Lake Elsinore

Lake Elsinore, California. One-hundred and six degrees when we pulled into the campsite on Thursday before noon and it was just after 3:00 p.m. when thunder and lightning accompanied by rain with the possibility of flash flooding greeted us. After three weeks on the sandy, salty, beach I took three showers that afternoon to ease the blistering heat and to wash the salt out of my hair and the sand out of my ears. We stayed the night is a city campground and though it is well maintained it costs $30 a night. There are hook ups for electricity and water and there are free showers there as well but even though the campground is within walking distance of Lake Elsinore the beach has been fenced off and to reach it one must drive elsewhere to access it.

My daughter, her husband, and the kids were about fifteen miles away from there, in Perris, California, at his Grandmother’s home visiting for a few days. We didn’t want to impose so we decided to find a camp site and wait for them to join us. But at that cost we went looking for somewhere else to park for the night the next night and ended up at the Pechanga Casino, in Temecula, fifteen or so miles down I-15, where we were able to enjoy the air-conditioning of the casino during the heat of the day and the free parking lot during the night. That first night at the casino we went in and got a player’s card and received $10 in free play which we were able to double and walk out with in cash. There is clearly an art to boon docking and time will tell if we have a talent for it.

Don’t try to find a truck stop between Pismo Beach and here, there aren’t any. We drove down Highway 101 south through Santa Barbara, then Ventura, Oxnard, and Malibu before turning inward toward Los Angeles. We looked for a Flying J or a Love’s but the only thing we found was a Shell station in Thousand Oaks with a clerk kind enough to let us park for the night in his lot as long as we were gone by 6:00 a.m. We continued on in the early morning leaving the H-101 for the H-405 south, H-91 east, I- 5 south, and finally SR-74 east to Perris. Lake Elsinore is off of SR-74 going west toward San Juan Capistrano.

From Lake Elsinore we wound our way through the hills of Northern San Diego County spending each night in the parking lot of a different casino. Each casino we stopped at we got a new player’s card and either $10 or $20 dollars in play or a buffet ticket. Never did we have to spend more than a dollar of our own money other than for a tip. I hadn’t realized how many reservations existed within California, and there are so many right in this one area. In fact, “San Diego County has more Indian reservations than any other county in the United States. However, the reservations are very small, with total land holdings of just over 124,000 acres, or about 193 square miles of the 4,205 square miles in San Diego (http://www.sandiego.edu/nativeamerican/reservations.html ).”

Today we drove into Yuma, Arizona, where my partner’s mother lives. It was 115 degrees today and the weekend doesn’t look much cooler. We are staying at Motel 6 tonight while he visits with his mother. Kohl, our cat, is delighted to be out of the hot RV. He alternates between hiding under the bed and sitting on top of the air conditioner. We don’t know how long we will stay here in Yuma before we head out and don’t have any definite plans after this. We do want to see Slab City, outside of Niland, California, so we may head back that way for a few days. For tonight the AC and a cool shower are enough to think about and take pleasure in.