10 January, 2000

WE WENT CLIMBING!!
"Climbing? You guys climb? Like mountains, like tough hiking you mean? Or like with ropes and crud?" That's what someone Beebee knows pretty well said to her when she said we were going climbing.
Her reply, "Rock climbing. Like with ropes and harnesses and shoes and pro."
His reply, "I didn't know you did that."
What pathetic climbers we are. We used to go about three times a month… Anyway, we went climbing. And we sucked. But we had so much fun. So enjoy these pics of our day at Big Rock (Riverside, CA) with our dear friend Doug.

On Wednesday Dave and Steve installed new speakers in the front doors. Even though they are cheap little Kenwood speakers they sound much better than the 18-year old stock speakers that they replaced. Now we don't have to turn up the volume so high to hear the music when we are driving- it makes driving much more pleasant. We are still trying to come up with a way to block some more road and engine noise, but at least now we can hear the music better.

Wednesday night we had a great dinner with Dave and Haven at the Crab Pot. A totally new experience for us. You go in and order a feast which is served on butcher paper at the table. Shellfish, crab, shrimp… yummy stuff.

On Thursday we found ourselves in Redondo Beach having lunch with a good friend of Steve's from college. Mike introduced us to Leo's Mexican Food and we had a great, cheap lunch on the outdoor patio with 70 degree weather (in the shade). Not bad for mid-January, not bad at all. After lunch we headed back to Carmel.

On Friday Jocelyn insisted on learning how to do an oil change on Sandy with only minor instruction from Steve. What a gal! Not only is she smart and beautiful, but she isn't afraid to crawl around in the dirt under the truck and get some oil and grease on her hands (and clothes, and arms, and…) She even managed to seal off the seeping drain-plug leak on the first try.

Saturday found us up in Santa Cruz visiting Jocelyn's mother, Joyce. Joyce took us out to meet some of her singing-group friends and we had a great time. After eating a wonderful dinner that Joyce prepared for us and Steve's parents, we headed off to a party with the same group of singers. We ended up hanging around until about 4am, singing along with the wonderful musicians. Between the late hours and the drinks both Steve and Jocelyn were pretty slow to get out of bed this morning.

Despite our hangovers, we finally managed to rally ourselves (around noon!) and do some last minute shopping for Jocelyn's sister Cristie's birthday party. Had a great time with Cristie and Jocelyn's father and his girlfriend Greta. They all came over to Joyce's house for yet another wonderful meal. After we ate we all sat around and enjoyed the company and some relaxation.

Steve spent the late evening updating the site a bit- you can finally see the whole trip report for our run out in the desert last weekend. Just click here.

Beebee ran errands today, including buying a conveniently small CB which will fit right into the dash with little-to-no dash reconstruction; getting our identification docs all copied; engraving Steve's name into his medical alert bracelet (allergy to penicillin); and finding out that she knows more about which she speaks regarding car stuff than the assistant manager at Grand Auto. Cool.

Steve played housewife today (i.e. he stayed home and did most of the hard work) and got us some tires. All eight of them are meeting us up in Marysville on Friday. At least, we hope. If not, in a word, we're, well, late. Since we've got Todd going with us, we've got a deadline for real and that's so very good, otherwise we'd find ourselves leaving sometime, in oh, June.

After Ace we headed up to Cupertino to have dinner with Heather, one of three of J's best girlfriends. We met at Miyaki for tea and sushi and good conversation. We even got a belated new-year's gift of champagne. Fun!

Today, well today was long. We got up at 5:15 a.m., hit the road at 6 a.m. and drove. Boy did we drive. Up to Stockton to visit Grandma Sunny who was all positive excitement and encouragement. From her place we headed up north-east of Sacramento where, with a little bit of guidance from a mechanic who will remain unnamed at his request (thanks just the same, you know who you are!) we made some minor alterations to the engine compartment so that under the hood wouldn't be quite as confusing to mechanics in Mexico and Central America. We'll tell you more about it when we are beyond the reaches of certain state agencies who may frown upon such alterations. Between the ACE socket set and the multi-tool from Coleman we were pretty much set for tools. That little task took us the better part of three hours, got us pretty greasy-dirty and not just a little hungry. Unfortunately, said unnamed mechanic wasn't around when we finally finished so we didn't get the final ok and that made the next little while of driving a bit nervous.
The drive from up there to J's dad's had some gorgeous vistas including what we think to be the Stanislaus. We're there now, relaxing, listening to some jazz and enjoying the wonderful aromas eminating from the kitchen. Tomorrow will find us heading back up north to Marysville to pick up the trailer. And then find us driving back to Carmel with trailer in tow. Driving very S L O W L Y at the state-mandated 55 mph.

