Trip Interrupted

April 29, 2024

Leapin’ Lizards RV Ranch, Ocotillo Wells, California – Mountain Valley RV Park Skylark, Tehachapi, California

Today was the day we didn’t get to where we expected to be. 15,000 miles under our belt in this RV plus another 8500 miles or so with the travel trailer and you’d think that we wouldn’t be surprised by anything. Right? You would be wrong.

Today’s surprise was we didn’t make it to our planned destination. It was only going to be about 250 miles to someplace we can’t remember around Bakersfield, CA. It wasn’t a destination, just a place to park and sleep, that’s why we can’t remember the details (we’re actually writing this on May 7th).

Let’s back up to the beginning. We could go on those nasty roads towards the Big Telescope. That’s a big “Nope!” We could drive near Los Angeles. We definitely didn’t want to go anywhere near there! The only other path for us was to head east out of Ocotillo Wells and then ride up the western shore of the Salton Sea. Obviously we chose driving along the Salton Sea!

Perhaps we should have mentioned that in the previous blog, but the Salton Sea is a major ecological disaster. It shouldn’t be here, it was made by mistake, and every year the mistake gets works. But hey, pretty water! Pretty water that is saltier than the ocean. It would be full of dead fish if the fish hadn’t died years ago. The dust, which travels as far as Los Angeles at times, is toxic.

We both love it when the GPS cheerfully announces, “57 minutes of delay have been added to your route, you are are on the fastest route.” But we get to see onion totes, remember them?

Traffic was so bad we did a driver change on the highway, stopped of course. We also get to take silly pictures using chrome trucks as funhouse mirrors.

We eventually needed gas. We knew this would be difficult since it was an urban area and we couldn’t find our preferred Flying J gas station anywhere.

This is coming back from the station we used. See the one to the right? That one would have worked but all the bays were full. We pulled into this one and knew it was going to be tight.

We had to unhook to make it out of the parking lot. The good news is we found a big parking lot nearby to hook up again. Since it was around lunchtime and we were parked, we decided to grab lunch.

We passed some Joshua Trees, the first of our trip. We really need to come back here for the National Park, or Forest, or whatever it is.

But still, the views were great.

By now the winds were picking up and by a lot. We’ve learned to expect winds to pick up in the afternoon out here. These were more than the normal winds. The RV was all over the road. Susan could tell that Paul wasn’t enjoying the drive by his monosyllabic replies. It was nasty driving. There were flashing warnings about extreme winds high profile vehicles should use extreme caution. Upon seeing that warning she got on the laptop, found a nearby campground with an open spot and booked it. It was minutes away instead of the 30-40 minutes we had ahead of us if we stayed on plan. “You saved us!” we told the campground clerk when we checked in. We noticed a fair number of other campers that we’d seen on the highway coming in. Looked like a lot of people bailed out on their destination plans.

So now you know the story of how we didn’t make it to Bakersfield, CA and wound up in Tehachapi CA!

Daily: 259

Total: 4,022

Driving Miles/Day: 251

Overall Miles/Day: 89

mpg: 5.83