Winter's done

Over the dune

Well, we survived the winter on the central California coast. Actually, it was probably one of the nicer winters we've had. The temperatures were consistently in the 60s, a little rain when we first got there, occasionally some fog and sunny days. Our friends in Arizona had snow and freezing temps! The scenery was nice and we heard the ocean every day and the park is surrounded by strawberry fields and some brussel sprouts. Over the mountain is Gilroy, the garlic capital of the country and there are fields of artichokes and berries in the area.

We enjoyed our new job as maintenance host. We were in the campground loop all by ourselves and enjoyed the quiet. Our work consisted of some clean up, but mostly repairs that the regular staff wasn't  able to keep up with. We repaired tables and food boxes, restained post of interpretive centers, benches, painted and laid flooring. We kept up our homeowner repair skills and learned to use some new tools and had a lot of fun. The Sunset beach park also has responsibility for 3 other parks, Manresa/Uplands a popular surfing and tent camping park, Nisene Marks, primarily hiking trails in the redwoods and a small dune beach park of Palm

Nisene Marks

On days off we explored the coast area. We visited Monterey again and drove the 17 mile drive around Pebble beach, beautiful. To the north we went as far as Half Moon Bay and the parks and small towns along the way. We found some breweries to try in Monterey, Santa Cruz and Santa Clara, good food too. And we've found more to check out when we go back in Dec for 4 months!

It's a little stressful picking up and going again after sitting in one place for 3 months. Will the slides come in ok, where does everything go, are the vents all closed? But we took off and headed towards Escalante, our "home" park in Utah. After a stop in Boron, CA, we stopped for 2 days in St. George to visit Kyle, our son. We arrived back in Escalante Tues 4/2 and the park is already full. It's interesting that exactly 1 year earlier, we had the same weather driving from St. George to Escalante this year, rain, snow over the mountains then good. No trailer problems this year though and we avoided stopping for any reason in Vegas. It always costs us a bundle in truck repairs if we do!

So now we are here for 2 months before we embark on our planned Alaska trip for the summer.