Since I lost those 218 pictures, I guess I’ll just give you a quick run down of where I went and what I did. I left my brothers house in Rosamond California while he followed in his Prius. We headed due West to wine country, taking highway 46 to Paso Robles. It didn’t take long to get there so we were sipping Calif wines by early afternoon. After visiting 2 wine tasting rooms, we headed into a several mile long wine tasting loop and stopped at a nice little winery that happened to have two nice women to talk to. I enjoyed myself talking to them until Dan got bored and decided to take off and visit some more wineries before it was too late…most wineries close their tasting rooms by 5pm. The plan was for me to follow and stop at each wine tasting room I found on the loop. A half hour later I left and headed down the road to what I thought was the next winery. Up a steep hill. I didn’t notice that the sign said, “Vineyard”, not “Winery”. When I got to the top of the steep hill, I discovered that the gate was closed, with no place for my 37′ RV to turn around safely. So I backed down the 1/2 mile or so only to jamb my rear rails into the blacktop, stopping my progress. Couldn’t move forward either. Not enough power. Just about then the two women I’d met at the last winery stopped to offer help. I used their phone to call my tow company and they kept me on the phone for over a half hour while they tried to find someone that could tow my 22,000 lb rig out of it’s predicament.
A cop showed up and since the rear end of the rig was poking out into the road, he set up with his lights flashing so traffic would be warned. Finally, one of the tow companies in the area dispatched a tow truck, stating that I’d have to sign a no fault agreement if they damaged my RV.
Around that time, two locals pulled in and volunteer to give me a tug. The tugger had a four wheel drive pickup truck. Not even a dually. Just four wheels. I said sure, we hooked up a chain to the front of my RV, I climbed in and started it up, put it in gear, gave them the high sign and seconds later, I was free. Unhooked and backed up at an angle so I wouldn’t get stuck again and headed up the road trying to find my brother.
I made the entire loop and didn’t see any open wine tasting rooms, since it was after five PM, I just expected him to head to our roundavous point…a nice RV park. Where they charge $58 per night! But it was getting dark, I couldn’t find him along the route we’d planned and I felt I could get online and use Skype to give him a call (I’d lost my phone in Guadalajara). So, I hook up and my computer fails. Wouldn’t boot. Totally dead. Eventually, I found that the mother board or the CPU had gone bad. Well, I couldn’t call him, my spare computer didn’t work either, it had died weeks before, but I’d already hooked up and used services, it was 10pm, so I just went ahead and spent the night without trying to call. I did leave a note on the office door that he could have found if he came back. He came by the next morning. He’d been to the RV park a couple hours before I got there, waited a while, but gave up and went to spend the night at a motel. The next day we went and visited a really old mission, now a museum. Those pictures are completely gone, but after the mission visit we went across the street to another museum that was a historically important home/cafe/bar/store. The following pictures are of that building and grounds.
Water storage tower.
The arbor, probably would be spectacular with flowers.
Some of the flowers all over the place.
Funny looking plant of some kind.
A little information about the original owners.
The building at last.
A couple hundred year old toilet. No plumbing though.
Nice big living room on the second floor.
The old school room where the kids suffered, but the teacher is a doll.
Back outside, a really interesting machine of some type.
This device had a wooden tub with a one lunger engine attached that pumped whatever it was in the tub. The wood was still in pretty good shape, though it could have been restored, and I thought the machine might be used in construction, like an ancient cement pumper, but that’s not likely.
I thought all the catii in the barrow was kind of interesting.
This is desert country...
Later that second day, we visited Morro Bay to look for some special kind of butterfly that is suppose to live there but the season was over and they had all gone to Mexico, or north, dunno. But I had fun looking at the area and hanging out on the beach.
Cyprus trees.
We walk to the beach. Weather wasn't all that nice. Chilly, cloudy. No butterflys.
This tree was hanging on for dear life.
This is all the closer we got to the ocean. Didn't want sand all over. The sand here is very fine.
And off we go up the coast.
That night we stayed at the same campground and next morning we headed over to the coast then north to San Simeon, and the home of the Hearst Castle. As we arrived at the castle, around 11am, the weather was threatening but not to bad. As the day progressed, it turned into a really nasty storm. I was happy to be inside the castle because the palm fronds outside were horizontal with the wind as the rain came down in copious sheets.