On the other side of the mountains

San Diego, CA – We’ve made it to California at last, almost a month to the day after leaving Ottawa!  Only 30 miles from our location in this suburb of San Diego called Chula Vista, is the Pacific Ocean. And even closer, to the south, is Tijuana, Mexico, so we’re kind of at the bottom left corner of the USA.

Our location for the next four days is in the KOA Campground of the Year for 2013, and it is lovely – paved roads and concrete pads for the RVs, with grassy sections between sites and tall shade trees. The facilities are excellent and spotlessly clean.  Our Wi-Fi connection is strong, always a hoped-for bonus, and we are close to the sightseeing spots we want to visit.  I’m not sure what the criteria are to win such an honour, but what we’ve seen so far puts checks in all our boxes.

We had quite an early start from Yuma today. Val woke up at 3:30 but kindly waited for me to wake up on my own; that was about 6:30, because it’s kind of hard, in an RV the size of ours, not to hear the coffee maker bubbling, or not to notice the beams of light flowing aft to the bedroom, or not to feel the RV lurch as one’s beloved moves about. So we were on the road just after 8 am, and about half an hour later we turned the clock back an hour when we crossed into the Pacific time zone. That made us REALLY early!

Another geography lesson awaited us, as we watched the Arizona desert morph into the barren, sand-duned terrain one usually pictures when one thinks of a desert on the California side.  Luckily, it wasn’t windy, because it was easy to see how blinding it would be if all that loose sand got swept into the air.  We passed several spots where people with RVs were dry camping among the dunes, and there were dune buggy tire tracks all over the place.

A few miles further along, the dunes gave way to a wide expanse of fertile fields, where we saw crews of pickers harvesting lush heads of lettuce and cauliflower and loading them onto carts.

Next, we encountered rocks, great piles of them, as if a giant dump truck had delivered them in mountain-sized heaps by the highway.  The highway rose from sea level to 1000 feet, then 2000, then 3000 and finally 4000 feet, literally up in the clouds!  From the Sahara to sweeping the wet off the windshield in less than half an hour!

Just before we began our climb, we encountered a wind farm with 100 turbines, all turning mightily in a stiff wind.  Some were hidden behind a hill so only the white arms showed, looking like giant spiders’ legs crawling toward the highway. It looked quite eerie.

On our descent toward the San Diego area, the hillsides were carpeted with houses and businesses for miles and miles, one community blending into the next.  It’s not hard to absorb the fact that California’s population surpasses that of all of Canada, squeezed into a space a fraction of the size of the Great White North.