ON THE ROAD AGAIN!
Day 135 – We’d like to thank our friends & family for taking the time to visit with us during our two-week stay in the L.A. area. It was so good seeing all of you! After much thought but no time to do research (therefore a quick decision), we’re going to head south and east next, rather than back up north along the coast. We miss the trees & definitely will go back to explore more of southern Oregon and northern California at another time. But because it’s winter & there are snowy and icy mountain passes to cross if we go north, then east, we’re going to try something new & completely different for us: the desert of the southwest. We have no idea where we will stay tonight. We’re just taking the quickest way out of town & driving east to get out of the Big City; then when we (or the cats) have had enough driving, we’ll stop somewhere and camp.
250 miles
Golden Shore RV Resort, 101 Golden Shore, Long Beach, CA 90802, (562) 435-4646 or (800) 668-3581, info@goldenshorervresort.com or www.goldenshorervresort.com. Check-in is after 2 p.m. Check-out is before noon. We chose this RV Park because we needed to be as close to Rob’s moms’ house as possible. This Park is 20 to 35 minutes away from her house, depending on traffic, & was the only Park in the vicinity. It was an excellent choice. We made reservations 1 year in advance & were glad we did. The Park remained full with no more than a site or two vacant for any amount of time during our two-week stay. It’s not a huge Park, nor is it just a parking lot. There were 80 campsites, all offering full amenities (pool, spa, restrooms, showers, laundry, pet area, rec. room, campstore, office, the security of a gated community, picnic area, BBQ grills, shuffleboard, horseshoes, landscaping, water, electricity, sewer, cable, bike path, shuttle service, Wi-Fi, Good Sam Club 10%-off discount, and a discount for weekly stays), all right between downtown Long Beach, the Ports of Long Beach & Los Angeles, and the Pacific Ocean. Very conveniently located to the tourist areas in Los Angeles and Orange County. But being this close to everything you might ever need, comes with a price – traffic noise. But that really was our only complaint & in the same situation as we were in during this visit, we would stay here again. We were assigned site #63, which was at the end of a row so only one side of us ever had someone next to us. Most people that parked next to us stayed only a night or two & were very quiet. People were out & about, exercising on bicycles or jogging, walking their dogs or just visiting. The cats didn’t like it, nor did they adjust to the traffic noise, but what they didn’t know was that it could’ve been so much worse. People were respectful except for the three boys set loose to roam the Park. The price for all this was excellent – $680 for two weeks (averaging $48.57 per night), because we qualified for the weekly rates. We would recommend this Park to anyone wanting a conveniently-located, safe place to stay in the Los Angeles area.
We departed at 11:05 a.m., 64 degrees, clear & sunny. It was wonderful to be on the road again. We hopped on the 710 (Long Beach Freeway) and headed north to the 91 Freeway, going east. Heavy traffic on both. Continual shopping centers & malls & houses lined both sides of the Freeways for more than 1 ½ hours as we approached the mountains to the east. The terrain & trees & plants began to change as the traffic & number of lanes on the Freeway decreased. Less places to shop, less homes & more space between the houses. The high reached 75 degrees & the wind picked up some. We got off the 91 east and continued on the 60 east to the 10 east, passing through Riverside. Definitely more desert-like out. We stopped for lunch & a gas refill, then continued on the 10 to near the California/Arizona border near Blythe, where we took Highway 78 south through farmlands mixed with desert in the Imperial Valley, surrounded by mountains. The Colorado River runs through this area and was the border between CA & AZ.
We’d driven 5 ½ hours; time to find a place to settle in. The girls slept the whole time except for when we took the lunch break. We have gotten used to much shorter drives, but since it’d been 2 weeks since we went anywhere in the RV, this longer trip was no problem at all. We stopped at Palo Verde County Park to check it out for spending the night. There was no sign giving instructions how to pay or even if camping was allowed, but there were numbered campsites – with no hook-ups, no water, no dump station and not even picnic tables or fire rings. The camping sites were right beside the Oxbow Lake, formerly the Colorado River before the River was channelized. There was a public restroom by the road and a nearby boat launch. No one was there, just lots of ducks on the Lake. Hmmmm, what to do….
A man stopped to walk his dog & we asked him if camping was allowed & where we should pay. He said that, yes, people do camp here & someone comes around to collect money every now & then. We pulled up to a site numbered “13”, hoping this didn’t mean bad luck, and we parked the RV but did not unhitch the car just in case we were asked to leave. We were settled in by 5:30 p.m. No one showed up to collect money & no one showed up to camp at the Park, but people, mostly truckers, were stopping to use the restrooms. The traffic on the road was fairly loud, and we wished we could find a place to stay without traffic noise. Tomorrow we’ll meander on to see what else is out there. To bed early again, followed by another 12 hours of sleep. Guess we were tired.