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Date:         Fri, 21 Jul 1995 11:23:48 -0700 (PDT)
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@vanagon.com>
From:         "Tobin T. Copley" <tobin@freenet.vancouver.bc.ca>
Subject:      Big Trip report [Part 1, long]

Hi gang!

Here is the first part of our report on the circum- continental trip (Jan-Mar 1995). I'll try and post a chapter every Friday.

Tobin ----- Part I: Canada to the Mexican Border

Because we live in downtown Vancouver (and because our camper had been broken into a few months before), we didn't load up the bus until the morning we left. And, because Dec 31 is Christa's birthday (and oh yeah, it's New Year's Eve as well), and because we got kind of baked the night before, we didn't get up until nearly 10 o'clock in the morning. We were so excited we were shaking! Had a nice breakfast, cleaned up the house, and started loading the van.

It's amazing how much you can fit in a westy. Keep in mind we were going to be living out of the van for 3 months, and had to carry clothes and bedding to allow us to be comfortable from +30 degrees C to -35 degrees C. I had the entire area under the rear seat packed with tools, spare parts, a hibatchi (which we never used), and a huge hydraulic floor jack. I also carried a copy of the Idiot's Guide, a Bentley manual, a Haynes manual, and some stuff Joel had photocopied for me on my gas heater. (Joel's stuff would come in handly later).

Finally we had the bus all loaded up, did one last check of the house for stuff we might have missed, and turned the ignition key!

Our trusty westy fired right up, and we pulled out. The odometer read 154,550 miles. It was a crisp sunny day, clear and rather cold for Vancouver. As we headed south over the Granville Street bridge we admired our beautiful city. It was great to get on the road! Climbing the Granville Street hill, Christa asked if I'd brought the shortwave listening guide for Radio Canada International. Uh oh. We turned around and retreived the guide.

Take two. South over the bridge again. Nice view. We realized it was nearly two o'clock in the afternoon, and we still had the US border in front of us. We weren't going to get very far today, oh well. As we approached the border an hour later, I started to get nervous. What if they gave us a hassle? What if they took everything out of the car to search it? I'd heard some horror stories from other list members, and I could just see us sitting there re-packing the car in the cold at midnight. Stay calm.... just stay calm. Breathe...

We pulled up to the booth at the US Customs. The guard was about 40, with a burr cut, mustache, and square jaw. He did not smile. He looked at us levelly for maybe 4 or 5 seconds after I rolled up and said "Good afternoon." He did not return my salutation. His eyes cast about our hippie- mobile. "Citizenship?" "Where do you live?" "Destination?" Uh, oh, here it comes... "Uh, Mexico!" I said brightly. He paused for a second, then looked right at me.

"Weelll...," he said slowly, "We get a lot of these here Volkswagens coming through here going down to Mexico..."

*GULP!*

"...And I can tell you you'll have no problem finding parts for this thing down there!" Whew! I couldn't believe it! "So what year is this, anyway?..." So we talked about how great VW buses were for a minute or so, and then he waved us on, wishing us happy travels (in Spanish). Good karma!

We stopped in Bellingham to change some money and buy some food at a natural food co-op there, then made it all the way to Tacoma (about 150 miles from Vancouver) that night. Oooh, hard driving! :) Our gas heater had packed it in (discovered later it was just a loose wire), and it was well below freezing. So were we. We were looking forward to plugging into a hook-up and cranking our little ceramic heater.

We pulled up to our site, surrounded by huge (ugly!) RVs, and I hopped outside to plug us in. What the hell was this? The plug was huge and round, like a clothes dryer plug. Ahhh... The AAA book said 15 amp hook-ups, but didn't bother to mention there were no NORMAL plugs!! Arrrgh! Office was closed, since it was New Years Day. Nobody we could rouse at the RV park had a spare plug adapter. Off to Fred Meyer's to shop for a plug. The guy there says, "You mean, like a dryer plug?" I said I guess so, had a look at one, it seemed close enough, so I got the plug, a length of cord, and a female household plug and got to work on the floor of Fred Meyer's. Made my own adapter; I was rather proud of myself.

