We have settled in at an RV park in San Diego called Santee Lakes Preserve. It's as nice a place as we have seen and its as clean and well kept as any park we have been in....We even have a babbling Brook outside our bedroom window.
We have been busy and time seems to fly, but just to bring you up to speed.....
Left City of Rocks and got out on the highway heading West into Arizona. The vista's of that area are certainly something to behold. We are seeing everything that has been shown in the Arizona Highways magazines we have seen over the years. As we were heading West however, the weather turned bad for the first time on our trip with sleet, snow and rain. Yes and cold too. I thought Arizona was the place where all the snowbirds went to avoid this kind of weather.
Stopped for the night in Gila Bend (Sounds kinda neat like something out of the old westerns we watched on TV) There wasn't much there but "Augies Campground" was as neat, clean and friendly with free wireless even and all for the lowest price we've seen for camping at a private campground ($18.00).
We took the southern route (Interstate 8) that follows the Mexican Border quite closely and were stopped a number of times at Border Patrol inspection stops. It is apparent that there is quite a problem with border crossings in the area. At one point we even saw some people being taken into custody
Most of the area between City of Rocks and the California border was pretty wide open without too many surprises except when we reached Yuma, Arizona. With Yuma being right on the border we came across more RV Parks and RV's than we have ever seen in one place. We were told that this area is a major place to stop due to the available cheap Dental and Presciptions available in Mexico. Just east of Yuma, another surprise was the dunes in southern California....almost like the Sleeping Bear Dunes in Michigan although not as big.
From Yuma and the Dunes we quickly hit the mountains and which were a little more that I expected.....13 miles of 6% grades isn't so bad going up, but coming down is very exciting in 17 tons of motorhome and towcar. For some reason, I had thought this southern route was less mountainous. One thing different about these "hills" was the fact that it looked like a big pile of rocks as in some big dump truck dumping huge rocks in a pile and no vegetation. Just different than what we had been seeing.
After driving through the mountains, we arrived at San Diego and the Santee Lakes Preserve, our campground for the next three days. As I said it's quite nice for being in the middle of everything and close to transportation. We have found that taking the public transportation gives us a better perspective of some the places we have seen, and the rapid transit system here is the cleanest we seen....no graffiti. Driving in new cities can be quite exciting and the rail system took us right to "Old Town" San Diego. From there we took the Trolley Tour of the city from Old Town, USS Midway, Coronado, Seaport, San Diego Zoo, El Prado.....a total of 10 stops, all at interesting areas. We stopped at the USS Midway an aircraft carrier from late World War II that was active through the middle 1990's.
We also stopped at Coronado to see the Del Coronado Hotel which is where the movie "Some like it Hot" was filmed with Jack Lemon and Tony Curtis. My Dad was stationed here when his ship was in during World War II and we have pictures of me at this hotel as a child on its beautiful beach.
Last stop for us was Old Town which is nice but a few too many shops for me. The Architecture was interesting though.
Our reason for going to San Diego was to see Marge's cousin Carol and her husband and we had a delightful Italian dinner at a restaurant called Trattoria Di IV an unassuming little place with really good food.
Tomorrow on to see our grandchildren...oh yes and our daughter and her husband too!
