Day 14 -- San Luis Obispo to Salinas, back to Greenfield, CA -- 150 Miles

Today oscelated between extremes of pleasure and pain. On the pain side, we had tires and gasoline. I've been kinda worried about our front tires because our rig wears those expense suckers ONLY on the inside edge and virtually nowhere else on the tire. This means they wear out much quicker than one might expect. It's maddening, but requests for alignment our our thirty-foot rig have always resulted in blank stares. So we drive on them and replace them frequently.

Once, when we were in New Mexico, I happened to glance at the passenger-side front tire and nearly fainted as I saw that the fabric was beginning to show through on the inside edge. Thankfully we were close to a tire store and were fortunately able to buy the very last two tires they had in our size. Thankfully, the store agreed to help us and fairly quicky had us on our way. Today, the only tire store we saw would not have accommodated a 32-foot rig so we had to cruise on by. No other tire buying opportunities were seen the rest of the day.

On the subject of gasoline, we had allowed outselves to get below our mandatory fill-up point of a half tank. When we left the National Guard campground in San Luis Obispo this morning, the guage was resting just above a quarter of a tank. So it was with some trepidation that I headed up highway 101 without the needed pit stop. I had no idea when or where we might encounter a station in the middle of such open country.

Naturally, we could get quite a distance on a quarter tank, but I had no idea just how far we'd have to travel to find a town of sufficient size to have gas stations large enough to accomodate our rig. Thankfully, we found one before the needle had dropped below the one quarter mark, and we were soon on our way some two hundred dollars poorer but with about 32 gallons of added fuel in the tank.

Our intended stop for the morning was the Mission San Miguel Archangel which sits about 10 miles north of Paso Robles, California, on Highway 101. Since we'd never visited the mission before and, indeed, had never even heard of it, we didn't know whether to expect a pile of adobe bricks with a plaque, or whether there might be actual buildings and grounds to visit.

To our immense surprise and pleasure, San Miguel Archangel is simply a fantastic place to visit. The buildings are largely intact. Though some are no doubt reconstructed, the whole mission complex has been maintained in a fairly pristine condition, and work goes on to this day. All the accessible rooms are furnished, and the central courtyard holds a profuse collection of flowers, shrubs, and trees.

We happily wandered the buildings and grounds for a good couple of hours, shot countless photos, but encountered very few other tourists. Only about a third of the buildings surrounding the central courtyard are available for visit. I suspect that church people must still work and even live in the other two thirds.

In my opinion, cream-colored buildings sporting burnt orange terra cotta roofs against a startling blue sky is just about as good a photographic subject as you're going to find anywhere. So naturally, I saw potential photos everwhere I looked. Eventually I ended up with nearly a hundred shots, and I was only getting started. But we just couldn't spend the whole day there and had to make a few miles before dinnertime. We had our lunch in the parking lot, then set off for what we thought was our intended camp in Soledad Canyon near the town of Soledad about ninety minutes north of the mission.

Here's where the the old adage of "best laid plans often go astray" comes into play. Once we got to Soledad we started trying to find directions to the camp. Entering the address in Concetta's IPhone GPS we found a strange discrepancy. It appeared that the GPS thought that Soledad Canyon was four hundred miles away in southern California. Uh, oh!

Further research turned up the fact that we had simply assumed soledad canyon was near the town of Soledad and such proximity was definitely NOT correct! What to do? After some hand wringing and soul searching, we decided to pour through the camp listing book and call any camp within reasonable driving distance. We immediately found that all we could do was leave messages.

While we waited for the hoped-for call-backs, and with no other choice, we got back on Route 101 and headed further north todward the actual town of Soledad. Suddenly, Concetta informed me that she had found a camp obstensibly in our immediate area. As we roared down Route 101, a fairly stiff wind buffetting us like a tiny ship on a storm-tossed sea, we realized that we needed to call as soon as possible to secure a spot. We knew that the coming Memorial Day weekend was going to severely limit our success.

Concetta simply cannot hear voices on her phone adequately when the road's background noise is too strong. The addition of buffetting winds makes the problem even worse. So naturally, I took on the job of talking to Concetta's newly-found potential camp host after she had dialed my phone. As we barreled north on Route 101, I found myself driving with one hand while holding the phone in the other. Due to the noise level, I ended up constantly telling the chap on the other end of the line to please repeat what he had just said. Not the smartest thing I ever did.

Finally we sort of got things straight and made ready to reverse direction since the camp was behind us. This manuever was more hazardous then you can imagine. We started by exiting Route 101 onto a handy farm field side road. Once there we had to back into an intersecting side road, then pull up and sit facing a sort of gap in the center divider of Route 101.

We immediatelty saw that traffic running both directions was just a blur going past at nearly seventy miles an hour. I looked both ways and my heart sank. There looked to be NO way to cross both lanes of the northbound traffic and then merge with the southbound traffic without causing a massive multi-car chain reaction.

Then suddenly a miracle happened, and a huge gap appeared in the northbound traffic lanes. Taking my foot off the brake, I jammed down on the accelerator and charged across both of the temporarily empty lanes and stopped diagonally in the center medium area. Naturally, I could not see whether the tail end of the RV had cleared the northbound lanes nor could I see the southbound lanes at all. I told Concetta to look out her window and tell me when a similar miraculous gap appeared in the traffic flow on her side.

For many minutes we sat there, poised for takeoff, as both lanes of traffic barreled by like Indianapolis race cars right outside our front window. The same thing was happening directly behind us, I knew, and I desperately hoped that my adopting a diagonal stance in the medium had adequately cleared those northbound travel lanes.

Suddenly Concetta yelled, "after the next white car you can go for." Knowing that the traffic gap would we measured in micro seconds, I tensely waited for the white car barrel past, then stomped on the accerator and litterally "flew" into the fast lane headed south. Checking my mirror I found I still had few seconds before the oncoming coming frontrunners reached us, so I turned on the blinker and quickly slid into the slow lane.

I don't think either of us took a normal breath for another few minutes and the tension did not abate either. The chap with whom we had spoken told us that the office closed at 4:00 p.m and it only took the barest glance at our watches to let us know that we had perhaps thirty minutes to follow the directions on Concetta's IPhone, find the camp, and check in at the office.

Naturally, the first thing we did when we reached the appropriate offramp for the camp was to turn the wrong direction and end up on a tiny rural road lined with grape vines on either side. Looking ahead we could see no side roads or pullouts anywhere ahead. So I did what I always do: I pulled off the road and onto the dirt shoulder next to the grape vines on the north side of the road, cranked the wheel over in a sharp left turn so we straddled the road, then rolled off onto the dirt shoulder next to the grapes on the south side of the road. That done we had ample room to head back the way we had come. Fortunately the soil on both sides of the road was pretty firm and I didn't end up running over any grape plants.

When we had reversed direction, we easily found the road onto which we should have made our turn and just moments later we rolled to a stop opposite the camp office. The time was fifteen minutes before closing.

So here we are in what just has to be the best camp we've found this trip, maybe even over several trips. The place is called "Yank's" and every single camp site has a concrete slab to park upon. Everything is immaculent from property line to property line. There's a spiffy laundry building (photo right above), a swimming pool, lots of nice landscaping, modern hookups, and every street is paved. We loved the look of it so much we decided to stay two days. We'll see what we can see around the area tomorrow, then come back for another night before continuing our meandering way home on Sunday.

So that's it for today. We've had a grand adventure today, a few tense moments, lots of excitement, and a whole lot of fun. Hopefully we will continue that plan of attack tomorrow so ciao for now and we wish you happy adventures of your own.