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It’s May but still a little brisk for sleeping a tent camper this far north so decided to saddle up, go over to the California coast and turn south.  After leaving the Lake Tahoe area I headed towards Sacramento.  It was a Sunday, which is a great time to drive through a state capital and look around.  Always a better traffic situation.  This was really a pit stop to say that I’ve been to Sacramento and use the library.  Rule of thumb, big city libraries have a much more interesting bunch of patrons then smaller towns and it was no different here.  Some emails done, some bills paid via WiFi and I was off again.  Still wasn’t sure where to go for the night so I looked on freecampsites.net.  If I went straight south I was a couple of hours away from a Walmart that allowed camping and there wasn’t much else.  I wanted to clean up the camper a bit and secure the Harley with new stronger straps so a parking lot was a good stop for this. 

While working on this minor fix, a pickup truck pulled up with two men who came over and asked if they could take a couple of minutes to check out my set up.  They told me they both had pickups, each had some sort of camper /trailer and both were Harley riders.  My kind of people.  Their couple of minute stop lasted for about an hour.  They did look around but mostly we swapped travel stories, and we each recommended some great places to visit.  By time they left felt like we were old friends.

I headed toward Monterey in the morning.  I wanted to get to the coast and ride Rt 1.  Did some driving through Salinas and other agricultural areas.  The center section of California and out to the coast seems to really used to its maximum potential.  Seems every piece of flat or nearly flat ground is accounted for to be productive.  Everywhere you looked something was growing, being harvested, some plants just starting to come up through the earth or land was being plowed in preparation to plant something.  No doubt this is all well calculated to have a constant source of product, but it was so regimented that it was reminding me more of a big business factory style environment, which it really is.  There is also an amazing amount of rolling hills and it looked like if you can’t plant something, then graze cattle, horses and sheep.  If not that, then put up some buildings and houses.  At some points I would drive for miles and miles through almond groves, then miles of vineyards, orange groves, all types of vegetables and strawberries.  I’ve always knew CA was a big agricultural state, but until I drove some of it and saw the enormity, my imagination didn’t do it justice.

My idea is to anchor the camper at Big Sur then ride the Harley. I went through Monterey and there was some road construction going on which caused a bit of a delay and just before getting on Rt 1, a sign that said road closed ahead.  Well it can’t be Rt 1 that’s closed because, well it’s Rt 1, so onward.  What a beautiful drive.  There are a lot of cut outs to pull over and take a look at the scenery which is a really good idea if your the driver, because you better be paying attention to navigating the curvy road.   Today is windy and really brisk so I’m okay with being in the truck right now.  The view and ride are spectacular and since the road is legendary I was expecting nothing less. 

About 25 miles into the drive I pulled over to catch some views and check about the road closed sign I saw earlier.  I found out via the internet that Rt.1 was closed ahead but should be open in short order, like maybe in five months.  Forgot all about the mudslides from several months ago and they are still cleaning up.  Okay plan “B” is… I don’t know, so lets pull out the map.  My thought was to back track to Monterey then drive back south on the other side of Big Sur and find a place to camp where I can come back up Rt 1 going north, then I would have seen most of that whole section by Big Sur. 

I got on line and found a free camping spot in a town about where I wanted to start riding the next day.  The spot was right on the Main Street of a small town off Rt 101.  The reference about this site was from 2013 and hoped it was still okay.  After driving through more amazing hills and agriculture I arrived at dusk and found the place.  There was one other RV there that looked battle scared and like it hadn’t moved for quite some time.  I wondered if this was even the camper that referenced the place back in 2013 and maybe never left.  Behind me was train tracks and in front of me on the street a couple of convenience stores and a bar with the door open and music blaring.  In general it was a lonely looking place.  I asked the cashier at each convenience store about campers parking here and both mentioned something to the effect they didn’t know but the police don’t usually arrest people for parking cars there.  Okay so there it was, clear confirmation that it was okay to camp here.  This is one of the few places that I ever felt uneasy about staying.  Not to be judgmental but from the looks of some of the customers in the stores, these folks were a tough bunch.  The few signs of life on the road were an occasional car passing with rap music booming with lyrics that were mostly cursing, or something, something, kill the cops.  The one saving grace was that I noticed what appeared to be a police camera blinking on the one light pole in the lot.  I did send a message to one of my sons about my location and to say that if he didn’t hear back from me in a couple of days, here’s where they should start looking for me.  I had a couple of glasses of wine to take the edge off, slept great and got out of town early the next morning.