We enjoyed the drive from Tuolumne to Marysville as much as one can enjoy backtracking(we had to use the same highway from Sacramento yesterday evening and this morning) on a windy country road behind an 18 wheeler, but that's neither here nor there.

The trailer is, in a word, supercalafragilisticexpialadotious. Helder Manufacturing outdid itself. They put in a new axle and springs and saved us a spare spring to take along. Thanks so much Reinard, Ralph, Bill and Bob. We're on our 22nd mile towing it and she feels like she isn't even there.

Morning came far too quickly and we pulled ourselves out of bed reluctantly to pack up. While it wasn't exactly a fun day, packing wasn't as bad as we thought it might be. Jocelyn led the charge- and did a great job of keeping us relatively organized. Intermittent sprinkles made the job an awful lot harder and slower. Slow enough that instead of cleaning ourselves up and dismissing ourselves politely from Steve's parents, we barely finished throwing stuff into the truck, took a last grungy picture in front of Sandy, and got on our way.
Not cleaning up turned out to be a good thing- about two miles down the road Steve was up on the roof rack, trying to get the tarp lashed down securely enough to keep it from driving him crazy from flapping in the wind.

As we pulled out of Carmel, we enjoyed a great sunset that we took to be a good omen that things would start going smoother now that we were finally underway.

After cleaning up at Joyce's house we grabbed a ride with our pal Greg and had a wonderful little goodbye party with our friends. Thanks to all who were there. We love you and will miss you very much.

Despite our poor humor we had an appointment to keep in Los Gatos with an LCML lister who was generous enough to drive from Mountain View just to stand in the pouring rain and take a look under the hood to see if everything looked in order. All of this, for someone that he only knows based on some email conversations and our web site. Big thanks to Brian Sullivan.
So we had a wonderful bon voyage brunch with the entire family at the Crow's Nest- a local Santa Cruz institution with a great view that happens to serve food. It was nice to be warm and dry inside, watching the stormy day outside. And even though we knew we weren't really going to drive away right after, we enjoyed good food and the wonderful company of our siblings and parents.

After brunch however, we felt quite stranded and unproductive. We wanted so badly to be on the road but since it was Sunday AND the Superbowl, there were no automotive workers to be found. So Steve and Jocelyn opted for a long walk on the beach. It cleared our heads a lot and we decided that we are done with time tables on this trip. We pushed so hard to leave by Sunday and got thwarted at almost every step. We finally came to the conclusion that maybe we just weren't supposed to leave yesterday, for whatever reason. It's easy to get Zen when you're walking along on a stormy beach.

We say that, because faced with two to four days for repairs, we're feeling very aggravated, despite our resolution to disregard timelines.

All our love and thanks to everyone for their good wishes, support and love- it was a hard day.

After a call off to Helder to discuss the bent axle we decided to pull it off the trailer and take it over to a local shop to see if they could straighten it out. We figured that if they couldn't, we would drive on up to Marysville again and see what those fine craftsmen could do. Boy, that's just what we want, another eight-hour round trip…

Fortunately, the guy at the local shop thinks he can get it straight and true for us. He may even be able to get it done by tomorrow afternoon, we've got our fingers crossed!

To celebrate, we went to the beach and enjoyed a cold run in the fog. The weather reminded us a lot of summer in San Diego.

After our run, we received confirmation that the folks at Pull-Pal have shipped our pull-pal out to us and it should be waiting in San Diego when we get there. Whoo-hoo! If you don't know what a pull-pal is, you should definitely check out their web site. Basically, it is a modified collapsible plow that lets you use your winch even if there isn't a handy tree, boulder, or vehicle nearby. Especially handy for us as we will be spending most of our trip unaccompanied. We'll post more info and pictures once we have gotten a chance to try it out.

Spent the evening doing some small repacking tasks- all of our tools are now happily stowed into the new Ace toolbox- and watching the first of three parts of "A Town Like Alice". Good movie so far.