Got back in the camper, drove back to the site, got out in the dark, tried to plug it in. Wouldn't fit. Christa held the flashlight. Arrrgh! The 15A dryer plug and the 15A RV plug were different! The ground prong wouldn't fit. I was cold. What the hell, I removed the ground prong (Who needs a ground, anyway?). Arrrgh! Still wouldn't fit! The two flat prongs were at slightly different angles. HELL! Who needs the plug housing? I'll just dissassemble the plug, tape up each prong with electrician's tape, and stick each prong in with insulated vice-grips. It's only 110V/15A, right? I get Christa ready to knock me clear if I start to smoke and all my limbs stick out straight, and I stick the prongs into the socket. ARRRRGH! They wouldn't bloody well fit!! Too wide (just), too thick (just). I gave up. I was just about frozen anyway.

Christa finally found someone kind enough to let us plug into an auxilary plug on the outside of their RV. Ah, heat. Darned toasty, actually, and we had to turn the heater down. Dinner, bed, sleep. Ah.

Next morning, we return everything to Fred Meyer, and picked up an adapter at Camping World for, like, $3.00.

TIP: Buy one of these adapters if you want to run 110v stuff where they advertise hook-ups. Over half the places we stayed had the RV plugs ONLY.

The second day out was still clear and cold. Even though we wanted to stay off the Interstate highways as much as possible, the cold made us push for California (and warmer weather) as fast as possible. So we cruised down I-5 at 57 mph. I thought I'd wait until we got to California to fix the heater, because I hate working on stuff outside when it's so cold. Our heater boxes were full of holes, so they weren't much help at all--barely kept the ice off the inside of the windshield. So we wore a lot of clothes. It wasn't so bad in daylight, but once the sun went down (at about 4:00 pm) it got a lot colder in the van. I made deal with Christa that if I could push us through into California that night, we could buy a bottle of Knudsen Erath to go with dinner.

With the promise of wine we pushed through the night, wearing nearly everything we had with us, and arrived late in Yreka California. We plugged in (with our nifty new adapter), turned on the heater, found some nice classical music on NPR, and Christa made a beautiful herb-garlic cream sauce tortellini with a blackberry-apple crumble and whipped cream for dessert. And the wine was perfect. Life was good: toasty in our westy, with a full tummy, surrounded by the aroma of beautiful food with the soft strains of classical music wafting across the candlelit table.

The next day took us down the I-5 all the way to Martha Rubin's house in Moraga, just outside of San Fransisco. After driving through a minor snow storm in the mountains of Northern California, and driving a woman and her three kids 30 or so miles into Redding (her hoodless electronic- everything car had died in the snow/rain, and I didn't have a clue how to fix it), we hit the central valley, where it warmed up a lot. Good. Now we were just a little bit chilly instead of frozen solid. Stopped at the "World famous" (I'm a sucker for that!) Olive Pit in Corning, where Christa marvelled at a kazillion varieties of olives. We bought a 10 pound tin of Blue Diamond almonds. Yum!

Later that afternoon, we stopped for lunch near Colusa. Lunch was uneventful, but just before we stopped I decided to pull into the access for a farmer's field to turn around, rather than trying to do a 3-point turn on the highway. The ground looked solid and flat. Ok. Pulled in easily, stopped, put it in reverse, engaged the clutch.... hmmm. Must be neutral. Found reverse again, and... nothing. Geez, did I just lose reverse gear? I tried first gear. Nothing. What? Christa gets out. She reports that we are stuck in one inch of the stickiest, slimiest clay she has ever seen. She's carrying an inch or two of this stuff on the bottom of her boots. The clay totally clogged the tires, so it was like trying to get out of mud with racing sticks.

I broke out the folding shovel. I shovelled gravel under the rear wheels for traction, Christa took a picture (see David Schwarze's web site). Using this method, we got halfway to firm ground when the farmer showed up in a big 4x4 pick up. He pulled us out. Sideways. Oh, well, time for lunch!

Got into Martha's place that evening. We spent several days with Martha and her wonderful family before going down to the vanagon meet at Pfieffer Beach at Big Sur. Martha is the most incredible host either of us had ever seen. Absolutely unbelievable! Food! Drink! Laundry every night! Trips to parts stores! Trips to tire stores to get nice new tires put on the back of our bus. Martha doesn't sleep, either. Her daughter, Sarah, was terrific. She came with us on many of our trips, and Christa, Sarah, and I had a nice time at a make-yer-own-jewelry bead store before we left. Nate, Martha's husband, was great too, but because he seemed to work more and sleep less than Martha (was this possible?) we didn't get all that much time with him.

Martha also resolved a long-standing debate between Christa and I regarding the colour of our westy. I thought it was yellow; Christa thought this was ridiculous: it was clearly orange! Yellow! Orange! VW calls it "Chrome Yellow" (L20A), but even I agreed this was not at all descriptive. Martha looked at it and said, "You know, it's actually _mango!_ We looked at it. Martha was right: our camper is mango.

