America 2024, the adventure begins.

So far so good! We had a very non-eventful flight from Adelaide to LAX via Fiji with time enough in transit for Peter to devour a rather nice looking Fijian pizza!  Our luggage arrived unscathed, we found our bus to the hire car site, collected our car and were on our way. Remember, KEEP RIGHT!  Wait, where are we going? A quick google. Nope, that’s right, we need a US phone SIM card.  How much we rely our phones these days! Quick, ask the girl who organised our car before we leave the lot.  “Sure, I’ll Google a T Mobile store for you”, she said, until she realised she’d left her phone – somewhere!  “Just wait there, ‘til I find it.”  She arrived back shortly after with the address of the closest T Mobile, “just head on out left, you’re gonna take the first left, then you’re gonna take the first right and you’ll see it right there.”

Left, right, left – KEEP RIGHT!  Left out of the car park and onto the road, think RIGHT!  Wow! For lunch time the road’s awfully busy!  But, we made the left, right, left and found the T Mobile.  Now armed with phone and data coverage we googled the hotel we’d booked for a night until we collected our rental RV,  headed out of the car park, and kept right!

Next on the list was to find the nearest Walmart armed with our list of requirements for living in an RV for the next 4 months. Bedding, towels, dinnerware, Kitchen utensils, etc. etc.  An hour later and totally ravenous we found a Japanese Ramon noodle place for a very late lunch then headed to Target to get the things we couldn’t get at Walmart.  It was almost 8.30pm when we finally arrived back at the hotel with almost everything we needed and without forgetting to KEEP RIGHT!

The jet lag must have kicked in overnight because my first hint of wakefulness arrived to a very bright sliver of light from outside and the clock telling me it was just after 9am!  Another full day was on the cards.  First up, head to the RV rental location and offload all our bags and purchases.  Next, deposit the hire car then walk the 2 miles (have to get our head around miles and feet distances) back to the RV rental, which also went off without a hitch!  Are we cooking with gas or what! 

Our hire RV

With all our worldly goods loaded up and only a “there you go, see you in 10 days” from the hire guy, we headed off, keeping right!

We collected our hire RV on Tuesday and headed north towards Fillmore where Peter had earmarked 3 RV’s to look at.  Our first overnight was at a lovely camp site at Lake Piru.  We arrived well into dark so had no idea what was around us.  The morning was crisp and overcast but we had an interesting walk around part of the lake.

We can’t wait to get the tedium of purchasing an RV and organising ourselves over with so we can get out into the countryside and explore.  This was a stunning spot with only a couple of other campers.  Considering the size of the camping site I imagine they’ll be a hundreds more campers when the summer season begins.

Maybe because of the lack of people, the critters were out and easy to spot.  We saw several eagles, deer and squirrels.  But the clouds rolled in and we had RV’s to look at so we rolled on.

It was tricky messaging people and waiting for replies, not knowing whether they would respond or not, how long to wait for a response, killing time or drive on to the next one?  As it turned out, the first RV was already sold, the second RV was at the upper limit of our budget and although it ticked all the boxes the guy selling it just didn’t give us a good feeling.  We didn’t doubt that his ownership and sale was legitimate, but his father was a car salesman and the owner was, well, car salesmanlike.  Enough said!  The third RV was our last in this region so we were very hopeful that it ticked all our boxes. We decided it was a yes as soon as we met the owners.  Dave is a retired GP and his wife, Claudia are the loveliest people.  They’ve only just stopped travelling in their 32 foot motorhome, after travelling all over America in RVs.  They walk every day, people after our own heart and they love sailing!  We spent a wonderful afternoon with them, exchanging travel experiences and have bought their motorhome.  Third time lucky and meant to be because the brand is a Bounder and their logo is a cartoon hopping kangaroo!

It’s the weekend now, Saturday, we’ve been in the US 6 days and have come to some conclusions:

LA is expensive!  We can’t comment on other regions but everything from food to clothes to fuel (or gasoline) and random things like movie tickets are dearer than home.   In fact, they’re actually about the same price but the exchange rate means we’re paying 50% more, although it is improving slowly for us here.

Americans, for the most part are very polite.  They’re very quick with thank you, or I’m sorry, or pardon me and so incredibly helpful. 

Those we’ve spoken with so far are amazed that we live between an RV and a boat and that we have 4 months to spend here.

Everything has sugar in it!  I’ve spent so much time in the supermarket reading food labels and trying to find the healthier foods.  On the plus side, though, everything also has a very clear label listing ingredients (even if most of them are different types of sugars and preservatives) and everything has a calorie count listed (helpful but scary). This morning for example, I went to buy bread and I must have read the labels on 20 different loaves of bread before I found one without sugar!  Even the wholemeal, seeded supposed healthy bread had sugar.

Everywhere seems busy. Lots of people, lots of traffic.  It’ll be interesting to see how it is here as we move towards summer because this is the low season.

And finally, a sad indictment of the current situation here, I think.  The larger and more expensive containers of washing liquid in some Walmarts were behind locked glass cabinets.  I assume so people can’t steal them, but it also occurred to me that maybe they’re using them for another nefarious purpose?

While we wait to take over our Bounder and since we’ve pre-paid for our RV mileage we decided to do some sightseeing.  We headed north along the coast on the El Camino Real, which translates to “the Royal Road” a 600 mile long route that links 21 Spanish missions from San Diego to San Francisco.  It began as a path that enabled missionaries to traverse between the missions in the early 1800s but now is a major highway.  There are iron bell markers along the entire route at approximately 1 -2 miles apart that were originally installed in 1906.  By 1913 there were 450 bells.  Between 2005 and 2012 a restoration project was undertaken to replace any missing bells and now there are 585 bells in total.