Anaheim, CA

Here's a harbor shot along 101.
Lots of pretty beaches along 101.
We saw miles and miles and miles of veggie farming.
The RV's are parked along the Pacific Coast Highway. If we had known, we would have stayed there but we had a RV site reserved. This went on for several miles. I love the breaking waves.
Here are some of the trees grown in boxes for resale. (read below)


When my in-laws were on the mission field it was good when they wrote about the little things that they might not think were even important. I found the day to day things interesting. This is what I am doing today. I had something happen yesterday that was a pleasant surprise. Our GPS (we call her ‘Grace’ because lately she has needed a lot of it) started locking up and getting lost from time to time. With the coach and trailer it is inconvenient to almost get to your destination, especially in a city and have her quit. We can’t just go around the block like in a car due to low trees and sharp corners. I would like to send her in to get checked out but that leaves us without a GPS for a while. Since we are going through the LA area this week, we researched on the Web and found a new one that we like. A new one will let us have a GPS while the old one is being fixed and then with two we won’t have to switch it back and forth from the coach to the car. Here’s the surprise. Wal-Mart has a pretty good deal but doesn’t stock the one I want in stores. It is an online purchase. I kind of need it now so we went to Circuit City and they had the same thing for about $80 more. I told the salesman that Wal-Mart had it for less and asked if he could help the price. He said, “Sure. We’ll do price matching.” Not only did they match the price but they gave me a discount. He just took my word on the price. I didn’t have documentation. As we left I told Kim that policies like this are just good business. I guess people do this kind of thing every day, but it was the first time it happened to me and it was a good experience. The store didn’t have the GPS in stock but we paid for it and it is being held at a store 25 miles down the road and we are going right by it today anyway.

I write the blog on my word processor and then copy and paste to the blog. It is surprising that I have 42 pages, 27,728 words of blog notes on my computer. That doesn’t include the descriptions I type with each picture. Yesterday we got to the campground and asked for a local Mexican restaurant. They told us about a little hole in the wall and we told them that is just what we wanted. Mexican food is different here. It is spicier. We have also started seeing more and more catering trucks parked along the road with Mexican food. I’d like to stop and patronize one of those. Yesterday we drove south mostly on 101 and it was a pretty drive. We were surprised to see so many vegetable farms. It was common to have a mountain on each side of us and a valley with rich farmland between. Maybe there was 5 to 15 miles between the mountains. There were so many manual laborers. We had to have seen over a thousand people working and harvesting by hand. Everything is irrigated and they lay 30’ aluminum pipes every 50 feet or so. This is so labor intensive. We saw huge stacks of this pipe. There were literally thousands of pieces. The tractors are cool in that they have 4 large lug tires and are 4 wheel drive. There are very few rubber wheeled big 4WD tractors. Instead they have Cat rubber track tractors or every once in a while we see an old Cat steel track dozer pulling tillage equipment.

Here in the Santa Clarita area there are so many trucks that it boggles the mind. We are in the area of highways 5 and 126. In one small town there are 3 huge fuel stations within a mile and that is about all there is for that mile – trucks. They are parked along the road, parked in turn lanes and waiting to get out on the roads. We have to get fuel today and will probably stop by one of these giant fuel centers.

Here’s an interesting tidbit. A month or so ago we bought a Silver Leaf electronic monitor that reads the buss data signals from our engine and transmission computers. It collects all kinds of data on the go. It even stores all error codes in plain English so I don’t have to look up and see what the code number is. Some interesting data is that my best fuel mileage is about 57 to 58 MPH. At 55 the transmission doesn’t get into 6th (high) gear. When I set my cruise it even digitally shows me what speed I have set it at. Normal level driving at 57 MPH registers about 75 horsepower. While I have 400 HP at lower altitudes, I only have 330 HP at 9,000 feet elevation. I really like the Silver Leaf unit. It is expensive but I can move it from coach to coach and if there is a new engine or transmission, I just send it in and they reprogram it to accept the new equipment. They said they have customers who have moved the computer to their 4th coach.

Something I haven’t mentioned is trucks. It is interesting in that different states trucks are configured differently for their weight and length laws. In Washington the dump truck configuration seemed to favor a straight truck with a box and a trailer with a 20’ tongue and a dump box. Often the trailer had no steering – just a long tongue that pulled like a two wheeled trailer. They unhooked when they dumped. Here in California they have a semi tractor with one rear axle pulling a single axle trailer and a single axle dolly with another single axle trailer. They bottom gravity dump with air doors from the tractor. We saw a fleet of about 8 trucks going down a lane and dumping on the go and turning around to go get more. They never stopped. This California configuration is the same on fuel and box trucks also.

Another interesting sight is all the huge nursery farms that have trees planted each in its own box and sitting on top of the ground. There were thousands and thousands of trees like this. It looked like hundreds of acres of trees just close together in boxes. The boxes were from 2 foot square to about 8 foot square with 25 foot trees in them. I think they just load the tree, box and all when they ship them. I don’t think we could do this in Indiana as the roots would freeze.