While we were in the Bay Area, the weather began to go to pieces. Christa and I walked all over San Francisco in the pouring rain, and it only got worse as time wore on. When we left to drive down to Big Sur, the wind had come up a lot, and was gusting wildly. By the time we were south of San Jose, it was taking a lot of effort to stay in our lane. I dropped our speed a bit. By the time we reached Carmel, it was dark and all hell had broken loose. When we were driving into the wind, I could barely hold 40mph. Redwood branches were down everywhere. Stuff was blowing all over the road, and the wind was screaming against the car. With 26 miles left to the campsite, we headed down the coast highway.

Visibility dropped. Sand and small rocks pounded into the car. I dropped our speed down to 25 miles an hour. Gusts would move the car 3 or 4 feet to one side almost instantly, and direction of the gust became impossible to predict. Just staying on the road was becoming a problem. As we'd come out of the other end of a cut through a sand dune, a wall of airborne sand and rocks would be waiting for us. I started to worry that we might break our windshield or headlights or some of the paint off the front of the car. The noise was incredible. The wind played with us, knocking us first one way, then the other, then back again. I slowed down even more, with the 4-way flashers on so we wouldn't get rear-ended. We could see nothing to our right, except for an occaisonal glimpse of the stormy Pacific smashing on the rocks below. After one particularly hard crosswind gust in the middle of a bridge, Christa started to cry. "We're going to die!" she cried, sobbing as sand, pebbles, and branches bounced off the car. She cried for a few more miles, then resigned herself to fate, and just watched the madness around us. Might as well enjoy the show!

After what seemed like hours, we arrived at the campsite, and found that most people had already arrived. We pulled into the site we were sharing with Bradley Prunehead, and hunkered down over some fine fish chowder. It was great to meet everyone. We learned that Steve Johnson's wife, Linda, had also broken into tears on the drive down the coast highway, so maybe my driving wasn't so bad after all! Other folks have reported on the Big Sur meet, so I won't go into detail here. Suffice to say that Christa and I and John and Carol Huguenard were sure glad that Jeff had Brought Something For Bob! Great folks, great food, lousy weather, and a great time. Jeff Schneiter had brought a tent, but because his tent was in a few inches of water by the time he went to turn in, he slept in the top bunk of our camper both nights.

Oh yeah, and we burned Sarah Rubin's sweater. What a sport!

I got our gas heater working again, but then it promptly blew a fuse and nearly exploded, so I figured it was time to have a pro look at it. We were originally going to go down the coast highway to San Luis Obispo, but the weather was still unstable, and Jeff knew a few FLARS in Santa Cruz, so we took Jeff and headed back north to Santa Cruz. Jeff lives in the hills above SC, and the road up to his place had redwoods down across it and was flooded out in places, so we took a long and circuitous detour. Finally made it to his place, where we enjoyed the 30 minutes of electrical power he got that weekend, met the superdog Argo, and hung out. Jeff took us back into town in his insanely fast Honda Civic, hung out at the laundromat while we washed our clothes, then took us out for pizza! What a guy! Back to his place, cooked with some local herbs, and went to bed in our camper. Listened to waves of wind come crashing up the redwood forested hillside, followed by the sound of cones, twigs, and huge branches bouncing off the top of the camper ALL NIGHT LONG. I was just waiting for one of the trees themselves to come crashing down on us. As the night wore on, I became too tired to care.

The next morning, Jeff left for work and we headed into town to get our heater fixed. We actually found a shop in California that knew something about gas heaters. The manual Joel had given proved to be very useful. Turned out I had an 8A fuse where a 16A one should go, and a 16A where a 8A belonged. I had switched them up! Oh, well. Mr. Mechanic also told me I had to rig up a proper exhaust system for the heater, 'cause the preheater hose I was using couldn't handle the heat from the heater and would melt and might set my engine compartment on fire. Uh. Ok, then.

We decided to bail on San Luis Obispo even though David Garth had kindly offered us his driveway, because we were getting tired of rain and severe weather. California is supposed to be sunny, right? We figured we should go for the desert (desert=dry, dry=no rain), so we took secondary roads all the way to Bakersfield. Rained. Stayed overnight in Bakersfield, and left the next morning. As we left Bakersfield, we saw a sign reading:

BAKERSFIELD: COME FOR A VISIT, STAY FOR A LIFETIME!

