong and persistent. We cooked and talked and set up tarps in the wind, anticipating rain at any moment, but it passed us by. We stayed a record three nights there, just kind of taking in the area and slowing down a bit. We didn’t want to hit LA during the weekend, when hotel rates were considerably higher. So on Sunday morning we set off, down 101, and the Pacific Coast highway, cruising in California traffic past surfers setting off into the crystal blue waves, and into the jungle that is the outskirts of LA.
Both Kate and I had pretty much negative preconceptions of what LA was all about. We both kind of saw it as a gigantic parking lot, swarming with crime and superficiality. We were wrong, thankfully. LA is not as ugly as Northern Californians would like to think it is, the burghs that we saw, Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, and Venice are all shaded with trees.
The biggest surprise for me personally was Beverly Hills. I half expected to see bleach blonde plastic surgery victims walking chihuahuas and talking on cell phones, but there was none of that to be seen, though it may go on behind the massive gates of the massive houses in that rightfully famous neighborhood. We drove our ever modest camping mobile around the winding hills looking in awe at not only the ridiculous mansions, but kind of reveling in how actually pretty it was, and how, hey, if we had a spare ten million dollars to spend on a small house, that would be a good place to do it.
In the evening we found ourselves in Santa Monica, and walked the busy pier their, while the ever bustling crowds swarmed everywhere around us. It was sunny and 74 degrees outside, the breeze was light, and it was gorgeous. It was living up to the stereotypes, but in a good way. We spent the late evening in an outdoor seating bar named Bugsy’s along the 3rd St. Promenade, a really nice pedestrian walk area where extremely talented street musicians entertain the wildly diverse crowds walking around the warm night air.