We did take another trip since the last time I posted--to Visalia/Sequoia and Valencia. I meant to post about it, but since I haven't yet, I probably won't. You can read about my fear of plunging off a cliff in Sequoia in my post at Carseatblog.com, though.
We also took a trip (by plane) to Illinois in August, but the rest of our time was spent waiting for the new baby to arrive.
I'm pleased to announce that baby Oliver made his appearance on September 21. He was born (as planned) in a pool in our back yard, surrounded by flora and fauna. Hey, maybe he'll be an outdoorsy type!
So far (knocking on a huge chunk of wood) he is a very easy-going baby. He rarely cries, and although he wakes up a few times a night to eat, he falls right back asleep. Elias and Anna adore him, too.
We don't have any trips planned for now, but when we do, Oliver will be ready with his vintage-trailer blankie (pictured above).
Steve is on a little adventure without us or the Jupiter Too right now. He's in Arizona helping with media relations for the big wildfire they have out there.
His trip does tie in with our blog, though.
Last night, before Steve left, I jokingly asked him if he wanted to take my "WPA Guide to 1930s Arizona" with him. It's a book I originally read for my aforementioned American Highway course in college, but which I've held onto and which has inexplicably been sitting on a counter in our living room for the past several months.
See, during the Depression the WPA commissioned travel guides for various states, and some of them have been reprinted. It's neat to read about what places (especially sparsely populated places) were like back then. Or at least it is for me, because I'm a huge nerd.
Steve declined to take the book, but I did look up the city he was going to--Springerville--in the index. Sure enough, there was a write-up.
At the time, the population was under 600. (I'm not sure what it is today.) Most of the write-up was about a guy who caught some horse thieves, but when I got to the last paragraph I squealed with delight: Springerville is the location of one of the Madonnas of the Trail statues!
Steve said he'd be sure to go by, and he took the above photo on the way to his briefing this afternoon. I'm a little sad I can't see it myself, but given the circumstances it's probably for the best.
Last week we took the Jupiter Too up to Solvang, the quaint little Scandinavian town on California's central coast.
Other than eating pancakes (very, very good pancakes) and looking at European kitsch, there's not a whole lot to do there, so we also spent some time exploring nearby areas.
One afternoon we found ourselves at Pismo Beach, the only beach in California where you can drive on the sand. I didn't really get the appeal: Why would we want to drive on the sand? Moreover, why would one want to be on a beach where others were driving on the sand? But Steve wanted to try it out just to say he did it, so I went along for the ride, so to speak.
It actually was kind of neat. It was also unbelievably windy.
We drove near the waterline on the wettish, compact sand until we got to the end of the vehicle area. At that point we got out and snapped a photo.
About 30 seconds after Steve took that photo, the wind ripped that frisbee-like thing out of Elias's hands (or so he claims). It spun like a wheel on that yellow outer rim and rolled away past the "No Vehicles Permitted" sign. We told Elias sorry, it's gone. But he started crying, which is unusual for him. Luckily the frisbee-thing then lodged itself against a fence just outside the vehicle area, so Steve said he'd go get it.
Since we had to get back in the truck anyway and because it was so windy, we drove the 200 or so feet over to the fence rather than walking. Steve retrieved the toy then got back in and...discovered we were stuck.
I told him to put it in reverse because I know in snow you're supposed to rock back and forth. But snow tends to compact whereas sand tends to bury you deeper, plus the truck wasn't moving in any direction. Steve got out and discovered the sand was up to the running boards, thanks in part to the powderiness of being farther from the water and in part from the wind blowing so much of it against the tires just in the short time we were stopped.
Steve got out to contemplate our situation while I googled "vehicle stuck in sand." About then, a guy in a red pickup truck came driving up and started talking to Steve. The guy--who turned out to be a firefighter, too--told Steve the same thing I had just discovered in an eHow article: We needed to let air out of the tires.
So Steve let air out of our two front tires and the guy hitched us up to his truck. A minute later and we were back on the compact sand, and we had learned a valuable lesson.
Now that we know how we're supposed to drive on sand, we might even go back sometime...with the trailer! (They allow camping on the beach, too.)
As for the other stuff we did:
I found an absolutely awesome playground not far from the touristy section of Solvang. It had amazing wooden play structures, misting stations (though it was too cool to need them), swings, slides, a pristine baseball diamond, etc.
In Arroyo Grande (about an hour from Solvang) we went to a great ice cream place called Doc Burnstein's. They had some really neat flavors, like a coffee ice cream with ground-up espresso beans, Birthday Cake (Anna had that--and it did taste exactly like birthday cake), Merlot, and the one I liked most: Marzipan!
Also, while our truck might have been stuck in the sand, at least our heads weren't! Yeah, that's a really lame segue into the other highlight of our trip: feeding ostriches and emus at an ostrich farm.
Here's video of Steve feeding the ostriches. (The kids each fed the emus instead, because they were a little more tame. The emus, that is, not the kids.)
Our campground was really nice, too. Lots and lots of grass for the kids to play in.
The only downside is that it was so windy we couldn't have a campfire any of the nights we were there, which meant no s'mores and no pie-iron pies (more on that another time).
Once we bought the new trailer, we were itching to take it out, especially with summer (and all of its heat and crowds) fast approaching.