Whew! That was close!

With the weather still lousy, we decided to high-tail it (at 57mph, that is) east on Hwy 58 to Mojave. Tehachapi was absolutely flooded out--4 lane roads reduced to 1 lane above water. Mojave was worse. We had been thinking we'd go to Death Valley (We'd heard it was a pretty dry place, generally), so we phoned the ranger there to get the latest scoop. Uh. Raining. I didn't like the idea of being 282 feet below sea level in torrential rains and severe flooding, so we did what any other sane, red-blooded Canadian would do in a situation like this.

We drove hell-bent for Vegas.

Our self-imposed no-Interstate policy be damned, we hooked up with I-15 heading straight for Sin City. Pulled into the RV park behind the Circus-Circus, and headed for the casinos. We went crazy. We didn't stumble out of the casinos until the early morning, and we felt great! We were up two bucks! Hey, we were going to DO this town: there wasn't a nickle blackjack machine in town we couldn't beat! Coming off this gambling euphoria, we slept soundly while neon flashed all around us, illuminating the rainy night.

The next morning found us stuffing our faces at a $2.99 all- you-can-eat breakfast buffet. Vegas is my kind of place! Can't sit still though; time's a-wasting! Back to the casino floor, 'cause it never rains inside the casinos!

Well, I should have listened to Christa. I should have quit while I was ahead. But NO, I had to let it ride. The casino sharks took me for FIVE BIG ONES, leaving us a whole three dollars poorer than when we set foot in this cruel town. Christa and I had to go for a walk. Las Vegas must be a lonely place, because all these guys kept giving us these magazines full of pictures of young women who wanted to talk. I know this because these women had their phone numbers right there beside their pictures. I think maybe they, too, had lost a lot of their money because they didn't even have any clothes left to wear! Some of them must have been very lonely (or skilled conversationalists) because they wanted to talk to couples, too.

We decided we should leave while we still had some clothes to wear.

The next morning we headed for Arizona on US route 93. It had stopped raining! We paused at the Hoover Dam, and were impressed with the scale of the project. We putted along over the Arizona desert, enjoying a vastness of the landscape. Joshua trees came and went. After joining up with I-40 at Kingman, we began to climb again, in and out of the snow as we cleared pass after pass. Christa wasn't feeling that well, so we opted for a $20.00 motel room in Williams so she could rest up. We watched incredibly bad television, and I got Hagen-Daz bars from the store down the street. Life is good.

It was just a short run from there to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, under beautiful crystal-clear skies. I'd hyped Christa up about how wild the Canyon is: you think you're moving along a flat plain, and then, with almost no warning, there's this huge chasm below you. Christa was very excited. We entered the park, and came to first viewpoint. I parked, and we ran over to the edge. Clouds. The canyon was totally obscurred in thick clouds a thousand feet below us. Oh, poo! Christa goes to the look out area anyway, and then this rainbow appears below us. Whoa, heavy! We had a circular rainbow a thousand feet below us, with our shadows like a shaft of darkness cutting down into the centre of the rainbow itself. This was almost spiritual.

We found a campsite, got settled, paid our fee, then headed back to the rim. The clouds had totally disappeared. Christa was blown away. We hiked lots, sat and stared at the canyon. We met another young couple. We chatted, and they invited us for drinks later. We watched the sunset, and went to make dinner.

We met our new friends for drinks. They got us very drunk. Remember we're at 7,000 feet? I didn't. Whoa, big drunk. Yuck. Good thing was I didn't get cold that night, even though we had no hook-up and there was at least 2 feet of snow on the ground.

The next morning in the parking lot outside the showers we met a fellow and his young girlfriend who were heading from North Carolina to California in his 1970 bus. They tipped us off to a good natural food store in Flagstaf with great granola. All right! We headed out of the park by the East Drive to US 89, then south to Flagstaff. The scenery on the East Drive (AZ hwy 64) is incredible, although some of the signs for "trading posts" in the Navajo Nation were pretty sad: "FRIENDLY INJUNS AHEAD, GET 'UM GOOD DEALS." I'd thought we'd moved beyond that, but just goes to show stereotypes still work for some people...

In Flagstaff we found the farmer's market natural food store (with a nice bakery next door) without much trouble, and stocked up on stuff, granola included. From there we dropped down to Sedona where we spent the night. Much warmer.

