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1 to 15 November 2016 16 to 30 November 2016

Wednesday November 16, 2016

A day at home, we put a few things away for our next travel day.

Michele had a great idea, a raclette for supper, miam miam!

We are taking the road leading away from S.F. The traffic should be better, let's hope!

Thursday November 17, 2016

The last thing we do before we leave, hook the car to the MH and look at the nice palm tree.

A few minutes after we hit the road, we hit traffic. Our speed is about 20 km/h.
It took us over an hour to rive 60 km. On the bright side, the drivers are well disciplined and nobody goes from left to right and vice versa.

After we went over an other pass (900 feet), we are on the I-5 south.
What a weird field!

We are still in the Central Valley of California.
The I-5 is not in the valley, agriculture takes all the valley floor, I-5 is on the edge where no agriculture takes place.

We saw two of those big fire on our way south. We learned that when fruit trees are no longer profitable, they burn them.

California has a big shortage of water and water is very expensive. Who is to blame for this situation?

After driving 466 km on roads that were not all that good, we arrive at our home for the night. We are in Bakersfield.

This is a big RV Park with mostly permanent resident and a small section for travelers like us.
Nice place, then, we hear a train! When I say train, I mean 1 to 2 trains an hour every hour...

There is a pool and a hot tub, let's go and check it out. Nope, not heated.
I love the sign.

We had a nice sunset.

Taco night tonight.

We are very surprised by the condition of the roads in California.
I guess they are like Canada, they did not do maintenance for many years and now they suffer for it.

Friday November 18, 2016

Well, it did not start well this morning.
The park employee who registered us last night told us how to get back on hwy 58, but he gave us the wrong direction, so a detour of 5 km was required...
The RV Park is at an altitude of 426 feet and as soon as we left the RV Park it started to go up.

After 55 km, we are at 4044 feet of altitude.
Boy does it go up. The MH is doing very good , but noisy with the engine working hard. We even passed many trucks.

Another weird field!

The weatherman called for some strong wind today. We have had strong winds and wind gusts all the way up the pass. I guess looking at the wind turbine, it is always windy here.

What goes up, as to come down. Going down is a lot easier and not as steep.

We only go down to about 2500 feet. We are now in the Mojave desert.

We always smile when we see this sign and look at the road.

We are now on I-15 south toward LA. One more pass to 4260 feet this time

Going down is something else. It is very very steep and very curvy for a long time. In 35 km, we went from 4260 to 650 feet in heavy traffic.

It is noon when we arrive at Glen Ivy where our RV Park is.

We will be here for 10 days. Once settled in, we take it easy.

We drove 300 km today. We could have stayed on I-5, but we would have had to drive in LA traffic for a long time so we took a detour to get to I-15 earlier and save on driving in the city.

Saturday November 19, 2016

We decided to visit two flea markets today.

After the first flea market, we wanted to eat at the market, but the food was as expensive or more expensive than a fast food joint.
So we tried a different fast food place.

On our way back, we are back in heavy traffic, I think it will be like that all the time here.

Sunday November 20, 2016

A do nothing day for us.
We tried to re-position the MH to see if we could get a signal for our Shaw Direct satellite. Nope, we could not get any signal. That is one of the dis-advantage of having the satellite mounted on the roof of the MH. We have no cable here and we only get 4 channels with our antenna. Very little TV for the next 10 days...
Michele goes out to do a mini grocery trip and I do some reading and work on the web page. We also look at what we want to do and see in the area.

Monday November 21, 2016

The weather is not that good today, but we still decided to go and check out the beach.
We are taking a back road into the mountain and look for caches along the way.

This road is very twisty and the traffic is horrendous. They drive super fast on this road. We do not even try to stop looking for caches as it is way too dangerous to do so safely.

After about an hour, we are driving on the Pacific Coast Highway.
This road follows the coast as the name imply. The geology of the area around Los Angeles is all about mountains and canyons.

The Pacific ocean.

We are driving north to Huntington Beach. A cute little candy shop.

Christmas is coming up soon and the decorations are starting to pup-up.

One of the big beach in Huntington Beach.

We walked about 15 minutes to get to a pier. The access to the pier is free.
Since the weather is not that nice and warm, there are very few people out today.

Darn!
Thinking about us Canadians and the "fear" we have about some underground pipeline.
Now look here, drilling platforms near the beach and downtown and nobody is freaking out.
Either we or they have to re-think about how safe we do things.

On the pier, we looked at some surfers waiting for the BIG one.

We watched them for a few minutes.

Looking south.

Looking north.

The water is really nice.

