Day 101 – It was 34 degrees this morning and windy, quite chilly out. It rained all night but the sun is peeking through the trees this morning at 8:30. There’s a sunny place on the dashboard & the girls are arguing about who gets it.
We left at 10:00 this morning to check out some roads which head east and north of here. We’d planned on going to the coastal area above Santa Cruz, maybe Half Moon Bay, to camp after Point Reyes, and after that to one of the Redwood Parks near Santa Cruz. But when we were doing research recently, we found that the State and County Parks in both areas were either full already during the time period we’d be there or closed for the season. We were surprised that so many people would be camping during the winter; then when we thought about it, we’re further south now and it’s not going to be that cold. So we checked out the independent campgrounds to see if they were already booked around Christmas/New Year’s, but they were running anywhere from $60 to $85 per night for a site. We figured we didn’t need to go south along the coast that badly and decided to go inland next instead.
Inland south would bring us to the San Francisco area. Too crowded and way too expensive for a campsite – $100 per night for some. Therefore, we looked at inland north and saw that below Sacramento there are several areas which host the migrating sandhill cranes & December is a peak time for viewing. It’s remote enough there for us to find something more affordable and not too crowded for our tastes. There were basically two routes we could take from the Point Reyes area inland & we needed to check them for compatibility with driving the RV. We already knew that anything further south would involve going through Stinson Beach and Marin County near San Francisco. Very windy and very busy roads. People often aren’t patient when there’s an RV going slowly in front of them on the road. We’d hoped to avoid that scenario. This morning we thought we’d try a route which would take us through the hills of northern Marin County and bring us to Highway 101 further north of San Francisco where we could then proceed east into the Central Valley.
The road to the 101 was winding but we’ve seen worse. Traffic wasn’t too bad; we figured we wouldn’t irritate too many people when we were in the RV. It was very pretty, lots of rolling hills, at first continuing to travel thru woods but then changing to wine country as we approached the Napa and Sonoma Valleys. We decided this was the route we’d take when going to the Sandhill Crane Refuges. Meanwhile, we had found the San Pablo Bay National Wildlife Refuge & decided to spend some time there. There were several different units of the Refuge & they skirted the top of the San Francisco Bay. We did lots of driving looking for restrooms & various entrances to the Refuge. We found that most were closed due to budget cuts. (We’ve been seeing that a lot at Wildlife Refuges & State Parks on this trip, the budget-cut thing, and I wonder if the budgets are being cut so large corporations will have more money? Just sayin’.) We finally found one entrance to the Wildlife Refuge that was open, had the lunch we packed, and took a walk. It was cold & very windy so no kayaking and no biking. But at least we found our route to the next destination and tomorrow should be less windy and warmer.