We woke up in the morning to find one of our nice new rear tires has gone flat. Pumped it up, got it to a mechanic in Sedona. Nine bucks later, we're on our way. We worked our way along AZ89 up and down steep twisty roads through Jerome and Prescott, then onto US60 across the desert towards Blythe. Back into California, and out I-10 west. About 20 miles later, we pull off the Interstate at Wiley's Well Road, and headed south past a state prison. The road turned to gravel, and we went another 10 or 12 miles. The "free" campsite here turned out to cost $14.00, but the camp host was kind enough to volunteer that we could camp free a few more miles down the road on the Bureau of Land Management Land. So on we went. Another 6 or 8 miles later, we found a spot we could break through the low berm left by the grader on both sides of the road, and pulled off into the desert. Fifty yards off the road, I foundnd a level spot and turned off the engine. Quiet. Very, very quiet. We washed, ate, and piled into bed.

By the light of the next morning I realized just how much we are in the middle of nowhere. Didn't Charles Manson roam these parts? After exploring the desert on foot for a while, we packed up and fired up the camper. I worked us back onto the road, and pointed us south again. After all, why re-trace steps? The road HAS to lead somewhere, right? After about 10 miles the road starts to fall to pieces as we climbed into some desolated hills. But there were still tire tracks! If they did it, so could we! Another 15 miles and we unexpectedly hit a paved road. I looked at the sun, and turned right. We're on CA78, heading south, 20 or so miles north of Glamis. Nice country. Past the Imperial Dunes recreation area and into Brawley. Cool Mexican food for sale in the stores here. We worked our way along secondary roads to near Ocotillo, when we had to join I-8 heading west. We fought a strong head wind until we climbed into the mountains. After passing through snow just east of San Diego, we dropped down towards the Pacific and rolled on over to David Schwarze's place.

David was just moving in to his new (very nice) place, so I helped him move a few heavy or awkward things, then we ordered pizza and retired to his hot tub. Ahhh...

We spent a couple of days with David, getting the camper ready for Mexico. Insurance at AAA, last minute spare parts, and a really fun cruise of some of David's favorite San Diego junk yards. Incredible junk yards! Splits, loaves, vanagons! Rust free! These yards must be Volkswagen heaven! As David was punching his ridiculously powerful Mustang 5 litre down the freeways, I could see the hills of Tiajuana to the south. I was getting excited (and nervous!) about what lay ahead.

The morning we pulled out, we double- and triple-checked that we had everything we thought we'd need. Spare parts. Tools. First aid stuff. Full water tank in the car, full 6 gallon tank on the roof. Full (1 gallon?) solar shower on the roof too. We drove to San Ysidro, and filled up with gas. We practiced filling up Mexican-style: making so damn sure we had a FULL tank we left a half gallon on the pavement. We fit another 6.5 gallons of fuel in our (rated) 6 gallon jerry can and threw that on the roof, too. There. That gave us well over 400 miles cruising range. Checked the oil level again, checked the tire air pressure again. Ok. Our trusty camper was ready! We changed several hundred bucks American cash into pesos, and heading for the border crossing.

I got that border-crossing nervousness again. Would the Mexican guards hassle us? Christa was silent, and I could tell she was nervous, too. We'd agreed we were going to get through Tijuana as quickly as possible, and head directly south to get as far into the country that afternoon as we could. Christa was to be my navigator, watching for signs to Ensenada, directing me through the city, with the AAA Baja California map folded to the Tijuana city inset clutched tightly in her hands.

Tall chain-link razor-wired fences lined Interstate 5 as we cruised down the last couple of miles of the American freeway. Signs in Spanish warned people not to run across the highway. The US Border Patrol were everywere in their big 4x4s, and just before the crossing, a small army of them were stationed at the side of the road with big guys watching traffic from the hoods of their trucks. Oh, great.

At the border, traffic widened to 8 or 10 lanes southbound to pass through the inspection booths. Traffic crawled but never really stopped, and as we rolled up to the booth ourselves, we saw there was no one in any of the booths! Traffic just rolled south into the country unimpeded! I was so blown away by this I actually stopped for a second, hesistant to just DRIVE IN to a foreign country, until an angry horn blast behind me persuaded me to go with the flow and not draw attention to myself. So we drove into Mexico without seeing a single Mexican official. Welcome to Mexico!

Tobin ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tobin T. Copley Currently ============= (604) 689-2660 Occupationally /_| |__||__| :| putta tobin@freenet.vancouver.bc.ca Challenged! O| | putta '-()-------()-' Circum-continental USA, Mexico, Canada 15,000 miles... '76 VW Camper! (Mango)


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