I saw a place on the map not too far away called Lompoc, CA further south and right on Rt 1.  If I could find some place to throw out the anchor there and stay the night it would be a great launching spot for a ride up Rt 1.  I also picked Lompoc because it was the setting of a W.C.Fields movie called “The Bank Dick”.  If you’ve never seen that classic comedy, go find a copy and watch it, it’s from 1940 but it is timeless. 

I ended up finding a public street in Lompoc near, you guessed it a Walmart, that had several beat up campers and cars that looked like people lived in them.  I pulled up and went to a mini van that had a guy sitting in the front seat and asked him what the story was.  He told me he lived right here in his van and that cops rarely come by to roust them.  There was a Harley Sportster parked in front of his car and I asked him if that belonged to a camper too.  He told me that was his bike.  He slept in his van, rode his Harley around and actually worked full time at Walmart, so all he had to do was walk across the street to go to work.  I didn’t care much for his living space, but it sounded like a smart commute in busy Southern California.

So I picked out a spot to park and joined this little make shift village, unleashed the Fat Boy and headed north.  Again, Rt 1 is a classic so to say the ride was great is a give me.  Went through some of the seaside towns like Pismo Beach, Grover Beach, Moro Bay and others.  Stopped in a few spots and did the tourist walk, and spent a great day in the Southern California sunshine.  Never got quite as far up north as I hoped, but Rt 1 deserves a return trip in the summer and I think just on the Fat Boy next time. 

As the final leg of this California trip the next morning I was headed off to SanDiego.  First though I had to get through the dreaded LA area.  I’ve driven that area a few times many years ago and it was really congested, but I was hoping for the best by trying to get there around 11:30AM-ish.  It was still a mess with areas of heavy traffic, people jockeying for a better position even if they could just get one car ahead of you and lane splitters on motorcycles.  Although I ride, I’m not a fan of lane splitting and almost picked off one kid that I didn’t see coming past me doing about 60mph.  Being a rider I try and stay very aware of these things, and still he surprised me. 

There’s very few places to camp for free in the SanDiego area so I had to do a little extra digging.  I found that there was an Indian casino abut 25 miles out of town that would accommodate me so I headed there.  It’s pretty much out in the sticks so I was thinking that it was a tiny place. I got there and not only was it busy and alive, but they have a 5 story parking garage plus regular ground level lots and are in the middle of putting up a 300 plus room hotel on the property.  So I hung out at this rather large casino for a while in the evening and watched the legions of gamblers.  When I had enough I went home, to the parking lot. 

Next morning off to San Diego with the hopes of parking somewhere and taking the bike around town.  I had been traveling a lot the past several days and getting a little worn down.  The drive around San Diego was frustrating with a lot of traffic and not a lot of parking places for something my size.  By lunchtime I was pretty much spent and so after finally finding a space to park I just grabbed a Starbucks coffee and then some lunch.  Saw a place that was bursting at the seems with customers called Tacos El Gordo, which I believe means the Fat Taco, or perhaps it means I’m a fat taco, whatever.  It was a model of efficiency with about 7 different lines to get served, but each walk up had only 2 or 3 items that they served.  So if you wanted to get a taco and fries, that’s two different lines.  However, the wait for something was about 30 seconds which made up for that.  Amazing place, with 9 or 10 people just handling the food assembly.  I found out later that it is a chain, but the tacos were really good and fat as promised.  So with a caffeine rush going and a full belly I decided to get out of the traffic and end the California leg of my journey by heading to Yuma, AZ. 

Campers:  Been using a web site called Allstays for a while now, but also found a site called freecamping.net which has been really good for finding free space to camp.  Check it out.  Plenty of RV and camping spots in southern CA, but seems free space is tough to find.  Around Pismo Beach there were several RV camp sites right on the beach too.

Bikers:  Rt 1, GO!  Being here in May it’s still a little brisk riding.  As you can imagine it’s a bit windy along the coast and I’m guessing it’s like that all the time.  Great ride and deserves to be on everyone’s bucket list.  Rt 101that intertwines with Rt 1 on occasion is also an interesting ride, but a busy road.

Stretch:  Been mostly driving and riding this leg of the trip, so not a tremendous amount of opportunity for stretches.  However, staying at that lonely parking lot in that small town was a bit of a stretch.  Usually when something is not feeling right it’s probably a good idea to move on.  It occurred to me after thinking it through that a lot of what I was feeling uneasy about was due to the superficial looks of things in a preconceived sense.  Since pushing past ones  comfort zone is part of this project, I felt somewhat compelled to stay.  Glad I did.