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Out to the west coast - Chula VistaFeb 23, 2008
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Another state visited
The "fruit police"
Fun in the desert
Off to California today, for the second time. You actually enter California on the way to Los Algodones, Mexico, but this time we're actually staying in Chula Vista, just south of San Diego and about 300 kilometres from Yuma. It was like two different drives. The first part was flat and straight. Just after entering California, we were stopped at the "fruit police" check. This is just like a border crossing point, where all vehicles are stopped and they check where you're coming from and whether you might have agricultural products (mainly fruit we think) on board that could contain insects that might damage the California agricultural industry.
When we were coming into Yuma a few days ago, we saw lots of RV's with ATV's and/or toy haulers heading east...we now have discovered where they were all coming from. Just across the California border, near Holtville the true desert begins. The land is nothing but sand, with dunes that are anything from 10 to hundreds of feet high. There are lots of boondocking RV's and they all have ATV's or dune buggies. We saw obstacle type courses and hill climbing. At one point, we saw the types of lights you would see at highway construction sites, run by self contained generators mounted on their own trailers. Since there was no construction evident and they were in the middle of the desert, these must have been to facilitate night riding.
In a couple of places, I-8 runs close and parallel to the US-Mexico border. In both places, there were border patrol checkpoints where all cars are stopped (however briefly) and checked for illegal immigrants. Not sure what the border patrol criteria are, but they waved us through in both instances, but did stop cars in front of us and behind us for further questioning/searches.
Starting at Ocotillo, the road rises up from sea level to over four thousand feet in two big steps. The first is to about 3,000 feet and then a short flat section and then the final climb to about 4,100 feet where the wind generators are located. The road reminds us of the mountain roads in the Rockies, much steeper than we're used to in the US. The mountains themselves are mainly comprised of boulders, some as big as a house. As a testament to how hot it must get here in summer, every ΒΌ mile or so we spotted cement containers marked "Radiator water". In all, there were at least 20 of these on the steep parts of the hills.
The "down" side of the hills actually leads through the outskirts of greater San Diego, starting with El Cajon. We simply trusted Sarah (the GPS system) to get us where we were going. In this case, it was I-8 to SR-125 to SR-94 to SR-15 (Escondido Freeway) to I-5. Highways have both left and right exits and the exits don't necessarily point to where you want to go (e.g., when travelling westbound, you may take a left side exit to the north in order to get to a southbound freeway). The only slightly scary part of the drive was when we were in the right lane, travelling at 100 kph, rounding a right hand curve and seeing a half ton truck parked on the shoulder. That wouldn't have been bad, but the guy had lost part of his load of furniture, and the bed that remained on the truck was sticking out into our driving lane. Which again wouldn't be bad, but there was lots of traffic on our left, and they couldn't see the problem. We managed to squeeze through, although if we hadn't, the two guys in the back of the truck would have had severe injuries from the bed flying around after we hit it. Luckily, we did not hit it, and a few minutes later were at the Chula Vista RV Resort.
The resort is right on San Diego Bay, and has a big yacht marina attached. There's plenty of space to walk the dogs and the grounds are well landscaped with flowers, trees and bushes. We'll stay here for almost a week before moving on. Our plans have changed a bit, since the weather on the coast is forecast to be cool. Instead of going to Anaheim and Ventura, we will head back inland from here, to Palm Springs.
