Hi gang!

Here is the first part of our report on the circum-
continental trip (Jan-Mar 1995).  I'll try and post a 
chapter every Friday.

Tobin
-----
             Part I: Canada to the Mexican Border

Because we live in downtown Vancouver (and because our 
camper had been broken into a few months before), we didn't 
load up the bus until the morning we left.  And, because Dec 
31 is Christa's birthday (and oh yeah, it's New Year's Eve 
as well), and because we got kind of baked the night before, 
we didn't get up until nearly 10 o'clock in the morning.  We 
were so excited we were shaking!  Had a nice breakfast, 
cleaned up the house, and started loading the van.  

It's amazing how much you can fit in a westy.  Keep in mind 
we were going to be living out of the van for 3 months, and 
had to carry clothes and bedding to allow us to be 
comfortable from +30 degrees C to -35 degrees C.  I had the 
entire area under the rear seat packed with tools, spare 
parts, a hibatchi (which we never used), and a huge 
hydraulic floor jack.  I also carried a copy of the Idiot's 
Guide, a Bentley manual, a Haynes manual, and some stuff 
Joel had photocopied for me on my gas heater.  (Joel's stuff 
would come in handly later).

Finally we had the bus all loaded up, did one last check of 
the house for stuff we might have missed, and turned the 
ignition key!  

Our trusty westy fired right up, and we pulled out.  The 
odometer read 154,550 miles.  It was a crisp sunny day, 
clear and rather cold for Vancouver.  As we headed south 
over the Granville Street bridge we admired our beautiful 
city.  It was great to get on the road!  Climbing the 
Granville Street hill, Christa asked if I'd brought the 
shortwave listening guide for Radio Canada International.  
Uh oh.  We turned around and retreived the guide.

Take two.  South over the bridge again.  Nice view.  We 
realized it was nearly two o'clock in the afternoon, and we 
still had the US border in front of us.  We weren't going to 
get very far today, oh well.  As we approached the border an 
hour later, I started to get nervous.  What if they gave us 
a hassle?  What if they took everything out of the car to 
search it?  I'd heard some horror stories from other list 
members, and I could just see us sitting there re-packing 
the car in the cold at midnight.  Stay calm.... just stay 
calm.  Breathe...

We pulled up to the booth at the US Customs.  The guard was 
about 40, with a burr cut, mustache, and square jaw.  He did 
not smile.  He looked at us levelly for maybe 4 or 5 seconds 
after I rolled up and said "Good afternoon."  He did not 
return my salutation.  His eyes cast about our hippie-
mobile.  "Citizenship?"  "Where do you live?"  
"Destination?"  Uh, oh, here it comes... "Uh, Mexico!" I 
said brightly.  He paused for a second, then looked right at 
me.

"Weelll...," he said slowly, "We get a lot of these here 
Volkswagens coming through here going down to Mexico..."  

*GULP!*

"...And I can tell you you'll have no problem finding parts 
for this thing down there!"  Whew!  I couldn't believe it!  
"So what year is this, anyway?..."  So we talked about how 
great VW buses were for a minute or so, and then he waved us 
on, wishing us happy travels (in Spanish).  Good karma!

We stopped in Bellingham to change some money and buy some 
food at a natural food co-op there, then made it all the way 
to Tacoma (about 150 miles from Vancouver) that night.  
Oooh, hard driving!  :)  Our gas heater had packed it in 
(discovered later it was just a loose wire), and it was well 
below freezing.  So were we.  We were looking forward to 
plugging into a hook-up and cranking our little ceramic 
heater.  

We pulled up to our site, surrounded by huge (ugly!) RVs, 
and I hopped outside to plug us in.  What the hell was this?  
The plug was huge and round, like a clothes dryer plug.  
Ahhh... The AAA book said 15 amp hook-ups, but didn't bother 
to mention there were no NORMAL plugs!!  Arrrgh!  Office was 
closed, since it was New Years Day.  Nobody we could rouse 
at the RV park had a spare plug adapter.  Off to Fred 
Meyer's to shop for a plug.  The guy there says, "You mean, 
like a dryer plug?"  I said I guess so, had a look at one, 
it seemed close enough, so I got the plug, a length of cord, 
and a female household plug and got to work on the floor of 
Fred Meyer's.  Made my own adapter; I was rather proud of 
myself.  

