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We only had two weeks for this trip, and we stayed in dryer parts of California. Many days at Lake Isabella, many nights to watch a comet, and a glorious tour of the NASA-JPL Deep Space Tracking Station at Goldstone. What a fortnight!
1997 - Week 1
Friday-Sunday 5-7 April:
We loaded up old Spud I (a 1976 Mobile Traveler 22-foot survivor) and headed for US-101, south through Marin County (did we spend a night around Stinson Beach?) and over the red-orange Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco (as so many times before). A right turn at Geary Street took us out past Seal Rocks and Cliff House and down the Great Highway, the coast road to memoryland.
Pacific Ocean waves pounded on our right for the next hundred miles or more — a golden-blue spring day through Half Moon Bay, Pescadero, Davenport, and into Santa Cruz. Maureen and I met here in 1978. The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake severely rearranged the infrastructure. What is left? We drove up a mountain road on a dark Friday night to camper behind a tree and await dawn to find out.
And what we found in Santa Cruz that weekend was disspiriting. Our old haunts, gone. Bookstores, teahouses, patios, all gone. We poked around town, bought a few books, went back upill to that tree for another night, and left,
Monday 8 April:
Around the north end of Monterrey Bay, back to US-101 and the great Salinas Valley, the Mexican-flavored Gabilan and Coast ranges funneling us into ever-drier realms. King City and Greenfield (the Earthquake Capital of California) and San Miguel to Paso Robles. Being as we are, we stopped at all the old Spanish missions we could. Mission Santa Cruz was a closed shell. Soledad was closed again. San Miguel was familiarly glorious. And at Paso Robles we abandoned the highway and turned once again for the coast by an old road, stopping on a lonely ridge for a windswept night.
Tuesday 9 April:
We rolled down to the ocean and poked around Cambria at the bottom of the Big Sur coast. Signs warn of SEA LION CROSSING and those great beasts (or were they elephant seals?) were indeed lolling at the edge of the Pacific Coast Highway, menacing passing cars — Volkswagen Beetles are barely larger than the beasts. We ambled down the Central Coast and campered somewhere beyond Morro Rock, that monolith rising from a bay.
Wednesday 10 April:
Slowly we go into San Luis Obispo and its mission, poke around the revitalized heart of this university town. And slowly we wind through the small coastal towns to my old stomping ground of Pismo Beach; and beyond, to camper behind yet another tree on yet another windblown backroad. Does this sound familiar?
Thursday 11 April:
It's time to accumulate some mileage: halfway across California, from the coast through long interior valleys, Santa Maria to Bakersfield (the oil pit) and up into the Southern Sierrra Nevadas to Lake Isabella. We find a spot just north of the lake on the Kern River. We stay nearly a week.
1997 - Week 2
Friday-Thursday 12-17 April:
The days are delightful: sunny, clear, temperate. I've brought a pile of library books on Eastern Orthodoxy and I immerse myself in learning. Maureen reads and draws. We watch kayakers-rafters-canoers slide down the river just below us. On odd days we run the couple miles to Kernville for supplies and walkabouts and diversions.
At night we watch Comet Hale-Bopp float overhead and we don't eat the pudding. (Refer to Heaven's Gate.) An immensity of starry sky stares down on us. Dogs (Jake and Valkyrie) and cat (Petrushka) are resigned prisoners of our indolence. What, we worry?
1997 - Week 2+
Friday 19 April:
Just before we started this trip, I learned of a special event at the NASA-JPL Goldstone Deep Space Network (DSN) tracking station north of Barstow, an open house. Such a DSN Open House was quite rare in those days (more common since then), and I insisted that we attend. (See this announcement.) So today we rolled reluctantly from our lazy camp, down Walker Pass into the Mojave Desert, south to Kramer Junction (Four Corners), and east to Barstow (Barstool). Was this when we found the INJUN STUFF gas station? We campered amid Joshua trees on a windy sandstone ridge outside Fort Irwin and awaited the dawn.
Saturday 19 April:
The road to Goldstone (normally closed to outsiders) was intermittantly blocked by exercising battle tanks, etc. The DSN station is composed of a number of huge radio antenna dishes, ranging in diameter from 85 to 230 feet (26-70 meters) and scattered across 25 miles of rough desert terrain. The 'open house' tour required that we drive among the sites. NASA-JPL workers had displays at each site, showing off old and new technologies. Probes, computers, giant interferometer arrays, and much much more.
This was just before the Mars Pathfinder mission put landers on the surface of the red planet. I got to play with one of the prototypes of the Mars Rover. Rather, I got to lay on the carpet whilst a techie drove the rover over me, demonstrating its agility at surmounting bumpy objects (and I was pretty lumpy then). You just haven't LIVED till you've been run over by an interplanetary probe. Forget the damn reindeer.
We collected many brochures and buttons but alas, all good things must end, usually. We forelornly crawled away from Goldstone at closing time and started our long drive homeward, buzzing with astrodust. NOTE: Writing these notes eight years later, I find that the open house is now an annual event. We shall return.
Sunday 20 April:
We'd probably camped at a free BLM site some miles north of Bishop on US-395, still cool at elevation in late spring, with the High Sierras behind us and a rugged desert basin off to the east before the mighty White Mountains. So it's northward to a corner of Nevada, then across the Sierras and the great Central Valley and back to the Russian River. A most delightful two weeks, yes.
Other Pre-2000 Southwest Trips
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