Leg 2 - Santa Barbara to the Sonoran Desert

Second Leg – Santa Barbara, CA to the Sonoran Desert

View from my window upon waking in Santa Barbara

Breakfast in Santa Barbara

I need to re-think the whole driving-time aspect of this trip.  So far, the last two days took me 2.5 and 5 hours longer than google maps said.  To be fair to GoogleMaps, I wandered the city streets, trying to catch a glimpse of the ocean as much as possible.  Yesterday was kind of a nightmare day, honestly.

Yesterday I drove for 9 hours.  I followed Highway 1, aka PCH or Pacific Coast Highway as much as I could.  Many times I got off the highway and followed city streets.  I saw Malibu, Santa Monica Beach, Venice Beach, Seal Beach, Manhattan Beach, Redondo Beach, Huntington Beach, Newport Beach, and Oceanside Beach.

I don’t want to live in any of them.

They are large communities with lots of people crowding the beaches.  Not the vibe I’m looking for.  I think beaches are a young person’s real estate.  There isn’t much for me to do on a beach anymore except walk up and down and stare at the ocean.  Back in the day, I would have played volleyball on the beach all day every day.  I was a volleyball fanatic at one point in my life.  Actually, for many years.  Walking the beach isn’t bad, don’t get me wrong.  But it isn’t what I want for myself at this stage in life.  I need more movement.

Re-inventing myself.  That is what I am trying to do on this trip.  What do I want?

I thought I wanted beach.  But I want a large beach surrounded by a small community.  I haven’t found this yet.  So…what do I want from a beach?  If all I can do is walk up and down it and stare out at it, what do I want from it?

                Warmth, the sound of the waves.  No wind.  Lol.

I need to get out of cities.  They are definitely not what I am looking for.

All the campgrounds that I have tried to stay at on my way down the coast are full.  This night I used the website freecampsites.net to find a place to park for the night.  I found a parking lot in Oceanside, a short walk from the beach.  It was almost dark by the time I found it, so I parked, settled in for the night, and tried to sleep.

No human interest story for this day.

No grief processing for this day.  Except that I thought about John the whole way, and talked to him about the new things I was seeing.  I could talk to him and think about him without crying.  That surprised me.  That is progress.

Oceanside, CA to Tucson, Arizona

I had to think for a minute what day it is.  I figured I was going to lose track of my days.

Last night I parked in a parking lot in Oceanside, CA.  I wasn’t sure that it was legal, so slept with one eye open all night, expecting someone to come knock on my door at 3:00 a.m. to tell me I couldn’t stay there.  But it didn’t happen, and I woke up around 6:30 and decided to get my day started.  I drank some coffee then headed to the beach for a walk.  I had the most amazing walk along the beach in the morning light.  There weren’t too many people out and about, and there was no wind.  The waves were gently lapping the shore and the sun was making its way up into the sky.  It was peaceful and inviting.  I decided that this trip is an exploratory journey for me to see if there is someplace I would like to stay for a month or so.

My walk on the beach in Oceanside, CA

I started driving in Oceanside at 9:15 a.m.  I was determined to only drive four hours, given my previous two days of long drives.  I mapped it out, and that would put me at Yuma, Arizona or a place called Dateland at around four hours of driving, if I dared trust google Maps.  I got to Yuma around 1:00 in the afternoon.  There was NO WAY I was going to stop driving in Yuma at 1:00.  It was 102°, flat desert and I didn’t want to wander in a shopping mall.  So onward I went.  It turned out that Dateland was actually just a single truck stop turnout on the freeway.  I did stop and get a date milkshake.  I read somewhere that those were yummy.  It WAS yummy!  But then my stomach hurt the rest of the day.  Sometimes yummy and good for you are two different things.

I ended up driving 10 hours that day.  I found a campsite to stay for the night on my new best friend website freecampsites.net.  I arrived just in time to watch the sun set over the mountains in the Sonoran Desert.  It was an amazing view.   There wasn’t another soul in sight.  That actually made me a little nervous.  I suspected I wasn’t supposed to be there.  I kept a watchful eye out for a ranger approaching to tell me to leave.

I did enjoy the drive, long as it was.  I started out on the coast, then went up and over the Laguna Mountains.  On the eastern side, the landscape was small trees that looked like sagebrush, but more tree-like.  It was beautiful.  I was reminded of John Steinbeck’s writings.  Or maybe Hidalgo of the Disney movie that I used to watch with my daughters when they were young. 

Further along the drive, the landscape because a moonscape – huge rock piles as far as the eye could see.  This one made me think of the Disney movie Cars.  I think I heard that they did film some of it out there.  It made me think of a giant who was playing in a pebble lot and had made piles of them all around.  It was the color of the southwest in my mind – light rust-orange, bordering on gold. 

I stopped at a truck stop so I could connect to wifi and find a place to camp for the night.  Yesterday driving past Yuma so far threw me off my planned agenda, so I was now winging it.  I had done some research before I left Benicia and thought I could boondock.  It sounded like my kind of experience.  I am independent and capable and like solitude.  It would be perfect.  Or so I thought.

I found a place in the Sonoran Desert that looked like I could boondock camp.  For those of you who don’t know what that means, it just means finding a place typically in national parks or forest lands that allow free camping.  I drove out to the spot I found.  The last part was on a dirt road that got smaller and smaller as I went and got more rutted with each passing yard.  It was labeled as a mountain biking area.  It was starting to get late in the evening, maybe 7:00 p.m.  I was feeling the need to get parked for the night.  At one point, I saw a bend in the road up ahead, and right before the bend there was a deep rut in the road.  I was nervous about trying to drive over it.  The previous ones I had been able to go around, but I couldn’t go around this one.  At that moment in time, it seemed that there was only one way I could go - forward.  As the front of my van drove over the hole, suddenly I felt the front driver’s side tire spinning.  I got out and saw that I only had three tires on solid ground, and one was spinning in the air, about 6 inches off the ground.  Shit.  Now what was I going to do?!  I am a middle-aged woman, out in the desert, nobody around for miles, and I am stuck.  I was very angry with myself for doing this.  I should have known better, yada, yada, yada.  I got back in the van and rocked back and forth and turned the wheels back and forth and finally made contact on that fourth tire and was able to back out. 

That left me with the only way I could go:  back.  There was no turning around on that narrow road, so I had to back up about a mile back down the road to a small turnout that I had seen.  I would just camp there for the night.  My first thought was just to camp in the middle of that small road.  It didn’t look like it got much, if any, use.

I backed all the way down and found the spot.  I was so relieved, I almost kissed the ground, and I definitely thanked the sun god for delivering me safely.

I parked for the night, ate rice for dinner, and sat outside in a camp chair watching the sun set in the Sonoran Desert.  Sometimes it takes a small crisis to help us appreciate the simple pleasures.

Sunset in the Sonoran Desert.     

Sunrise in the Sonoran Desert

I no longer have a home.  So I got a cup that reminds me that home is wherever I am. 

For now.