Got back in the camper, drove back to the site, got out in 
the dark, tried to plug it in.  Wouldn't fit.  Christa held 
the flashlight.  Arrrgh!  The 15A dryer plug and the 15A RV 
plug were different!  The ground prong wouldn't fit.  I was 
cold.  What the hell, I removed the ground prong (Who needs 
a ground, anyway?).  Arrrgh!  Still wouldn't fit!  The two 
flat prongs were at slightly different angles.  HELL!  Who 
needs the plug housing?  I'll just dissassemble the plug, 
tape up each prong with electrician's tape, and stick each 
prong in with insulated vice-grips.  It's only 110V/15A, 
right?  I get Christa ready to knock me clear if I start to 
smoke and all my limbs stick out straight, and I stick the 
prongs into the socket.  ARRRRGH!  They wouldn't bloody well 
fit!!  Too wide (just), too thick (just).  I gave up.  I was 
just about frozen anyway.  

Christa finally found someone kind enough to let us plug 
into an auxilary plug on the outside of their RV.  Ah, heat.  
Darned toasty, actually, and we had to turn the heater down.  
Dinner, bed, sleep.  Ah.

Next morning, we return everything to Fred Meyer, and picked 
up an adapter at Camping World for, like, $3.00.

TIP: Buy one of these adapters if you want to run 110v stuff 
where they advertise hook-ups.  Over half the places we 
stayed had the RV plugs ONLY.

The second day out was still clear and cold.  Even though we 
wanted to stay off the Interstate highways as much as 
possible, the cold made us push for California (and warmer 
weather) as fast as possible.  So we cruised down I-5 at 57 
mph.  I thought I'd wait until we got to California to fix 
the heater, because I hate working on stuff outside when 
it's so cold.  Our heater boxes were full of holes, so they 
weren't much help at all--barely kept the ice off the inside 
of the windshield.  So we wore a lot of clothes.  It wasn't 
so bad in daylight, but once the sun went down (at about 
4:00 pm) it got a lot colder in the van.  I made deal with 
Christa that if I could push us through into California that 
night, we could buy a bottle of Knudsen Erath to go with 
dinner.  

With the promise of wine we pushed through the night, 
wearing nearly everything we had with us, and arrived late 
in Yreka California.  We plugged in (with our nifty new 
adapter), turned on the heater, found some nice classical 
music on NPR, and Christa made a beautiful herb-garlic cream 
sauce tortellini with a blackberry-apple crumble and whipped 
cream for dessert.  And the wine was perfect.  Life was 
good: toasty in our westy, with a full tummy, surrounded by 
the aroma of beautiful food with the soft strains of 
classical music wafting across the candlelit table.

The next day took us down the I-5 all the way to Martha 
Rubin's house in Moraga, just outside of San Fransisco.  
After driving through a minor snow storm in the mountains of 
Northern California, and driving a woman and her three kids 
30 or so miles into Redding (her hoodless electronic-
everything car had died in the snow/rain, and I didn't have 
a clue how to fix it), we hit the central valley, where it 
warmed up a lot.  Good.  Now we were just a little bit 
chilly instead of frozen solid.  Stopped at the "World 
famous" (I'm a sucker for that!) Olive Pit in Corning, where 
Christa marvelled at a kazillion varieties of olives.  We 
bought a 10 pound tin of Blue Diamond almonds.  Yum!

Later that afternoon, we stopped for lunch near Colusa.  
Lunch was uneventful, but just before we stopped I decided 
to pull into the access for a farmer's field to turn around, 
rather than trying to do a 3-point turn on the highway.  The 
ground looked solid and flat.  Ok.  Pulled in easily, 
stopped, put it in reverse, engaged the clutch....  hmmm.  
Must be neutral.  Found reverse again, and... nothing.  
Geez, did I just lose reverse gear?  I tried first gear.  
Nothing.  What?  Christa gets out.  She reports that we are 
stuck in one inch of the stickiest, slimiest clay she has 
ever seen.  She's carrying an inch or two of this stuff on 
the bottom of her boots.  The clay totally clogged the 
tires, so it was like trying to get out of mud with racing 
sticks.  

I broke out the folding shovel.  I shovelled gravel under 
the rear wheels for traction, Christa took a picture (see 
David Schwarze's web site).  Using this method, we got 
halfway to firm ground when the farmer showed up in a big 
4x4 pick up.  He pulled us out. Sideways.  Oh, well, time 
for lunch!

