Hell's Canyon

We drove through California, Nevada, Oregon, and into Idaho in the last three weeks. We entered the state of Idaho through the south end traveling north on Highway 95. It was a long drive from Nampa, Idaho, in the South, to our destination of Naples, about fifteen miles from the Canadian border. We traveled through small towns and smaller towns. The countryside rolled and rose around us. The highlight of the trip had to be the drive through Hell’s Canyon along the Salmon River. It was breathtaking.

We arrived at Mike’s father’s home, in Naples, close to 11:00 p.m on Saturday, September 11. I stayed in the RV while Mike said hello to his father for the first time in fifteen years. It was an emotional moment for both, a joyful moment. They talked late into the night while I slept. Once the talking was finished for the night Mike came to bed and couldn’t stop talking about the experience, the happiness and the relief he felt being with his father again. He has been longing for parental acceptance. Who can’t understand that?

My own parents were the best. Simply the best. I am sure that they had issues and I know that I didn’t always listen or appreciate them but I always knew that I had their love and that they “had my back.” No matter the wrong directions my life often times went they accepted me and loved and supported me. I know that Mike longs for that same feeling of affection and acceptance from a parent. He is hoping that he has found that in his father because he knows no matter how hard he works at it he will not get these from his mother. I wish him the best.

***

September 24 found us in Tahoe. It seems somehow we always end up back here in Tahoe. Don’t get me wrong, it is an utterly beautiful spot, but that does not mean that the experience is just as lovely as the scenery. Tahoe is a transient town. It is a small town where when you turn around you bump into someone you know, even if you wish you didn’t. Tahoe is a town that has as many DEA agents running around as city police. Tahoe, and I should make it clear, South Lake Tahoe is home to more than its share of meth manufacturers and meth dealers. It is a town with a 17.7 % unemployment rate as compared to the national average of 9.6 %. For all its scenic splendor South Lake Tahoe is a city in distress. Too much unemployment and too many illegal, immoral, or unhealthy avenues of escape.

Hopefully we will only be here in town for a few days. We have had to change our plans time and again and now we changed them again. We arrived in Tahoe last night after driving down from Bonner’s Ferry, Idaho. The week we spent in Idaho was relaxing and refreshing. It was also productive. Mike finally managed to rearrange all the storage bins and put things away that he had cluttering up the living space of the RV. He also spent quality time with his father and has come away with a renewed sense of purpose and self.

While in Tahoe I have been able to visit my second daughter and her husband and my three granddaughters. It has been a good visit. My granddaughters are all gorgeous and bright. The oldest will be fourteen in November; the other two are eleven and nine. They are all good students and involved in school clubs and the Boys and Girls Club. The second one plays the violin and the youngest will start an instrument next year. Yesterday the two oldest volunteered to help give water to marathon runners in exchange for donations to Club Life.

We move on to the coast by the end of the week and some business to deal with in Marin County. I will miss my daughter and her family here in Tahoe as I miss my youngest daughter and her family now in Kansas, my son in West Virginia, and my oldest daughter in San Francisco. It seems like so long ago that they were children and home with me. I miss the laughter, the squabbles, the tears, and the love.

On the move

Yuma, Arizona to Buellton, California on Sunday. It was a long hot drive but we made it. We stopped at Anderson’s Pea Soup where we had their famous pea soup and a salad then spent the night in their parking lot. The pea soup was too salty for my taste and in the morning it sat heavy upon my stomach. Anderson’s soup in the can is much better than what is served at their restaurant. The bread they served, a cheesy white bread and pumpernickel, weren’t very impressive either.

In the morning we headed up the coast toward Santa Cruz where we picked up a friend going to Marin County. We also stopped at a couple of roadside veggie stands and bought some Swiss chard, sweet onions, and garlic to sauté and toss with pasta, and some sweet corn and artichokes. From there we hit the 17 to 101 again and made our way over the Golden Gate Bridge and into Marin County. We dropped our friend off downtown and made our way to one of the small boat docks in Loch Lomond to park and sleep for the night. We stayed in Marin for three nights while we rested, took care of some business, hit the county library for some books, and planned our next route.

From Marin we traveled through Tahoe and Carson City and at the time of this writing we are outside of Lovelock, Nevada. My partner, Mike, is taking a nap before we head off again, north toward our next destination, Bonner’s Ferry, Idaho. That is where Mike’s father lives. Mike hasn’t seen his farther for fifteen years or so. They both moved around a lot at that time and somehow lost track of one another. They reconnected a year ago and have been talking on the phone regularly and now it is time we traveled to see him. He is 81 this year and it is important for Mike to make the trip and spend some time with his father.

