Week 17: Saying Goodbye to California

Smuggling Lemons into Cali

This week was our last week in California as we hit the last national park - the redwoods. Sunday we made the 5 hour drive from Lassen Volcanic to the Redwoods. The route that we followed took us up into Oregon just a bit and then back down to the Redwoods. We happened to stop in Oregon to pick up some groceries before we re-entered California. If you’ve ever road-tripped to California you are probably familiar with their agricultural inspection stations. These are stations along the highway where every vehicle must stop. We’ve gone through these stations twice before - once when entering Cali the first time and then when we came back from Vegas after our flight from home. Both times they only asked if we had any plants - to which we confirmed we didn’t and then went on through. This time the man asked if we had any fruits and vegetables. I rattled off the few produce items we had just bought during our grocery trip and he asked where I had bought the lemons I mentioned. I told him Trader Joe’s and he looked at me and said “Ok, just don’t tell anyone.” So on we went with our illegal contraband. So if you ask us if we brought lemons into California, our lips are sealed 😉

License Plate Game

It’s crazy to think our time in California is over. We got to California at the beginning of April, so have been “living” in California for almost 3 months. This was our 3rd time in this truly beautiful state and I know we will continue to come back because there is still so much more to see! Near the beginning of our trip, Trevor and I started playing the “license plate game” where the first person to see all 51 (50 states and Washington D.c.) license plates wins. We are often paying attention to the license plates on cars and are so accustomed to seeing California plates that it will be weird to see other plates when we move onto Oregon. (During our two weeks at home we both found ourselves thinking it’s weird to see so many Ohio license plates. That’s when you know you’ve been gone for a long time!)

I’m sure you all are dying to know who won the license plate game. Well after nearly 5 months of playing and driving through 9 different states…we still have not finished. And I’m sure you think you have some pretty good guesses on which license plates we still have yet to see. But I’m guessing you’re wrong. Trevor has one left to see with West Virginia and I have two yet to see with Washington D.C. and West Virginia. We never would have expected West Virginia to be the one that has dragged this game on for months! I’m not exaggerating when I say we have seen probably 15 Alaska plates and at least 3 Hawaii plates. So if we ever do find that West Virginia plate we will let you know who wins. But we’ve decided to start another round of the game since this one has dragged on for so long!

The Hooligans Strike Again

Anyways, now that you’re all up to date on our license plate game, I’ll tell you about our week. Our campsite this week was in a national forest campground just outside the redwoods. We weren’t able to reserve a spot but knew there were some first come first serve spots so were happy to find an available site when we arrived Sunday evening. The site was completely covered by trees so we knew we would not be getting any solar or Starlink connection at our site. Thankfully, there was a large open dirt parking lot just across the road so every morning we drove over there to spend the day so we could have a Starlink connection for work. Tuesday, we went after work and did a few shorter hikes and then headed back to our campsite. Last week we had a couple people setting up at our campsite that we had to kick out because they didn’t know it was taken. They had said that people usually leave something at the site to mark it but because of our history of having things stolen we hadn’t been doing that. We felt bad and didn’t want to kick someone out again so we had decided to leave our levelers for the van at our site. Well, unfortunately, when we arrived back to our site Tuesday evening we found that some hooligans had struck again and our levelers were gone with no trace of them anywhere. So frustrating! So we decided we are not leaving anything at our site again!

Wednesday, we drove again to our dirt parking lot “office” and worked. We decided to stay at the parking lot into the evening because we had a few more things we wanted to do with the Wi-Fi. Around 8:30 we made our way back to our campsite. And, of course, there was a couple set up at our site. We made a loop through the campground to see if there was just another open site we could stay at so that we didn’t have to kick them out. Unfortunately, there was not. When you stay at a first come first serve site, there’s a deposit box where you put your payment and write down how many nights you will be there and at which site. Then there’s a little tear off that you clip to the number at your site. When we pulled up to the site our little tag was not on the number. We walked up to them and asked but they said there was no tag when they got there that morning. They were all set up with their tent, fire going, and things out on the table. We knew we were in a better position with the van to just go find a place to sleep so we let them have it and spent the night over in the dirt parking lot hoping the rangers didn’t kick us out, and thankfully they didn’t. Overall, it was just a frustrating situation that we tried to mark our spot, had the levelers stolen, and then had our spot taken because nothing was there. Soooo I don’t know what we will do in the future.

