Wow, another month in the bag. We’ve had a great time and stayed in 9 amazing places. We finally made it to the West coast and the weather and site-seeing has been off the hook. The longest we stayed was San Diego for a week. Everywhere else was 3-4 nights. San Diego was probably our favorite, or at least most epic. But Lake Lopez near San Luis Obispo was incredible and staying at Laguna Seca Raceway was really fun. Below is the map with our stops in alphabetical order. I’m getting a little better manipulating Google Maps into showing what I want 🙂 Our story this month starts with us leaving Las Vegas for more tropical climes.

 

Muir Woods is a spectacular National Monument park just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco.   The park is extremely popular and starting 2018 they require RESERVATIONS for parking and/or the shuttle at the park.   Donna’s friend Kelly clued us in about the reservations so I had made them a week prior.  Our reservation was good between 10:30 and 11:30 am.  During busier times the reservation would have had us parking near Hwy 101 and taking a shuttle in.  The shuttle adds about a 45 min ride each way.  We are here off-season so we were able to park in the main lot.  The main loop in Muir Woods is about 1/2 mile long from the visitor center and is wide, flat, and in most places paved.  This make the park very accessible for those less physically capable.   This parks sees many elderly, handicap, and children in strollers as a result.  There are many giant redwoods on the main loop and the trees are incredible.  It is a magical and beautiful place.  The main loop was pretty crowded and loud.  There are 4 or 5 trails off of the main loop and we took the Fern Creek 1.6mile loop trail.  This trail starts near the end of the main loop.   The trail was much more peaceful and quiet than the main loop.  It also was very beautiful and followed a very nice babbling creek.  The trail had many big redwoods but not as many giants as the main loop.   It took us about 3 hours to see the park, but you could easily spend all day if you are up to the additional trails.  The Fern Creek trail had about 180 feet of elevation change and we were pretty tired after our hike.   I think this park is a must see if you are in the San Francisco area.

Today we explored the Point Reyes National Seashore.   Our RV park was at the entrance to the area but its about a 20mile drive all the way to the point.  The drive is elevated and provides fantastic views of the shoreline both directions.   The stairs down to the lighthouse are only open Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.   We were in luck.  Oops, the stairs were closed due to high winds.  It was windy and pretty cold.  It was pretty crowded and many visitors were in t-shirts, shorts, and flip-flops.  I’m not that tough and many of them seemed miserable.  After the lighthouse we went to Drake Beach.  On the way to the beach we saw Elk along the road.   Unfortunately we didn’t get pics of the Elk.

Happy Easter. We had a leisurely morning to get ready to depart. We were rolling at 10am headed for Olema Campground at the entrance to Point Reyes National Seashore, and about an hour North of San Fransisco. During the drive we drove the Big Rig across the Golden Gate Bridge. Olema is in the country away from civilization. Looks like no internet for this location again (later we were able to get service and internet) . Yuck. The campground is very pretty with many really large trees. We ate a late lunch at the Farmhouse Cafe in Olema, one of only two restaurants nearby. It was ok, but pricey again.

Today, Kelly’s other, Steve, joined the group. He led us back through ½ of the17 mile drive to Carmel. Steve grew up coming to Carmel and he led us to some beautiful scenic locations and he gave us a tour of Pebble Beach Golf Club. We ate lunch at Pecadero’s Mexican restaurant in Carmel. Patio dining is really a pleasure with the mild weather and beautiful surroundings. We walked Ocean Blvd in Carmel and sampled some of the shops. We then let Maverick run wild on Carmel Beach. A beautiful beach that is also off-leash for the pup. We bid farewell to Kelly and Steve and returned to the coach for a quiet afternoon.

We picked up Donna’s friend Kelly at her hotel. We used Kelly as a mule and ordered stuff online delivered to her house in Foster City (San Fransisco area). We also had the kids forward our mail. I took our mail/packages and Donna and friend went for lunch, massage, and pedicures. I went to Home Depot and bought a vacuum for all of the sand in the car. I went back to the coach and worked through the mail and installed a new furnace blower motor Kelly delivered. I made reservations for the three of us at Tarpy’s Roadhouse and we had a nice dinner together. Tarpy’s is nice, pricey, and the food wasn’t as good as the setting and price would infer.