While in Yuma, Mike saw his mother. They have been estranged for the last year and he was hoping that a visit would bring them back together but it didn’t, it only served to complete the break. His mother is a manipulator; she uses her money as a way to control people in her life. She is also an alcoholic and sometime drug user. She is also clearly bi-polar with very distinct and rapid mood swings. She will control you or she won’t allow you into her life. She treats Mike as if he was still twelve years old and would prefer that he stay single and by her side the rest of her life, or the rest of his, whichever comes first. She gives gifts to others only to take them back if she doesn’t get her way and she can be vicious in her attacks, even when she has another do the attacking for her. An example of this is a message left on my cell phone recently. She doesn’t do her own calling but has friends call for her demanding that Mike call immediately. As I already mentioned they have been estranged for a while now and Mike calls much less frequently than he once did. She wants him to call at least twice a day, every day, and when this stopped she grew furious. She considers it my fault that he doesn’t call, she blames me saying that I am controlling him and keeping him away from her. The message on my cell only reinforced this thinking of hers. She had her friend call to threaten me with bodily harm if I did not have Mike call immediately. My phone hadn’t been on in a month so I didn’t hear the message until after Mike and I got to Yuma and stopped in to see her friend. This woman was all sugar and sweetness while we were there and telling us all the rotten things his mother had been up to lately. She was on the outside of Mike’s mother’s circle this week because she refused to do her bidding the week before. Once the visit was over and we were back at our motel I turned the phone on and listened to the messages and this is when I heard the threat. My blood ran cold at how menacing and calculating his mother could be. I could hear her voice in the background feeding words to her friend who spouted threat after threat at me over the phone. Mike listened to it and tried to assure me that it was all just words with no intent to back it up but the damage was done. Whatever happens in the future between Mike and his mother there can never be a truce between his mother and me. I have saved the message to my phone and will record it onto my laptop to save. Should I receive another one of these messages I have told Mike that I will make a police report.

So, now I am up to date on our travels and what is happening with us to date. I will continue to post as often as possible given the absence of ready internet access. We will be in Idaho sometime tonight. We will stay a week or so before we head south and east toward Kansas our next planned destination.

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.

Oceano Dunes

A beautiful summer evening on Oceano Dunes. The tide is reaching in toward the middle of the road now yet the campers keep coming as the quads, the dirt bikes, and the ATVs vie for equal time on the road. Kids squeal as they run through the surf and the snowy plover and the gulls share the shore line with the pelicans that so helpfully guide fisherman to fruitful fishing spots. We have been here for more than two weeks now and will spend one last night on the beach before moving south along Highway 101. We have walked the beach searching for sand dollar riches and the perfect rock and shell; skimmed boarded along the tide line and boogie boarded the waves. We have taken our snow board down the dune, constructed sand castles along the shore, and curled up with a good book and a hot cup of coffee inside the warm comfort of the RV.

Yes, the transmission is now a done deal. Much money and time later but it is finished and we are once again together in the RV. No more motels out of necessity alone. It was rough going for a while there. Not only the long stint of motel time but the time of separation for my partner and me. He stayed in town with the RV while I stayed with my daughter and her family in the motel down the peninsula wondering if the work would ever really get done and we would be rolling again. We motel squatters finally took it upon ourselves to pack up before the RV was ready and we hooked up the trailer and hit the road. We drove from Belmont, CA to Pismo Beach, CA, to Oceano Dunes State Recreational Area to camp and wait for the RV and the rest of our party to join us. The $10 a night stay on the beach sure beat the climbing cost of the motel.

Our time here on the dunes is coming to an end and we will be moving on. We will move down the coast toward Ventura then inland to San Bernadino County. That is where our caravan will split up. My daughter and her family will be heading east toward Kansas while my partner and I will be heading south toward San Diego and Imperial Counties. We have some business to take care of here in California as we contemplate where we would like to settle next. Some places that we are think of are Ferdinanda Beach, Florida and Folly Beach, North Carolina. But we are still in the contemplative stage so who knows. Until then we will keep on boondocking on.

I will miss my daughter and her family. Just the way I miss my other children. How is it that we become parents knowing that someday we will have to watch our children leave and just as we are not given any lessons in becoming parents we are given no lessons in overcoming the sadness of watching them go. I have four children. I loved being a mother. I still do. Maybe I wasn’t the best of mothers. But I don’t think I was the worst either. I don’t live up to the expectations of my oldest children, maybe not of my youngest either. I don’t live close enough to my second and I am too close to my third and fourth. I don’t know how to even it all out. I don’t love one more than the other though I do know that I am understood, and accepted for myself, more by some than by others. I would like to have adult relationships with my children, I would like to have loving open relationships with my grandchildren. Each night I pray for the same thing, I pray for the good health, the safety, and the happiness of my children and my grandchildren. Each night I will continue that same prayer.

Mario's Ninth Birthday

Get us out of this motel already!!!!!

Ten days in a motel have turned into two weeks and then some now. The RV should be ready to roll in the next week and we will be on the road again. We are heading south on California’s 101. We will pass through Santa Clara County and Monterey County before entering San Luis Obispo County to our next destination - Oceano Dunes (http://www.duneguide.com/sand_dune_guide_oceano_dunes.htm ). This is the plan anyway. But, we all know that plans are made to go awry and so far our trip has been full of awrys.

Plans. Lao Tzu said: “A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.” It is not really the arriving I am intent upon but the travelling. I am not great at this waiting game. I am irritable. I am frustrated and stressed. I am bored. I want to move on. From how much of what is going on here right now I have not decided. Muslims believe in “patience, perseverance, and prayer.” They realize that so many others before us have suffered and had their faith tested and that we shall be tried and tested in this life too. Christians believe that we are never given more than we can handle. In Buddhism patience is one of the six perfections that form the foundation of one’s quest for enlightenment. I pray to my own higher power each morning and night for patience and each day I try to practice a bit of what I pray for.