Disney 2

Kim and I with the Cars Characters
We ate lunch at the Rainforest Cafe and it was really good. On the left and right are round aquariums and in the middle there is a round tube that connects them. It was beat to see the fish swim back and forth.
Kim and I aren't sure what makes adults put on mickey ears but we figure it's a good thing.
At the Tortilla factory they had a scale calibrated to tell you how many Tortillas you weigh. I think Kim was 1650 and I was a lot closer to 3000.


We visited Disneyland again today and also the California Adventure Land that is next to it. What can you say? Disney is interesting and fun. We enjoyed watching them make tortillas. They make 1200 per minute. We also went to the Boudin Bread Company in Adventure Land and watched them make sourdough bread. Sourdough doesn’t use yeast. Instead it takes a small amount of the last batch of bread mixed into the new batch to make it rise. It is like ‘friendship bread’. Kim has done that before when a friend gives her a small amount of bread and she mixes a batch and puts that small amount in and just before she bakes it she takes out a small amount and gives it to a friend and so on. The Boudin Bread Co. is a big thing here in CA and they said at the factory that they are still passing on the bread from loaf to loaf from 150 years ago.

Tomorrow we leave for San Diego and will see the kids there on Monday eve. It will be so good to see them again.

Disneyland 1

Here we are at Toonland in Disney.
This tree is probably 50 feet tall
It's a small world after all
Moose bush
This is in Tommorrow Land. You press a button and a computer scans your head. The caption says, "Have your head examined". I would be afrain what they would (or wouldn't) find if they got in my head!

Today we went to Disneyland. It was our first time there. Today is the first day they were decorated for the holidays. It is really pretty. We left about 9 am and shuttled there and got back about 3 PM to rest a bit and plan to go back tonight for the light show.

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.

Paso Robles recap

Here's the rig at Paso Robles, Ca. We are at the Wine Country RV Resort. It is a really nice resort. Just above the Miata hood you can see the hammock post at an angle.
Here's a pic of a tree being moved for the Hearst Castle.
Highway 1 is very pretty. Here are some hills and the ocean.
This is one of the three guests houses at the Hearst Castle. Bob Hope stayed here and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had a party at the castle on the rear patio for his wife two weeks ago. It was for her charity.

W. R. Hearst was eccentric to say the least. Whenever his plans for the castle dictated that a big oak tree was in the way, he ordered that it be moved and not destroyed. The workers would dig around the tree, cut the roots and pour a concrete wall around it and under it and then move it on rollers. They then had to break up the concrete, haul it away and fill in around the tree with dirt. In 1926 they moved a tree that required a concrete wall ten inches thick and thirty foot diameter around the tree. It was estimated that the tree, its dirt and the concrete weighed 600 tons. See the picture above.

Today we plan to travel south to Castaic. We will stay there one night and then move on to Anaheim for three days and then on to San Diego for eight days to see our kids. We’re excited about that. Last night we purchased a two day park pass for Disneyland and the California Adventure Park. We got a discount online and can go straight to the turnstile and not wait in a ticket line. We printed the tickets in our MH. Pretty cool huh? Kim is excited to go to Disneyland. I am excited for her.

Paso Robles and the Hearst Castle

Beautiful hillsides adorned highways 101, 46 and 1.
This is the "Outside" pool at the Hearst Castle. He wanted the whole thing to look like Italy 300 years ago. I told Kim it would have been a lot cheaper for him to just go and visit Italy from time to time.
These are freshly planted vineyards. They last 35 to 45 years before having to be replanted.
This is a view from the Hearst Castle.
More pretty hills


Today we toured the Hearst Castle. It is a true paradox. It is a fascinating place and I could go on and on about the furnishings brought from Europe to decorate and furnish it including ceilings, benches, artwork and special made sculptures. I left there really saddened by the whole thing. I don’t think like other people – OK? Here is a guy who built a castle to his own ego. He entertained stars and leaders from all over the world – but here are some things we learned from the tour guide and the display area we toured. William Randall Hearst married and he lived in the west in California while his wife lived in the east on Long Island. He had a mistress that was in the video tape he shot that was part of our tour. He had 5 sons and between them they had 16 wives. When he was a child his mother would take him to Europe for up to 1.5 years at a time without his father. His father was a mining tycoon and was very wealthy. W. R. Hearst got into the newspaper business and owned newspapers, magazines, radio stations and got involved with the film industry. He built the castle but had no conception of how things looked on paper and consequently had them build many things and then tear them down and start over. There were artifacts where he sent letters to the architect and wanted things changed. As if this weren’t bad enough, he also had them quit their progress in one area and finish another area because he wanted to bring guests there. Consequently he had trouble keeping craftsmen on the job as they didn’t like his micro managing and tearing down their work. They would just quit. There was documentation that he was slow in paying the bills also. There was documentation that in 1923 he had $25,000.00 per month allotted to keep building his castle. In 1937 his empire began to collapse and it was discovered he was in financial trouble with 126 million in debts so from 1937 to 1945, he turned his estate over to an attorney who liquidated land, art and antiques. He never did get the castle finished. When he left it in about 1948 he said it was half finished. Here is one last irony. This guy was a nut that built a monument to himself and 600,000 people a year pay $20.00 each to see it. I didn’t want to go see it but so many people said we should – personally. I wouldn’t again. Here’s my logic. It is interesting that people around the world build these huge monuments to their success and then when their heirs can’t afford to keep up the place they make a tax deal with the government to take it over and turn it into a tourist attraction.

