Big Bear, CA

Traveling from Lake Havasu up into the California mountainside was an experience. Route 18 on the west side of Big Bear is fine for trailers but going in from the east side was pretty narrow (still not as bad as parts of Route 1 in California, writing from our future perspective.) There was one section where we went up a 10% grade with this right hand turn that made me feel like we we were going to roll off the road.

We'd selected a waterfront site at Holloway RV resort in Big Bear Lake, but the water level in the reservoir has dropped so low that some previously lake-front houses on the north side are now nowhere near the water, and are instead overlooking a huge, grassy field. Our camp site would have been right on the water under normal conditions. Instead, the site overlooked a slightly damp "cove" of mud. The mud emitted a rich smell of...well, mud.

We hiked the interesting Woodland Trail in the San Bernardino National Forest, where we viewed this pocked pine that had become an acorn storage unit for apparently every woodpecker for miles around! Other trees had a few holes but this one, for no discernible reason, was the woodpeckers' favorite. 

              

Interpretive signage also showed us this pack rats' nest - so now we really appreciate the source of the insult when somebody is labeled a pat rack.  

Other fun activities included clambering over the rocks in Boulder Bay Park (Pippi and Dorian pictured) and, of course, sampling local brews. We chose the Bone Yard Grill for a touristy experience in the bustling Village area, but really enjoyed the Big Bear Mountain Brewery for a laid-back drink on their patio (dogs welcome!) and open-mic entertainment.

           

 

Lake Havasu, AZ

Dorian has been eyeing the Lake Havasu area for its combination of two of our favorite features - desert, and water. And water was in abundance at Lake Havasu when we arrived, due to the recent monsoon rains in Arizona (yes, there is mid-summer rain here .... ominous clouds, sky-splitting lightning and thunder, and deluges almost every afternoon, scattered here and there). 

The ranger at Lake Havasu State Park's entrance told us to proceed slowly through the storm runoff, without which advice we would certainly have turned back at several roads covered by rushing waters, one nearly 1-foot deep. A half-hour later all that was left were piles of mud and debris already being cleared out with front-end loaders. Clearly this is a routine occurrence here! (Going through the foot-high water was on the advice of the ranger but, in retrospect, one questions whether the ranger really knew how high the water had gotten.)

Our campsite was lakeside. We were just here for one night so we didn't have time for kayaking or exploring the area before heading off to our next stop. But before leaving town, we checked out the London Bridge as we breakfasted al fresco. 

Camp Verde, Arizona

 Home! 

A view from one of the many trails outside our campground

 

Executive summary: It's beautiful here. And hot!

When we were getting ready to sell our house, I had mentally divided all the things that needed to happen into phases. Some of the phases were mundane: Get the house ready to sell. Move stuff into storage, and so on. Others were more meaningful to me: The first day on the road and away from Reston, the trip itself, and finally and very importantly, our safe arrival in Camp Verde, Arizona. No weather disasters, no tire blow-outs... I sometimes fear making plans because planning even a few days in advance requires too many optimistic assumptions about the future. This plan had many steps and many opportunities for disaster (in my pessimistic view, anyway) and, yet, here we are, undisastered.

We had selected a campground here well over six months ago. We put a lot of thought into the choice but I had forgotten just about everything except the name and address. As we got close, even before Durango, I started to feel trepidation. What if we had picked a bad spot? What if we didn't like it? What if the people weren't friendly? Good news. It's a great spot and we like it a lot. I can relax now.

View from our campground, only slightly edited

And by relax, I mean melt onto the floor. It's lovely here but--holy cow--the heat! And there's some
upper temperature at which point you stop adding "but it's a dry heat!" Because, as you say it, you have to admit to yourself that it doesn't matter. At some number of degrees Fahrenheit, Celsius, or Kelvin, hot is simply hot. On the Big Island of Hawaii, if you stand just downwind of a fresh lava flow, the wind that blows over you feels like it is trying to cook you. On the hottest part of the hottest days, that's what it feels like here.

 

Those who know us understand that we are very risk averse. The minute we heard about the Cascadia Subduction Zone, it was good-bye coastal Pacific Northwest as a possible place to settle. So it is odd that we both reacted calmly to the fact that we woke up on our first morning in Camp Verde not just to the smell of smoke but to a thick blanket of smoke obscuring even the near-bye buttes and hills. We quickly educated ourselves on where to go for fire information, signed up for local emergency alerts, and then went back to our normally scheduled activities. We arrived in smoke and lived with fairly heavy smoke in the area for so long that, later, when we went several days without smoke, it felt like something was missing. There is an excessive heat warning for tomorrow, though, so the comfortingly familiar smoke may return.

Having whined thus, I should mention that we do have AC. And we don't plan to stay here during the height of summer. However, we're kind of stuck here while we do all the things necessary to domicile here, such as register our vehicles in Arizona. After that process, which may take a couple of weeks, we plan to hightail it to the coast (the west one) and hug the moderate temperatures near the coast as we head north.