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| Jasper's new ride |
Waking up to an over excited puppy at 5:30 am was not how I planned on starting my day. Our new puppy, Jasper, is just about three months old, and he still hasn’t worked out the difference between 5:30 am, 7:30 am and 9:30 am... Today, unfortunately he was on his early clock. Sigh. Rather than put him back in his crate, I took a gamble and brought him in bed with me. Luckily it worked and he went back to sleep once he figured out that I was turning my back on him because I did not want to play…
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| Mass in RV with Father Albert |
Today was to be a short two-hour drive to a campsite about 16 miles south of Santa Cruz, so I relaxed and let the kids sleep in once I was officially up. I made myself a latte (yes, a latte…), took Jasper for a walk and watched Sunday mass at St. Mark with Father Albert and the team, including the awesome Kevin Kelly! After months of being at the controls, it was really cool tuning in via YouTube in the RV! Huge thanks to Andrew Custer and Jim Zoolalian for covering me!
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| Taking coffee orders... |
As I mentioned yesterday, the RV rental by owner business is booming at the moment. Another area of improvement in the RV world is good coffee at your campsite. Figuring this would be the case, I brought my espresso machine from home, along with my grinder and coffee beans from Groundwork. Ahhhh. Like I always say, making yourself coffee in the morning before you make your kids breakfast is like on an airplane when they tell you to put the oxygen mask on yourself first before assisting others…
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| Downtown Paso Robles |
After I buttoned everything up, we pulled out of our campsite around 1pm. Wait. I just made that sound so easy and glamorous. But let me say this. There is nothing easy or glamorous about connecting or disconnecting the sewer hose. It's totally gross. I'm so glad I had my coffee before doing this. Eeewwwwww!
I wanted to show the kids the cute little downtown area of Paso Robles, so we did a drive by around the central downtown park area. It was good to see that many of the shops and restaurants have survived the pandemic so far. Almost everyone walking around on the streets was wearing masks.
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| California farms |
We hopped back on the 101 and began heading north. It’s easy to understand why California is such a huge supplier of fruit and produce for the US and foreign markets. Today, in our short trip alone, we passed through 200 miles of farmland with everything from lettuce to grapes to avocados, and even pimentos!
For some reason Waze took us off the beaten path a bit as we cut back across towards the sea from the main highway. It was nice to see some of the inland towns not completely boarded up. I can tell that they aren’t thriving, but at least they weren’t completely closed down for good.
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| The old railway Santa Cruz |
We arrived at the Santa Cruz KOA with plenty of time to head down to the beach. It’s about one mile from the campsite, so we loaded up Jasper in his newly crafted wooden basket (formerly a wine box), and road along the old railroad tracks down to the beach.
Jaden brought his skim board, which I ended up carrying about 5 minutes into the trip… :) We made our way down a slight hill through both rural, and new custom built mansions. The countryside here reminds me of the Hamptons on long island. If there were rolling hills in the Hamptons that is.
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| Beach fun for all |
The beach was a nice break from our little home on wheels. We all got to stretch our legs and splash in the water a bit. The water here is a bit colder than it is in SoCal, but felt good just the same. Jasper loved to dig in the sand, but was not so sure about the waves, as he dashed away from them as each rolled in.
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| Digging the beach |
We headed back to the campsite just before sunset, as I did not want to ride down the country road after dark.
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| Near sunset skim boarding |
I BBQed as the sun was going down and we enjoyed a nice little dinner together inside on our café table.
Tomorrow will be a long leg of our trip, so I’m going to attempt to get to bed early. Cell service is bad here, and the WIFI is not much better, so hopefully that helps get the kids off electronics and into bed early too… Ha! Wish me luck!
Good night all.
Day 2 – July 26, 2020
Start: Paso Robles CA
Destination: Santa Cruz CA
Where we stayed: Santa Cruz/Monterey Bay KOA
Mileage: 124 miles
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