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Oct 13

Day 2: Los Banos to El Portal, CA

No offense to Los Banos, but the selection of retail grocery stores sucks. I do not consider Walmart to be fit for purpose. What about Target you ask? I tried that as well. I suspected that things were not looking good when the customer service person answering the phone replies “will have to ask” when asked if this Target store carried any organic or locally grown produce.

In case you’re wondering, they do not.

Given this cruel reality, we punted on groceries in Los Banos and headed over to the town of Merced and found a decent substitute. While we were in Merced, we grabbed some lunch and did a quick load of laundry, then made our way to El Portal, our designated overnight location.

El Portal seems to be one of those towns that really isn’t a town. In fact, El Portal simply appears to be nothing more than a hodgepodge of motels, bars, and restaurants – a collection of crap on HW 140 just prior to arriving to someplace that is actually far more interesting … which in this case is Yosemite National Park.

Given that we could not check into our Yosemite camping spot until Sunday, we decided to park Mabel and overnight at Indian Flat RV park.

Welcome to Indian Flat RV Park

Indian Flat RV park is pretty much a dump. The sites are incredibly tight, the electric is on the “wrong” side of the sites, and worst of all, at night this place is lit-up bright as a Christmas tree. In fairness, the guy helping us check-in (I think the owner) was nice and let us park our truck in the neighboring (unused) RV spot for the night.

Since we’d be dry camping in the park, we needed a place to fully drain our holding tanks and top-off our fresh water. So despite certain setbacks, this place does the trick.

You can see from the two pictures below how tightly everyone is packed into this place.

Mabel and another RV – too close for comfort

Our truck is actually in the neighboring RV spot

Like the rest of El Portal, I recommend you pass on through … the Yosemite entrance gate is only another eight miles up the road. Fortunately, we are merely biding our time for the night.

Oct 12

Day 1: Los Banos, CA (part two)

Like many California State Parks, the San Luis Reservoir is decent enough, but way overpriced in my view – $38 bucks for no hook-ups is a bit on the steep side I think.  By the way, the Golden state will hit you up for an additional $1 to shower for five minutes.  That said, the campsites are huge, offer plenty of elbow room between neighboring sites, and are level.  Nice.

This time of year the park was mostly empty; so all in all, we had some nice downtime to relax.

Per usual, we did get out for some park exploring … or at least tried to.  Many of the most “marketed” trails were closed for the season; not sure what that’s all about.  Not to be deterred, we walked the park roads in an attempt to make the most of things.  In the end this was ok since the park was basically empty.

Also we did manage to see some wildlife during our stay.

Like these elk:

Elk grazing the fields

And lots of these bugs:

Desert Stink Beetle

And by far the biggest spider I’ve ever seen outside of a museum or zoo:

California Tarantula

Another big downer about this park is that many of the more heavily marketing trails are closed for the year, but not marked as such.  We found this out the hard way – after driving 15 minutes to the trail parking lot, walking another ten minutes to the trailhead, then finding access to the trail itself sufficiently cut off by a gate.

Rolling hills under clouds

The lone highway through the park

Despite some otherwise pretty scenery, I give this park a big thumbs down.

Not sure I can recommend this park

Once we settled in for the evening, I started a nice fire ($6 for a small bundle of wood) and Kelly made a fantastic pizza.  We had fresh-baked cookies for dessert (ok, they were Tollhouse).

Enjoying warm cookies and milk.

Afterwards, we settled in to begin watching season-1 of Showtime’s TV drama Homeland.  Wow, what a good show.

Oct 11

Yosemite Preamble: Half Moon Bay to San Martin

Kelly and I are headed to Yosemite National Park.  Neither of us has ever been and we are both quite excited to explore this vast park.  Most of the major National Parks require reservations made far in advance and when I booked this reservation a few months ago, I secured an arrival date Oct-14.

Recently, Kelly and I decided we wanted to get out of HMB Thursday night in order to avoid the craziness that is about to consume our town – Pumpkin Festival.  Anticipating heavy traffic Friday morning, we decided to avoid traffic and leave early.  Accordingly, we got our act together such that we were equipped to shove off earlier this evening … about 7pm

Just wanting to get ahead of the Friday morning rush hour, we drove about 75 minutes southeast to San Martin, CA  and dry camped in the Camping World parking lot.

As far as I could tell, there were three or four other RVer’s doing the same.

We’ve got some minor tweaks to address in the Airstream – nothing major, just some issues that have surfaced since taking possession in early July.  Tomorrow we are headed Toscano RV – one of the larger Airstream dealers in northern California.  Hopefully we’ll be in and out of there quickly and without any drama.

Sep 20

Golf Course Sunset

Tonight’s walk was just what I needed following a long day at the office.  I arrived home just in time to catch a beautiful sunset.

Sunset at the Ritz Carlton golf course

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