We met a guy in a coffee shop on our way home that was a strong believer and has a son who is in the mission field. When it is all said and done at the end of my life would I rather be able to say I built an empire but didn’t father my kids – or live a life that would send a son to the mission field? Sorry, I don’t usually rant, I just couldn’t help myself.

On the plus side, we had a great day for a drive and saw many, many wineries and beautiful vineyards. The countryside is so very pretty here. We got back at about 4 this afternoon and we laid in the hammock in the sunshine for an hour or so. Last night we got home after dark and there were so many stars that I set up the hammock and we got some blankets and laid under the stars for a while. It was fun.

San Juan Bautista to Paso Robles

Kim and I on the bike taxi in China Town, San Francisco.
We met the owner of this converted motorhome at a rest area and he was quite a colorful guy. He was a leftover hippie about 65 years old. Note the name is 'The Cool Bus'. There is also a bench vise bolted to the front bumper that is painted John Deere green.
Here's a farm scene on hwy 101.
More veggies.


Here's Kim seated at our picnic table in Paso Robles. Beside her is my computer from where we posted today. The temp is 74 and it is nice and sunny.

Mon 11.12.07

Sorry we haven’t posted. We have been at campgrounds that had trees so we couldn’t use our satellite and my notebook will only get out on our network. I don’t know what’s wrong with it, but it has been incredibly frustrating. Oh well, don’t let it rent space in your head Mitch. I will probably post three of four blogs today. I have been doing the journaling; I just haven’t been able to post them. Today we traveled from San Juan Bautista to Paso Robles. We will be here two days and then head to a campground a few minutes from Disney Land. We’ve never been there so it should be fun. The drive today brought us totally different scenery than what we have seen in California. Highway 101 runs between two mountain ranges and the valley soil was black and fertile. There were so many different kinds of vegetables grown there and it looks like they may have pretty much a full year growing season. We must have seen over a thousand workers in the fields harvesting, plowing, discing, planting and irrigating. We also saw more and more palm trees. We saw one in the middle of a field of vegetables. That was unique. We also came upon a mile or two of oil wells. There had to have been well over 150 wells. Many of them were not more than 200 feet apart. I have never seen them that close.

San Francisco day 3 of 3

Kim hanging onto the side of a cable car.
Here is a cable car and in the distance is a turnabout. A turnabout is a short section of tracks on a big turntable. Two guys push the car onto the turnabout and turn it around manually by hand. It isn't very hard to do.
Here's the guy who gave us the bike taxi ride to China Town.
This is the inside of a street car.
Here's the outside of a streetcar. It has two large antenna like arms that make contact with the electric wires above.

Fri 11.9.07

Today we went to the Cable Car Museum and Power House. This is the operations center for the cable cars. It is a must see while in San Francisco. There were old cable cars and lots of artifacts such as good displays of how the car grips the cable and how long the equipment lasts. A cable last 75 to 250 days and the pine wood brakes that rub the track for stopping only 2 to 3 days. In 1947 the city decided to do away with the cable cars and replace them with buses. There was such uproar from the people that they finally put it to vote and the city overwhelmingly voted to keep the cable cars. As I said in an earlier post, they identify the city and now the cable car system in San Francisco is a national monument so they are here to stay.

It was good to get back home. I realize our home is mobile and I have seen signs that say, “Home is where you park it”, but last night I came up with how I feel about it – “Home sweet home – wherever it is”. We met our new neighbors last night and helped some people who pulled in after dark. They are a crew of painters from North Dakota that paint grain elevators and such. They’ll be here for a month. The owner was really nice and we talked quite a while. I think today will be reading and writing my book. I haven’t made as much progress as I would like. I would like to have my library with me and we probably need to stay in one place long enough for me to concentrate. I’m getting chapters organized though.