Today we need to restocked at Walmart and ate fast food for lunch. We then went to Lovers Point in Pacific Grove. It is a beautiful park on the ocean where the ocean crashes on the rocks. Really awesome. We made reservations for Chart House for dinner. A nice splurge. We had a table by the window overlooking Monterey Bay watching the sea otters play and sleep in the kelp. Very cool.

Today we left Lopez Lake and headed North on the 101 for Mazda Laguna Seca Raceway. There aren’t very many RV parks in the area and they are booked solid for Spring Break. Laguna Seca has RV parking with electric. We are staying here for 4 nights. Laguna Seca is a really neat camping spot. Our spot was high on the side of a hill overlooking turn 5 of the race track. The area is hilly or mountainous and really scenic.

There are cars running the track full time like Ferrari’s, Vipers, Porsche’s, BMW’s, … you get the idea. As a car guy this is really cool. The cars quit running about 5pm so its not an issue in the evening. The weather is perfect. Once set up we ran into Monterey for a look-see. We’ve both been here 3-4 times so its pretty familiar. We drove the 17 mile scenic drive that loops from Pacific Grove to Carmel and back.

Today we got up and headed to San Simeon. We had reservations for 11am to tour the Hearst Castle. It was really busy because it is Spring Break in these parts. The Castle is remarkable and the setting overlooking the coastline is amazing. It is really worth taking the time to see if you are in the area. We ate lunch nearby at Cavalier’s. It is just a hotel restaurant but had good trip advisor reviews and was quite good. Cavaliers sets right on the beach and we enjoyed a short walk with Maverick. On the way back I decided to get new faucets for the bedroom and bathroom. I had replaced the old shiny brass ones about a year ago with rubbed bronze RV equivalents. On the road I wasn’t thrilled with these because they were very short and hard to use. So tonight I decided I would fix that for good. I went to Home Depot and bought real faucets (not plastic RV faucets) with an elevated and rotating spout. On the way into the park from town we were treated to a beautiful Fox crossing the road. Yesterday I saw a herd of deer and this morning our sleep was disturbed by wild turkeys gobbling outside our window. Since it was twilight we drove through the park. We found our flock of 8 wild turkeys and the two males put on a show puffing up and fanning their tails. We also found our herd of 9 deer grazing nearby. Earlier, leaving the park we saw a man get very close to the deer taking pictures. All of the wildlife here is pretty approachable. Supposedly there are Pumas and Bear nearby but we couldn’t find them. We have really enjoyed the scenic beauty of this park and lake and the frequent wildlife encounters.

Well I haven’t done too much technical since retiring but the last three days are a minor exception. If you don’t care about computers and operating systems you can skip this. I had become increasingly frustrated with Windows 10 on my laptop. The laptop was taking way too long to boot, was very slow to start applications and would frequently just hang for a quite some time. Over the past couple of weeks I helped it a lot by disabling virus protection and the Malware detection but that didn’t seem like a great long term solution. I decided about a week ago to dry run Linux (again). I installed the ISO to a flash drive. This enabled me to try it out without yet committing to it. The distribution is Linux Mint and it is currently the most popular. Mint mounted my windows drive with no problem so I could do some work, browse the web, but not keep any OS changes (no persistence). I really like it and three days ago I decided to take the plunge and install it for real. First I backed up all of my data to external drives. My main backup is on a drive protected by Bitlocker. I then did the full clean install of Linux Mint (not dual boot). It claimed to complete OK but totally failed on reboot. Of course this happened at Lake Lopez, the only place during our travels where I have absolutely NO Internet connectivity. So I lived in a Starbucks for two days where I finally realized my flash drive image had some kind of errors. Aarg. I used the bootable flash to re-download the ISO to yet a different flash drive and voila, I now have a fully functional Mint. I can mount my Bitlocker drive though it is a bit of a pain (two special console mount commands). The Bitlocker drive does get lost after a while but has always come back after a remount. I spent today totally updating, copying data, and installing apps. Linux has come a long way and so far the experience is quite good. Libre-Office so far has been totally compatible with my MS Office files, though I knew up front that my Excel macros would not work in Libre. Let me know if anyone wants any details.