So far we are very surprised by the density of the circulation on roads and highway.

Tuesday November 22, 2016

We booked some tickets for the recording of a TV show. The only show we could get during our time here in La is the show the Odd Couple with Matthew Perry on CBS. We have to be at CBS for 4 pm and the recording start at 5 pm.
We are on the road by noon because we are about 100 km from the CBS studio.
WOW, the traffic is bad, cars bumper to bumper all the way.

Behind this cloud are mountains. The smog is so thick you cannot see them.

Los Angeles, here we come!

Downtown LA.

Honestly, I did not see any of the following things. I was too busy driving in heavy traffic.

We made it to the Hollywood Boulevard. We are looking for a good deal for a bus tour for tomorrow.

This is the "Capitol Record" building (1956). Notice how it looks like a stack of records on a turntable.

On both sides of the Hollywood Blvd are stars on the sidewalk. This is the walk of fame.

The famous Pantages Theater.

We finally found a good deal for a bus tour tomorrow.

Stars for the Apollo XI astronauts.

We made it to the CBS studio in time. We cannot bring any telephone of camera to the recording of the show.
We sat down by 4 pm and the recording of scenes started at 5 pm.
We came out of the studio at around 8:30 pm. The recording is for a half hour show.
We really liked the experience of watching the recording of a TV sitcom. We recommend this, if you are ever in the LA area and you have the time.

We are back on the interstate by 9 pm. We are thinking the traffic should be light at this hour.
Wrong!
Wall-to-wall cars and trucks. We left home this morning with half a tank of gas. We are good for 300 km with that amount of gas. We had to stop to fill up before we made it home. We almost ran out of gas on the highway!!!
It took us a little over two hours to make it back home. On top we hit some construction sites.

Here I am filling up with gas. The most I ever put in the tank was 45.4 L. This time I put 44 L.

Once back home, I could not go to bed right away. I needed to relax a bit from this driving thing. I am not used to driving in heavy traffic for so long.

We still had a great day.

Wednesday November 23, 2016

We are on our way back to LA, this time for the guided tour bus.
WOW! It only took us 1 hour 20 minutes to get to Hollywood Blvd.
Look at the smog in the air?

The Hollywood theater on Hollywood Blvd.

Ca you see the Hollywood sign in the distance?

Our transportation for the next two hours.

Our first stop is at the "Hollywood Bowl Overlook". Here, we can see the actual "Hollywood Bowl" with its seating for 17,000 people also the downtown Los Angeles skyline in the distance.

Us with the Hollywood Sign and the LA skyline.

Madonna's house.

As I said before, you are either going up or down because of the mountains and canyons. The richer you are, the higher your house will be.

Universal Studio Park with Harry Potter's castle.

If I remember right, nothing under 2 millions down there.

The guide told us so many names and locations, we forgot who lives where. We think this is the house of Lady Gaga

This one we remember, Eddy Murphy.

I do not remember who lives there, but I remember the guide telling us that the security cameras are the eyes of the statues.

Next, we are in a residential area and then this house comes up. It is not a real house, it is used only for filming. You may remember this house from some movies.

Our next visit is on Rodeo Drive.

We are in front of the most expensive store in the world "House of Bijan". The owner rents the parking space in front of his store for $100,000 per year, notice the yellow park meter. His car is a Bugatti Veyron (1.7 million).

More of the boutiques on Rodeo Drive,

We are leaving Beverly Hills behind us.

We drove by Chinatown.

If you remember the movie Pretty Woman, on the left is the hotel where Vivian (Julia Roberts) is taken by the millionaire Edward (Richard Gere).
On the right photo, the arrow points to the "nice" rooms he took her to. The guide told us it costs $13,000 per night for a room and they used it for 6 days. If it is true.

We also drove by the LGBT neighborhood.

The building on the corner is a comedy club. The names of everybody who played here and had success got their name on the board.

We are done with the bus tour, we asked they driver to drop us off at the west end of Hollywood Blvd.
We will be walking Hollywood Blvd to get back to our car, about a mile.
"The Four Ladies Of Hollywood" is a monument dedicated to the 5 ladies (???) pioneer of cinema in Hollywood. Marilyne Monroe at the top, Dorothy Dandridge, May West, Dolores Del Rio and Anna May Wong.

We are now in front of the Chinese Theater.

The Chinese Theater is now part of a large shopping district.

This store attracted us because of the columns with TV wrapped around them and the Oscar statues.

A few of the stars we noticed today.

This one is for our youngest son, Benoit.

We enjoyed our tour and for $25 per person, it was not too bad.