Got into Martha's place that evening.  We spent several days 
with Martha and her wonderful family before going down to 
the vanagon meet at Pfieffer Beach at Big Sur.  Martha is 
the most incredible host either of us had ever seen.  
Absolutely unbelievable!  Food!  Drink!  Laundry every 
night!  Trips to parts stores!  Trips to tire stores to get 
nice new tires put on the back of our bus.  Martha doesn't 
sleep, either.  Her daughter, Sarah, was terrific.  She came 
with us on many of our trips, and Christa, Sarah, and I had 
a nice time at a make-yer-own-jewelry bead store before we 
left.  Nate, Martha's husband, was great too, but because he 
seemed to work more and sleep less than Martha (was this 
possible?) we didn't get all that much time with him.

Martha also resolved a long-standing debate between Christa 
and I regarding the colour of our westy.  I thought it was 
yellow; Christa thought this was ridiculous: it was clearly 
orange!  Yellow!  Orange!  VW calls it "Chrome Yellow" 
(L20A), but even I agreed this was not at all descriptive.  
Martha looked at it and said, "You know, it's actually 
_mango!_  We looked at it.  Martha was right: our camper is 
mango.

While we were in the Bay Area, the weather began to go to 
pieces. Christa and I walked all over San Francisco in the 
pouring rain, and it only got worse as time wore on.  When 
we left to drive down to Big Sur, the wind had come up a 
lot, and was gusting wildly.  By the time we were south of 
San Jose, it was taking a lot of effort to stay in our lane.  
I dropped our speed a bit.  By the time we reached Carmel, 
it was dark and all hell had broken loose.  When we were 
driving into the wind, I could barely hold 40mph.  Redwood 
branches were down everywhere.  Stuff was blowing all over 
the road, and the wind was screaming against the car.  With 
26 miles left to the campsite, we headed down the coast 
highway.

Visibility dropped.  Sand and small rocks pounded into the 
car.  I dropped our speed down to 25 miles an hour.  Gusts 
would move the car 3 or 4 feet to one side almost instantly, 
and direction of the gust became impossible to predict.  
Just staying on the road was becoming a problem.  As we'd 
come out of the other end of a cut through a sand dune, a 
wall of airborne sand and rocks would be waiting for us.  I 
started to worry that we might break our windshield or 
headlights or some of the paint off the front of the car.  
The noise was incredible.  The wind played with us, knocking 
us first one way, then the other, then back again.  I slowed 
down even more, with the 4-way flashers on so we wouldn't 
get rear-ended.  We could see nothing to our right, except 
for an occaisonal glimpse of the stormy Pacific smashing on 
the rocks below.  After one particularly hard crosswind gust 
in the middle of a bridge, Christa started to cry.  "We're 
going to die!" she cried, sobbing as sand, pebbles, and 
branches bounced off the car.  She cried for a few more 
miles, then resigned herself to fate, and just watched the 
madness around us.  Might as well enjoy the show!  

After what seemed like hours, we arrived at the campsite, 
and found that most people had already arrived.  We pulled 
into the site we were sharing with Bradley Prunehead, and 
hunkered down over some fine fish chowder.  It was great to 
meet everyone.  We learned that Steve Johnson's wife, Linda, 
had also broken into tears on the drive down the coast 
highway, so maybe my driving wasn't so bad after all!  Other 
folks have reported on the Big Sur meet, so I won't go into 
detail here.  Suffice to say that Christa and I and John and 
Carol Huguenard were sure glad that Jeff had Brought 
Something For Bob!  Great folks, great food, lousy weather, 
and a great time.  Jeff Schneiter had brought a tent, but 
because his tent was in a few inches of water by the time he 
went to turn in, he slept in the top bunk of our camper both 
nights.

Oh yeah, and we burned Sarah Rubin's sweater.  What a sport!

I got our gas heater working again, but then it promptly 
blew a fuse and nearly exploded, so I figured it was time to 
have a pro look at it.  We were originally going to go down 
the coast highway to San Luis Obispo, but the weather was 
still unstable, and Jeff knew a few FLARS in Santa Cruz, so 
we took Jeff and headed back north to Santa Cruz.  Jeff 
lives in the hills above SC, and the road up to his place 
had redwoods down across it and was flooded out in places, 
so we took a long and circuitous detour.  Finally made it to 
his place, where we enjoyed the 30 minutes of electrical 
power he got that weekend, met the superdog Argo, and hung 
out.  Jeff took us back into town in his insanely fast Honda 
Civic, hung out at the laundromat while we washed our 
clothes, then took us out for pizza!  What a guy!  Back to 
his place, cooked with some local herbs, and went to bed in 
our camper.  Listened to waves of wind come crashing up the 
redwood forested hillside, followed by the sound of cones, 
twigs, and huge branches bouncing off the top of the camper 
ALL NIGHT LONG.  I was just waiting for one of the trees 
themselves to come crashing down on us.  As the night wore 
on, I became too tired to care.  

