Roger & I said a sad "good-bye" to Ben last night and left Marina Dunes RV Park this morning. We went down a back road past some of the Central Valley's beautiful strawberry, artichoke, lettuce, cabbage, garlic and carrot fields. It is such a pleasure to see and smell these beautiful fields surrounded by mountains. Once we got onto Highway 101 going South, we continued to see more fields and occasionally a herd of cattle.
As we traveled, we were surprised to see as many vineyards as we saw. I was under the impression that most of the vineyards were in the Napa/Sonoma area, but we drove past many well know wine tasting rooms including Meridian. It appeared that the grapes have all been picked and the vines are turning a vibrate gold. The color of these vineyards along the sides of the brown beige mountains is breathtaking. A little further down the road, we could smell the sweet smell of oranges and lemons, sure enough, we saw acres of orange and lemon groves.
The further South we drove, the more interesting things we observed. Have you ever seen thousands of almond and pistachio trees? We drove for over two miles and could see nothing but these nut groves! In the middle of one of these groves was a huge oil field. There must have been 100 or more oil rigs pumping up oil. Just past the oil rigs we came upon some cotton fields. At first, from a distance, I thought that we were seeing snow, thank God it was cotton!
The ultimate sight was four mule deer grazing just on the other side of a pomegranate grove. I've never seen pomegranates grow, so I had to look them up in Wikipedia to make sure that is what I was seeing. They look so funny growing on a small tree and seeing these big red "balls".
We're staying at Castaic Lake RV Park, which isn't much for the price. We at least have WiFi (one hour free per day) and cable TV. Otherwise, I would describe it as a RV "Trailer Trash" park. Ninety percent of the RV's here are year round. We're only here for two nights, so we can put up with it. We plan to head out tomorrow in the car to see where we can keep our RV when we go back to Minnesota for Ben's wedding. It's always great on the road!!