We hit the road to get back home at 3 pm. We know it is the start of the Thanksgiving Weekend and the traffic will be bad.
BAD you say?
It took us 3 hours to get back home. I think the fastest we drove was around 30 mph.
We were done by the time we got home.

Thursday November 24, 2016

After two busy day, we stay home and relax a bit.
Today being Thanksgiving day, we know the roads will be packed and so will the stores.

Friday November 25, 2016

I went to see the lady in the office this morning and asked here if it would be possible to move us to another site where we could point the satellite to the sky and watch some Canadian TV. When we signed in, she told us nobody could change site for the long weekend. She is in a good mood this morning and she even offered me a few sites to chose from!
One site is perfect and in no time we are packed and ready to move to our new site.

Our new home. No shade, but we can watch Shaw Direct no problems and on top of this, the RV Park WIFI is super strong here.

Today is Black Friday and we head to Bestbuy to look for a cheap anti virus software.
We found AVG for $10 and good for 3 PC. We also found season 4 of House of Cards and a new cover for my table and for only $10 each. The line to get to a cashier was 40 minutes long.

Saturday November 26, 2016

Michele has a few books that she is done reading, we take them to the Bookmobile to exchange them.

You want books, they have books!
Michele is in her element here.

We went to the local farmer's market nearby and we made it back just before the rain.

From 2 o'clock on, it rained and rained.

Sunday November 27, 2016

Happy Birthday Jérémy!
We skyped with our oldest son and wished him a happy birthday.

After that, we decided to go and do some grocery shopping before we get to our next RV Park at Salton Sea.

It is the Grey Cup game today, Michele will be watching the game.

Can you watch Football and not have chicken wings and beer? No!

Michele is very comfortable watching the game.

Some wing before the end of the game, life is good!

I do some more "putting away stuff" for our travel day tomorrow.

Monday November 28, 2016

We fill up on propane before we leave the RV Park.

We are on the road by 9 am. Traffic is a little heavy, but moves along good. We have to go over another pass. This one peaks at more than 700 meters (2,300 feet).

At one point, we were sure we would get rained on, but nothing happened.

Traffic is light and we barely have winds. You can tell wind turbines are popular in this part of California.

We drove by Palm Spring.

After 190 km and two hours of driving, we arrive at our new home for the next 7 days.
Oasis Palms RV Park is near the Salton Sea.

After we were all set up, we had lunch and headed to the hot tub.

The RV Park even has a small pond where you can fish, but it is only catch and release.

We were here before, it was in March 2012.

Tuesday November 29, 2016

Here is our spot. We have forgotten how noisy it is because of the main highway next to the RV Park.

We expected the park to be at least half or more full at this time of the year, but it is not. We learned that the owner died and the kids took over, but they did not put the necessary effort into it and it went downhill. They even had to close down the park for many months until they found a new manager. The new manager cleaned up the place good and he is slowly rebuilding his client base.
Almost every evening they have a campfire for everyone. The small pond even has an illuminated fountain.

We will be here for the next seven days. This RV Park is part of Passport America, it means it is 50% less than regular price.
With the exchange rate it turns out to be about $27 a night. Today was a do nothing day.

Wednesday November 30, 2016

We decided to go and check out (again) "Salvation Mountain" and "Slab City" on the other side of the Salton Sea.
We are looking for caches as usual.
Our first cache in the area.

As I mentioned before, we were here in March 2012 and I had pretty well explained all about the Salton Sea.
This was a very popular area for tourist back in the 50's and 60's. Now it is a very depressed area and the Sea is more polluted and much lower water levels. Some of the old attractions are still visible.

Yes, we are 200 feet below sea level.

Looking west on the northern part of the Salton Sea.

The Coachella Valley, where is the Salton Sea, is in the Colorado Desert.
When you say desert, you say very little vegetation. The caches have to be under something or other.
Like this one, it was under a metal cover in the middle of nowhere.

Another cache was in this fake rock amongst the real rocks!

We even found a discarded snake skin.

Everything is so dry here.
Two cute shadows.

The sea level is about 20 feet lower then normal.
This beach is not made of sand, but it is made of small shells.

Here we are at Salvation Mountain.

The man who made it.

Salvation Mountain is right next to Slab City.

We forgot to take photos of Slab City...
We like this Sole Tree, a nice play on words.

On our way back home, we had to wait a long time for this very long train to go by.
Next, we had to stop for at a Border Patrol Checkpoint, they are looking for drugs and illegal aliens.

We found 14 caches and looked at beautiful scenery.

Until next time.

Life is good...