Hoff last left you as we were heading out of Yosemite Park. It was a shame that we hadn’t been able to see the park properly but it was just too busy and smokey, so we left that one for another trip.
After a somewhat expensive night in a slightly random campground, and having exchanged ideas and bear spray for beers with the other RV couple, we did some hasty planning and decided to flip the last bit of our trip. We’d planned to drive the California coast in our hire car once we’d handed back Ronda, but with Yosemite off the cards we decided to drive south and spend some time in the sunshine. It meant a drive back along many of the roads we’d covered a few days before, but we bust out 250 miles in one go (not so easy in the petrol powered kite) heading towards Pismo Beach on the coast.
As usual we were free styling our campground – picking a location off google maps and hoping for the best. Hoff ID’d two potential sights, and we aimed for the nearer of the two, but at last minute I made an executive call to press on to the further one as it was next to the beach. It was a bad call as we ended up stuck in Friday night traffic for two hours, and when we finally got to Pismo everything was either full or ridiculously expensive. A very friendly camp host pointed us back towards Lake Lopez, a state campground. It was significantly cheaper, and, it turned out, the other one Hoff had found on the map earlier. She was less than impressed and it was only the fact that I had already been driving for five hours and was the one getting further punished that proved to be the penance!
Lake Lopez turned out to be a cracking location and the ranger there gave us both a discount along with loads of recommendations for future sights to see and places to stay. We left early the next day and after a very quiet ‘dump and pump’ I.e. us emptying and refilling our tanks whilst trying not to wake the neighbours, we got back on the road heading south. We’d set our eyes on Santa Barbara for breakfast. Hoff was still hankering for eggs benedict and I was looking forward to a good coffee. Luckily we found them both at a cafe run by one of my friends, Henry’s Snell’s, cousins in Santa Barbara. We had a monster breakfast and Julian (Henry’s cousin) was kind enough to give us some more local tips. We also got on the WiFi, made a few calls to book some RV parks ahead of us (seeing as RV parks were expensive in is area we wanted to secure the cheap ones in advance) then parked Ronda before catching the bus back into town.
Santa Barbara was settled by the Spaniards some time ago – I believe in the 15 or 1600s, which by American standards is old. California was all part of México until the late 1800’s so there is a distinct spanish Mexican vibe to the place and many houses have a Southern European flavour to them. Our first port of call was a local brewery where we planned the rest if our stay over a local beer and a game of Bananagrams. We then wandered down to the pier and watched dolphins, pelicans and sea lions roaring over, under and around the bay. We also attempted to do some wine tasting as we’d heard there were quite a few wineries in town, but we came out $26 lighter having sampled some of the worst wines we’d ever tasted, so we called it quits and instead went back into the local breweries and spent an evening drinking local brews and trying to wangle as many free refills of the bar snacks as we could. We couldn’t face the walk back to Ronda so we got a taxi and after a quick water to try and sober up a bit (as we’d not been drinking much on the trip we were very lightweight so the few beers had an impact) we called it a night – 11pm was a rather late one for us!
We had a relatively leisurely get up the next day, leaving SB around 11am after using their relatively quick WiFi to do some planning. We were aiming for El Capitan, a state beach that we had heard great things about. It was only a couple of hours up the road so we pootled off looking forward to some time working on our tans. Sun’s out, guns out and all that….
The Hoffick's RTW adventure travel blog 