Day 13 -- San Dimas, California to San Luis Obispo, California -- 225 Miles

Today we had to leave last night's truly beautiful camp in San Dimas, California, and head west and north back toward the equally beautiful environment known as San Luis Obispo. We decided yesterday to check the National Guard camp where we stayed about a week ago to see if they had an overnight space left in their spartan, but very tidy camp. Though the Memorial Day weekend is upon us, the camp actually -- an unbelieveably -- had just one space left that they graciously said they'd rent to us for the night.

Because we had to hustle right along and not spend any time stopping for sightseeing, we didn't even bother to get the camera out. The National Guard camp office closes at 4:30 and even though we wasted absolutely NO time we just made the front gate with thirty minutes to spare. We even cut our normally leisure-prone lunch down to thirty minutes which made the crucial diffenence.

Thankfully, we hit almost no bumper-to-bumper traffic the entire way. We picked up Route 210 in San Dimas, Route 134 in Pasadena, and then Route 5 in San Fernando and all three flowed along pretty steadily. We did have the occasional backup, and once we came to a complete stop. But for the most part we truly lucked out in the traffic flow category. Had that not been true we would have not reached the San Luis Obispo the camp by closing time.

Having showered Southern California with that bit of praise I still have to say that if we had to contend with the volume of traffic that we saw today every single day of our lives, I would have moved decades ago. Yes, the climate is fantastic year around, the people are friendly and welcoming, and the cultural scene is second to none, but there's no way we would put up with it. In fact, I didn't put up with it and moved out of the state in October of 1973. I did come back for six months in 1976, but that was a fluke.

When Concetta and I first took up the challenge of RVing across America, we never bothered to make reservations unless we had been advised that the camps in an intended destination city were always much in demand. For instance, when we visited the boyhood home of Sam Clemens (Mark Twain) in Hannibal, Missouri, we decided to reserve a spot. We were certainly glad we did as two different RV clubs hand taken nearly all the sites.

Unfortunately, getting a camp site on the fly has become exponentially more difficult with the advent of hoards of full-timers in camps once designed for travelers. Most camps do try to maintain a few sites for RVers, but you just can't count on it. So traveling has become more difficult as we try to guess where we will be by the end of the day. Still, most times we don't call ahead until the morning of the day we need a site and this usually works. But if we find something we'd like to see, or we hear about a better camp, then we have to call and cancel.

Having said all of that I can tell you that there's nothing I'd rather do than fire up the Fleetwood Jamboree and head out, preferrably in a direction well away from most urban settings. We love to head north toward Wyoming and Montana, the Dakotas, or even Minnesota and the upper penninsula of Michigan. We also love heading for the southwest. Places like deserts of Arizona and New Mexico are beautiful in the spring or the fall. In 2022 we took a fall trip and traveled east toward the Carolinas using Interstate 40. Now we don't usually cruise the Interstates, but on this particular trip we absolutely adored the fall colors as we bisected Tennessee.