So a week later, we found ourselves on our first trip.
Before I go into details, though, I want to announce that the Airstream officially has its name: Jupiter Too.
See, we somehow got Elias turned on to the old campy show "Lost in Space." The family lived on a spaceship called the Jupiter 2, and I thought that since the Airstream has a space-age, retro look to it, we could play off of that. I suggested Jupiter 3, but when Steve suggested Jupiter Too, I knew we had a winner.
But back to the trip.
Since we didn't have much time to prepare, we kept it local, going to a nearby state beach. There were no hookups, so we had to be careful about battery and water usage. We wound up using the showers at the campground, in part because of our limited water supply (and whopping six-gallon water heater) and in part because we discovered the trailer didn't come with a shower head.
The kids enjoyed the beach. Well--Elias enjoyed the beach. Anna seemed perplexed by the whole thing. She refused to sit in the sand and it took her a long time to even play in it.
At first I thought she had inherited my aversion to sand, but then I realized it was my aversion to sand that had kept her from ever experiencing a sandbox (yes, I'm a terrible mom), and therefore she had no idea what the stuff was.
Elias, on the other hand, had no such issues.
So while Elias rolled in the surf Anna found happiness lounging in a chair, and I can't say I blame her.
We grilled hot dogs and made s'mores. Elias befriended every kid in the park. We gathered 'round the table and played games by the glow of some really bitchin' overhead LED lights. It was a lot of fun, despite the freight trains that roared by several times a night.
We enjoyed it so much that we have two more trips planned (to different campgrounds) over the next few weeks. We're even hoping to squeeze in a few trips over the summer, and Steve is already planning how soon we can get out there once the new baby is born.
Before I go, one parting photo of my kidlets, snug in their jammies looking out into the wilderness. (Well, not quite wilderness, but some grass at least.)
In my last post I alluded to us buying something in addition to a birdhouse for Steve's birthday.
That thing was an Airstream.
We had Homer on the market for a couple months without any bites except for a couple in Huntington Beach who decided not to look at it, and a guy in Garden Grove who wanted to trade us for a mobile home.
Homer wasn't getting any younger and was only losing value, so we decided to trade him in for something smaller that we could actually USE. We took a bit of a hit on the deal, of course, but I think it will ultimately be worth it.
And although I'm sad to see Homer go, my anxiety surrounding him has gone, too.
Obviously we won't be full-timing in the yet-to-be-named Airstream. If/when we do decide to full-time in a couple years we'll either trade it in or go park it somewhere and get something else in the meantime. I really have no idea.
But for now, we're planning our first camping trip for next month, and I truly can't wait!
Here are some photos. I only had my phone with me, so the quality isn't great.
The dinette, which converts into a bed:
The couch, which also converts into a bed:
Most of the kitchen:
The bathroom door, which I think is just SO cool-looking:
And part of the bedroom. It was really hard to get a photo in here:
Finally, one of the brake lights on the outside, just because I like the shape:
A few weeks ago, some house finches started flying around under our patio cover. It soon became evident they were building a nest in there. I thought it was a bad idea, because rather than putting the nest in the structural support, they built it on top of some folds of fabric on the sides. A few brisk breezes and the nest would be history.
I thought about scaring them off to save them the trouble, but then I decided that birds build nests in seemingly precarious places all the time and do just fine. So I figured they must know what they're doing.
Over the past couple days I hadn't noticed the birds around, and the nest had shifted to the point that it was close to falling down. The birds had abandoned the nest.
It struck me as very sad that they had spent all this time and effort building a new home, getting ready to move in, only to have their plans thwarted.
Then I noticed the parallels and got even more depressed about it. Apparently we attract other species who also aren't very good at planning for this sort of thing.
I realize it has been a couple months since I updated this. I haven't been intentionally neglecting things, it's just that we're in a huge state of limbo and it has been hard to know what or when to update things.
We do have a few pieces of big news, one good, and one bittersweet.
First, the bittersweet. We have decided to put Homer up for sale.
At this point, it looks like full-timing--if we even do it--is another two years away. Homer is too big for short jaunts. Steve would still need his Non-Commercial Class A, plus there are only two state parks in all of California that will fit him (Homer, that is, not Steve). Right now Homer is just sitting in storage, waiting to be used.
Although it would be the perfect trailer for full-timing, it's just not practical now, and without knowing what the future holds, it doesn't make sense to keep him.
If you or your friends are interested in a ginormous but very, very cool fifth wheel in practically-brand-new condition, you can check our ad here: http://www.rvsearch.com/findrv/index.cfm/a-d/tc-36286/vid-614805/
If we can't sell him, we might trade him in for something smaller that we can use now. We'd take a big financial hit on that, but it might be better than making payments plus insurance and storage fees on something we can't even use.
We are very sad to see Homer possibly leaving our family, but we are also excited to announce that we will have a new addition coming to our family this September in the form of our third child! Believe it or not, that development actually has little bearing on the Homer situation, although it probably is better to be grounded in one place for the time being.
So, for now, we're stuck indefinitely in Southern California. Although this isn't exactly what we wanted, we realize our situation could be much worse, and we're grateful to have what we do.
I will continue to post updates about Homer. And seriously, if you know people who want a full-timing 5er, pass on the info.
