First, I must share with you our last San Diego Sunset. It was very nice.

I woke up at my normal time, about 0730-0900, or thereabouts and tried to coax Max off the bed for a walk. He chose to stay inside a little longer or a smarter choice, he didn’t want to take a chance of waking Diane too soon by jumping off the bed. I suspect he got that vibe from me. So, I left him alone and he stayed there until Diane got up. I honestly don’t remember what time it was.

After Max’s walk I started putting things away in preparation for our departure. I took my time because I was kind of dreading getting to the point where I’d have to start the RV and I wasn’t convinced that was going to happen. The other question mark in my head was the big slide out, wondering if it would slide in. All my stress was for naught because everything worked just fine.

Then, after hooking up the car, we embarked on the next challenge, driving up Orange Avenue through downtown Coronado to 4th Avenue, then across the Bay Bridge to I-5. Sounds simple, right? Well, it wasn’t all that easy. First, Orange Avenue isn’t all that wide when you cram two lanes of traffic between rows of parked cars on each side most of which actually parked close to the curb. That means those who didn’t create the need for drivers in the lane next to the parkers, to jog out once in a while. Not too tough in a car, but driving an RV makes it a challenge. You’ll be happy to know that we made it OK. We also made it down 4th Ave and across the bridge, transitioned to 3 or 4 different freeways until we finally wound up on I-8 East. Whew! Pretty exciting stuff.

We drove until Diane convinced me that we should fill the fuel tank and, maybe, eat some lunch. This finally led us to the Golden Acorn Casino in Campo where we filled the tank and bought some dead chicken. Fuel was $4.27/gal and the chicken wound up costing $27.50 after Diane added two enormous cinnamon things for breakfast. We kept one of them and ate the other one for dessert.

The remainder of the drive to Yuma was uneventful until we made it to the top of one of many higher elevations where we came across this:

We saw the smoke from miles away and wondered what it could be. A real mess. The ambulance was just ahead of us and didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry so whoever was in the car got out OK, or they didn’t get out at all.

After that, the trip turned into some extremely long stretches of straight road with a minor turn one way or another to keep it interesting.

Don and Judy welcomed us with open arms, and I didn’t take one picture of them. I’ll do that tomorrow and add it to tomorrows post.

Time to stop.