BEN KATE KODA
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Grass Valley to San Diego
We left GV around 6:00 on Thursday evening. The van felt heavy heading up and out the driveway. We have four surfboards, two SUPS, two foil boards, a kite board, three kites, two foiling wings, spear fishing gear and all the other stuff that goes along with that. Kate has done a pretty amazing job organizing our food box, and we have enough food to go off grid for around a month.
The limiting factor is water. We carry forty gallons, but the dog motors through that fairly quickly. Showers are taken mostly in the ocean, but occasionally it is nice to have a freshwater rinse.
The drive down the Central Valley is always intensely boring, but was made slightly more interesting this time by the high winds. They were mostly crosswinds, which were made much worse by the Mercedes engineers who designed ‘crosswind assist’. This mainly is designed to randomly slam on the brakes and swerve the van in a seemingly arbitrary direction. Unlike the lane assist, which is equally annoying, there is no way to disable this function. Despite fighting the van all the way down the middle of California, we made it to the top of Tejon Pass, and found a nice dirt road for the night. We slept under the crackle and hiss of the high voltage lines. The wind blew and we woke up above the fog which rolled in to cover the valleys.
The next morning we continued on to San Clemente, and then to Encinitas, after spending the day at San Onofre.
The following days fell into an easy rhythm. The hardest thing is sleeping in town, as vanlifers have pretty much ruined stealth camping in this area. Bunch of degenerates. Luckily, Kate’s brother had a parking spot we could use, so we stayed there. We wake up early most mornings and drive out to the beach and bluff. We run the dog, go for a surf, and then eat food. Reading, organizing the van, and running last minute errands has kept us busy. Yesterday Kate flew back up to the Bay for a meeting, and tomorrow we cross into Baja. I think we will aim not too far down the first night, past Ensenada a bit. There is a seafood restaurant I heard about that I would like to try. The next couple months should be pretty good.
Exciting helicopter rescue