Time Period: March 22 – April 9, 2009
Miles Driven: 991
On the morning of March 22, 2009 we pulled up the jacks in South San Francisco, hitched up and made a mad dash out of California. Well, mad dash in a nomadic sense. We didn’t actually cross the border into Arizona for another 2 weeks. What follows is a condensed version of our amazing journey during that time.
Sacramento
Our first stop was Sacramento to visit with our dear friends, Lindsay & Sean. This is also where we keep our storage unit for all the stuff we don’t want to carry with us as we travel. We traded in our winter wardrobes for our spring attire, stocked up on SmartPower Energy Drink (which we currently have a pallet of) and left Chris’ paramotor gear behind.
Sean and Lindsay also gave us a tour around downtown Sacramento and showed us some of their favorite things.
Lonely Planet Travel Blogger Awards
Next up was back to the San Francisco area for the Lonely Planet Travel Blogger Awards. We had been invited to attend by our friend, Matthew Cashmore who was in from Australia to run the show. We had been enjoying many evenings hanging out with him. And we met a lot of great travel blogger folks at the awards.
We stayed at our friend Dawn’s place in San Leandro, and enjoyed lots of time hanging out with her daughter Allegra – who our kitten Kiki adores.
Pacific Coast Highway
And then we started heading south along the Pacific Coast Highway, with a stop in Santa Cruz to make a guest appearance on the radio show GeekSpeak.
And then south we went enjoying amazing coastal views the entire way!
Some of our stops included Morro Rock, an old bridge near Gaviota and overnighting at Thornhill Broome State Park along the beach.
Los Angeles
We had intentions of staying in Los Angeles for several days to visit with friends and Chris’ cousins. However, options for parking a trailer in Los Angeles are quite limited. Until we met Melanie of TravelsWithTwo at the Lonely Planet awards. She invited us to park at her place in Studio City, gave us a tour of the neighborhood and did a fun interview with us!
We ended up only staying for a very jam packed 24 hours in the area, which included a private music performance by Chris’ cousin’s band, Watson 66 and a tour of Paramount Studios.
Hemet
Our reason for staying on the west coast for so long was speak at the O’Reilly ETech conference in early March – where we met Victor. He invited us to stop in at his family’s ranch new Hemet if we were ever in the area. And so, there we were. It was absolutely beautiful.
We met his wife Jennifer, his sister Helene and her boyfriend Sean as well as his parents. All amazing people who felt immediately like family, and they extended an open invite for us to stay as long as we like. However, we already had rendezvous plans with our friend and fellow technomad, Ben Willmore. As serendipity would have it, Helene mentioned she had met him at Photoshop World before. They extended an invite to have our convergence on the ranch, and Ben was quite agreeable to the idea.
So thus, we had a several day stay on the ranch – having lots of fun hiking, learning about sustainable off grid living and working on fun light painting/poi spinning photography projects. We even did a video interview with Ben to compare our technomadic lifestyles. Our stay kept getting extended in the fun of it all, until us technomads made a pact to leave together on Wednesday morning.
Joshua Tree
We then meandered through San Jacinto National Forest and descended into the oasis that is Palm Desert and into our last stop in California – an overnight and drive through Joshua Tree National Park. We arrived at sunset, which also happened to be the rise of a full moon over the mountainscape.
The drive in the morning through the park was gorgeous, and we saw lots of blooming desert flower. We then took Route 62 into Arizona, leaving California behind for now.
Great travel photos! I love the kitten pictures. Too cute. 🙂