Tag Archives: california

Staying Put – House-sitting Style

June 9, 2015 Keevan 2 Comments

After the wedding, Fred, Pia and I took on a house-sitting staycation in the Santa Cruz mountains area for good friends who were off traveling and having their own adventures.

We spent three very relaxing weeks lounging around, sipping coffee while reading newspapers, walking to town, and mostly enjoying this fabulous garden retreat, designed and maintained by my good friend and garden designer Albright-Souza Garden Design.

As seen above, Pia also had a buddy to hang with.

Albright-Souza Garden Design has a wonderful blog of her own, Perjoy with much useful information on designing with drought tolerant and native plants. She often showcases other gardens, so I thought it time to show off some of her handy work used to create her own backyard retreat!

If you are in this area, and think it’s finally time to tear out that water guzzling lawn, and give your yard an updo, check out her work over at her website, and give her a call!

Albright-Souza Garden Design

Perjoy

Downtime here in such a lovely setting is just what these KeeVan nomads needed to refresh and re-energize.

Time to visit with good friends, time to read books, time to reflect, time to spend with family, squeeze in a little knitting, and of course plan our next adventure.

House-sitting is a great way to take short breaks from life on the road and continue at the same time to experience new lifestyles and modes of living.

We nomads are back in our van now and are currently heading north again, but there are some more forks in our path coming up.

Stay tuned….to see which fork we take. ❧

* A little aside note.

For those interested in asking Keevansoul questions about their lifestyle / traveling adventures, please do so with your questions in the comments section of the blog. It helps to create dialog and gives me ideas to write about. I try to keep my personal e-mail for my close friends and family. Just my policy. But I will always try to answer questions here on the blog. Thanks for understanding!!

Camping, Nature, Travel, wildflowers

Folsom Lake, Wildflowers, And The Wedding

April 15, 2015 Keevan 3 Comments

We’re sitting here at Beals Point Campground on Folsom Lake, after driving north through Owen’s Valley, then over to Carson Valley, then across the Sierra’s again to warmer weather.

It’s all been gorgeous, but the weather turned bitter cold with nights into the low 20’s and wind gusting horrendously around the beautiful Carson Valley.

Planning on meeting up with our daughter who is in Sacramento on business, we decide to cross the Sierra summit before snow falls on the highway.

We miraculously find this uncrowded campground and enjoy a few days of if not drier, at least much warmer weather.

Lounging around an entire day, bundled up playing dice games, reading books, and sipping warm tea while the rain pours down and pounds the van, we are happy. We set the awning up to have a dry porch area, take shorts walks in rain gear, and enjoy Mother Nature.

The birds who stuffed this tree with winter rations are certainly prepared! Just like us, they must feel like they can never have too much food on hand…just in case.

After the storm, the days are sunny, warm and delightful.

We find wildflowers everywhere we hike.

When the weekend rolls around and the campground fills up, we drive a long and windy road to the other side of the lake, where the campground on that side, Peninsula campground, is just barely open. In fact no ranger ever comes around to collect and there is no way to pay. The camp host, the only other person here on our first day, and who only recently arrived himself, said not to worry about it. So we don’t. We have the entire campground to ourselves for the first day and a half, before a few other brave souls starting arriving.

These golden fields filled with blue Lupine and purple Vetch is what we look at here out the van door.

We finally go and meet up with daughter, and spend a few days in the city of Sacramento together, enjoying some good food, soft beds, and hot showers.

Fun is had by all, and refreshing as this is, still it’s good to be back in the van by lakeside again.

It’s really where we feel at home now.

We are here for another day, then will be heading back to Santa Cruz to finish preparing for her wedding.

I plan on being absent from this blog for awhile, and won’t be posting for at least a few weeks, while we change gears and celebrate in a different fashion, spend time with family, and oh yeah, learn how to use my new camera! (It’s a 7D markII) So many things to be excited about!

These photos and all previous photos on this blog have been taken with a really old Canon Rebel 2ti camera. It has been an awesome traveling camera, very lightweight and easy to tote around on hikes, and has taken it’s share of bumps and bruises, but it’s time, and now I’m really looking forward to playing around with this new camera, experimenting, and pushing my limits some.

Peace to all and Happy Spring. ❧

Hiking, Nature, Travel

The Oldest Trees On Earth

April 7, 2015 Keevan 6 Comments

We gradually leave the desert behind us, climbing over two summits to get through the mountain pass into the Inyo National Forest in California.