Back to the Beach

Thursday, after work we headed to a short hiking trail that went right along the coast and ended at a beach. The California coast just never disappoints and we enjoyed sitting at the beach for a bit. We were in need of water and dump at this point in the week so we booked a campsite at a KOA for the night and also took advantage of the showers there.

Friday we had to check out of our site by 11 and had a Hipcamp site booked for the weekend that we couldn’t check into until 2, so we went to a Walmart parking lot to finish work for the day. The Hipcamp was essentially just a couple camping spots in someone’s front yard. It was certainly not very luxurious but it was nice and close to the park. We just relaxed Friday evening and played some games.

One thing about vanlife is that we often don’t have a lot of social interaction outside of each other. With both of us being introverts that doesn’t really bother us too much usually. Sometimes, if we’re at a really remote location, we won’t even see another human being for several days. I think that sometimes, though, the lack of social interaction starts to get to us and we just start saying things to say things. One of our new favorite things to say to each other is “I think you’re just talking to hear yourself talk.” Friday evening was one of those nights for Trevor and I don’t even know what nonsense things he was saying but we laughed and both knew he was just talking to talk 😊

The Great Redwoods

Saturday, as usual, was a hiking day. We had secured permits for the Tall Tress Grove -  a 4 mile hike through a redwoods grove. The parking lot is pretty small so you have to get permits for the hike and ours was for 8 AM - 12 PM. It was about an hour and a half drive to the trail so we woke up at 7:30 in hopes we could leave our campsite by 8. Unfortunately, we quickly discovered that we had once again overflowed our pee jug. It’s been a while since this has happened since we have a much better sense of when it is getting full than we did at the beginning. The way our toilet works is it funnels the pee into a jug within the base compartment of the toilet, so thankfully it doesn’t overflow onto the floor or anything but you have to take the whole toilet apart and clean up all of the pieces. Thank you to Trevor for taking the time to clean it all up. So we got a later start to our morning than we had hoped but still made it in time to do the hike. We enjoyed the hike and loved the impressive redwood trees. After some lunch we did a short trail through the Lady Bird Johnson Grove. After that, we (mostly me) were pretty pooped so headed back to our campsite for a relaxing evening of watching soccer, reading, etc.

We definitely enjoyed our time in the redwoods and the trees are just amazing. We both agreed though that we liked Sequoia better and didn’t think the redwoods quite compared to the impressive size and beautiful color of the sequoia trees.

Our Plans

This week we did some planning for our trip home. In a few weeks, my sister, Mandi, and her boyfriend, Nathaniel, will be joining us for a week in Washington. We are SO excited to have them join us! There have been many times at campgrounds when I see a group of friends or families camping together and it really makes me wish we had someone there to share our experience with. Trevor and I have really loved doing this trip together, there’s no one else I’d want to do it with, but there are definitely many moments I wish we had loved ones here to experience things with us. I’m excited to get to do that with Mandi and Nathaniel. After their visit, we will start making the drive home. We will take a few weeks to make the drive, seeing some parks and things along the way and will hopefully arrive home around mid-August. Our current plan is to spend about a month at home and then do a few weeks on the east coast to see the fall colors. And then our time of living in the van will come to an end. It’s hard to believe this adventure is so quickly coming to a close. There’s definitely a lot of mixed feelings that come along with knowing that, but we still have a lot of places to check off our list before we say goodbye to vanlife and we are very excited for those places! So we will keep on driving until the road leads us home!