This is the view that welcomes us as we round one particular corner. Surprise!

After managing to get over the pass, we turn off onto White Mountain Road. We are heading up to the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest, located in the White Mountains, about an hour east of Bishop, California.

It’s refreshing being in the Pine forest again, the ground laden with slate and hidden wonders that one almost misses. We must have stepped over these beautiful little succulents numerous times before actually observing the tiny red blooms and happy yellow flowers on them.

We wind up and up and up until we are over 9,000 feet in elevation. Only because of California’s ongoing drought and the lowest recorded snowpack in history, can we visit this area this early in spring. Having not been this high for a long time, we feel like we are really on top of the world.

And just below timberline is exactly where the oldest trees on earth are living.

Some of these Bristlecone Pines are over 5,000 years old. They have been here for so long, according to one fellow hiker we meet, that they actually used to live at lower elevations, until the mountains pushed up to these colossal heights.

I try to wrap my brain around that!

These trees grow so slowly, that according to Wikipedia, even their needles sometimes stay on the trees for over 40 years. Talk about slow growth!

Somewhere in this forest is the oldest individual recorded living tree in the world. The “Methusala” tree. Depending on which scientific source one reads, it is recorded to be approximately 5,064 years old.

We hike around the Discovery trail. We are at about 10,000 feet elevation, and Pia wants to be with us. We take it slow, and take lots of rests.

But we don’t take the Methuselah trail, which is about four hours long the signage says. It takes us almost that long just for the Discovery trail, which supposedly takes about an hour and a half.

The actual Methusela Tree is a “secret.” The trail wanders about through the forest, but it is never revealed which tree is actually “it.” Some secrets are best kept secret I suppose. There are weirdos out there.

All in all, hey, what’s the difference in a 4,500 year old tree and a 5,000 year old tree anyway?

The rich colors, the twisted bark, the monstrous roots, the majestic stature of these older than old giants is pretty humbling.

I mean, I thought I was feeling old at 50-something…

No more whining or complaining about getting old, right Pia?

❧

Camping, Nature, Simple Living, Travel, Van Living

Long Snouts And Water Spouts

February 6, 2015 Keevan 6 Comments

We’ve been cruising south on highway 1 along the California coast, finding our travel mojo again.

Cement Ship – Seabright Beach, Santa Cruz

Santa Cruz to Monterrey to Big Sur…along the winding road, following along with the whales also heading south. We stop often to watch huge water spouts emerge from the ocean, then spot the enormous dark blobs barely visible, looking more like tiny specks in the gigantic Pacific Ocean.

So refreshing it’s been, beautiful blue skies and perfect temperature in the 60’s and 70’s. Monarch butterflies flitter about, and golden poppies are already brightening up the green hillsides in some localities.

It’s feeling a bit like spring.

The campgrounds are wonderfully sparse, our fellow campers we meet also energetically embrace this glorious opportunity to enjoy the outdoors without the summer crowds.

Morning bird songs wake us in the dawn, and orange sunsets announce the close of our days. So nice to be back in sync with nature’s rhythms again.

Piedras Blancas, a little north of charming Cambria, is home to thousands of Elephant Seals. These massive pinnipeds, once so close to extinction, there were only 50 known animals off of an isolated island, have made a whopping comeback, and now are able to entertain us humans with their bizarre shapes, very unromantic love lives, and ever so cute babies. From December through January, they haul their massive tonnage out of the ocean up onto shore, give birth, breed, and stay around only long enough to wean the pups, before swimming off into the depths of oceanic life again.

A real treat and amazement to watch…the males can weigh between two and five thousand pounds!! The dominant and beta males constantly challenge each other for lordship over their harems, and the babies constantly try to keep from getting trampled as these massive males (incredibly fast) maneuver along the shore alternately mating the girls, and fending off the boys.

To add interest to the show, the California coast has been having many “King tides”…excessively high tides, which reduce the beach front real estate to a slender thread of sand, crowding the seals, and mixing up the harems, so the big Bull Elephant Seals have even more work to do, to keep everything straight! We watched this one little pup try so hard to get across the hurdle of rock to reach his mother, we just wanted to go give him a little shove to help out. (We didn’t) Poor thing was so exhausted.

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Laying down our tired bodies from much exercise and outdoor vitamin D, we are lulled asleep by the crashing of the ocean waves. So grateful and fortunate for this past week.

❧

Nature, Travel

A Birding We Did Go

January 20, 2015 Keevan 2 Comments

While still waiting for some final parts for our Van, we decided to take a little bird watching expedition.

We drove over to Lodi, to the Isenberg Crane Reserve, in the central valley of California, in search of our friends the Sandhill Cranes.

We had encountered these beautiful birds across the northwest this past summer on our travels, then found them again in New Mexico in the fall as they began migrating south for the winter.

Sandhill Cranes are really fun to watch. They have a very happy almost laughing cry that echoes throughout the fields and skies. They are extremely vocal, making them easy to at least hear, if not see. They fly overhead in huge numbers at a time, in graceful flight, as they come and go to bodies of water.

At sunset they all come into a shallow body of water where they spend the night in large numbers – for safety away from the lands edge and predators.

At sunrise they all take off and scatter, spending their days in grasslands such as these or in farmers fields, while feeding and socializing.

Soon they will start their courtship rituals, which involve dancing, flapping, and jumping around to entice a mate for long lasting relationships.

Although we came for the Sandhills, we also saw many other wading birds, such as these beautiful Snowy Egrets.

And their shyer cousin, the Green Heron, caught with his crest raised! These herons are almost always hidden in the tangles they are so perfectly camouflaged for, so seeing him and his raised crest was a great treat!

There were diving birds, such as this common American Coot, who I learned is actually more closely related to the Sandhill Crane than it is to a duck.

A not too shy Northern Mockingbird with it’s ever cheerful personality spent the afternoon with us, while we ate our lunch.

And a few standbys such as this cute shot of an American Robin, always close at hand.

The thing with watching birds…is that you also find yourself getting to see some nice sunrises and sunsets too! A nice little bonus!

Unfortunately, Lodi, didn’t have much to offer in the camping department.

So back to Santa Cruz we headed, spending a day in Monterey in between. A nice respite, while waiting and waiting for parts.

❧

Boondocking, Camping, Nature, Simple Living, Travel, Van Living

California

December 7, 2014 Keevan Leave a comment

We just can’t leave the desert behind.

Here we find ourselves in the Mohave National Preserve back in California. We always love the Mohave for it’s peacefulness and lack of crowds. This shot above was our camping spot for the night, nestled in among the Joshua trees, but ouch, the temperatures just keep getting colder and colder.

When we finally woke up to a couple of inches of ice in Pia’s dog dish, we decided it was time to make some serious miles. But it was Thanksgiving weekend, and we wanted to both enjoy a bit of indulgence and avoid the highways full of traffic.

So we headed over to Las Vegas, Nevada, where there was plenty of action and a nice big Whole Foods Market, with a delicious Thanksgiving buffet all set up in their hot food bar.

We spent our first ever night sleeping in a casino parking lot, which was actually pretty quiet and secure feeling.

We took a Thanksgiving Day Drive and Hike around Red Rock Canyon Wilderness Preserve just outside of Las Vegas.

Signs all over the place said to watch out for wild horses and burros. And to be cautious of tortoise crossing, but no luck today…we didn’t see any of the above. But the rocks and trails were awesome.

Happy belated Thanksgiving to all.

❧

Campervan, Camping, Nature, Travel, Van Living

Giant U-Turn; Redmond to the Sierras

July 24, 2014 Keevan 2 Comments

We spent an entire week in Redmond, just outside of Bend Oregon, with our dear friend Beverly. We totally relaxed, slept in a real bed, fixed lots of delicious food, and played the board game Aggravation until all hours of the night. It’s nice to be able to take these types of breaks once in awhile to recharge and just enjoy some downtime.

Bev was such a gracious hostess!!!

We were seriously on our way to North Idaho, but while hanging around Redmond, we learned that both our kids and their significant others and children, had planned a camping trip to the Tahoe National Forest, just outside the Lake Tahoe area back in eastern California.

A small seed was planted, and after checking the map and figuring out the milage, we made a decision to go camping with them all.

A Giant U-Turn was made from our spot on the map in central Oregon, and we rode with the wind down the highway back to California, for just a small side trip. About 300 miles of a side trip.

Into the sierra’s we went, and the family we did meet.

Pine forests as far as one can see, thunderstorms in the afternoons, green meadows crisscrossed by streams and rivers. Awesome white puffy clouds against azure skies.

A wonderful time was had by all, relatives from both sides of extended families joined in on different days to make for lots of fun, food, campfires, fishing, hikes, and good talks.

Love you people dearly!

Can’t wait to meet up again somewhere along this long winding road. Thank you for a wonderful visit.

❧

Keevan Soul