The next morning, Jeff left for work and we headed into town 
to get our heater fixed.  We actually found a shop in 
California that knew something about gas heaters.  The 
manual Joel had given proved to be very useful.  Turned out 
I had an 8A fuse where a 16A one should go, and a 16A where 
a 8A belonged.  I had switched them up!  Oh, well.  Mr. 
Mechanic also told me I had to rig up a proper exhaust 
system for the heater, 'cause the preheater hose I was using 
couldn't handle the heat from the heater and would melt and 
might set my engine compartment on fire.  Uh.  Ok, then.

We decided to bail on San Luis Obispo even though David 
Garth had kindly offered us his driveway, because we were 
getting tired of rain and severe weather.  California is 
supposed to be sunny, right?  We figured we should go for 
the desert (desert=dry, dry=no rain), so we took secondary 
roads all the way to Bakersfield.  Rained.  Stayed overnight 
in Bakersfield, and left the next morning.  As we left 
Bakersfield, we saw a sign reading:

                   BAKERSFIELD:
                COME FOR A VISIT,
              STAY FOR A LIFETIME!

Whew!  That was close!

With the weather still lousy, we decided to high-tail it (at 
57mph, that is) east on Hwy 58 to Mojave.  Tehachapi was 
absolutely flooded out--4 lane roads reduced to 1 lane above 
water.  Mojave was worse.  We had been thinking we'd go to 
Death Valley (We'd heard it was a pretty dry place, 
generally), so we phoned the ranger there to get the latest 
scoop.  Uh.  Raining.  I didn't like the idea of being 282 
feet below sea level in torrential rains and severe 
flooding, so we did what any other sane, red-blooded 
Canadian would do in a situation like this.

We drove hell-bent for Vegas.

Our self-imposed no-Interstate policy be damned, we hooked 
up with I-15 heading straight for Sin City.  Pulled into the 
RV park behind the Circus-Circus, and headed for the 
casinos.  We went crazy.  We didn't stumble out of the 
casinos until the early morning, and we felt great!  We were 
up two bucks!  Hey, we were going to DO this town: there 
wasn't a nickle blackjack machine in town we couldn't beat!  
Coming off this gambling euphoria, we slept soundly while 
neon flashed all around us, illuminating the rainy night.  

The next morning found us stuffing our faces at a $2.99 all-
you-can-eat breakfast buffet.  Vegas is my kind of place!  
Can't sit still though; time's a-wasting!  Back to the 
casino floor, 'cause it never rains inside the casinos!  

Well, I should have listened to Christa.  I should have quit 
while I was ahead.  But NO, I had to let it ride.  The 
casino sharks took me for FIVE BIG ONES, leaving us a whole 
three dollars poorer than when we set foot in this cruel 
town.  Christa and I had to go for a walk.  Las Vegas must 
be a lonely place, because all these guys kept giving us 
these magazines full of pictures of young women who wanted 
to talk.  I know this because these women had their phone 
numbers right there beside their pictures.  I think maybe 
they, too, had lost a lot of their money because they didn't 
even have any clothes left to wear!   Some of them must have 
been very lonely (or skilled conversationalists) because 
they wanted to talk to couples, too.  

We decided we should leave while we still had some clothes 
to wear.

The next morning we headed for Arizona on US route 93.  It 
had stopped raining!  We paused at the Hoover Dam, and were 
impressed with the scale of the project.  We putted along 
over the Arizona desert, enjoying a vastness of the 
landscape.  Joshua trees came and went.  After joining up 
with I-40 at Kingman, we began to climb again, in and out of 
the snow as we cleared pass after pass.  Christa wasn't 
feeling that well, so we opted for a $20.00 motel room in 
Williams so she could rest up.  We watched incredibly bad 
television, and I got Hagen-Daz bars from the store down the 
street.  Life is good.

It was just a short run from there to the South Rim of the 
Grand Canyon, under beautiful crystal-clear skies.  I'd 
hyped Christa up about how wild the Canyon is: you think 
you're moving along a flat plain, and then, with almost no 
warning, there's this huge chasm below you.  Christa was 
very excited.  We entered the park, and came to first 
viewpoint.  I parked, and we ran over to the edge.  Clouds.  
The canyon was totally obscurred in thick clouds a thousand 
feet below us.  Oh, poo!  Christa goes to the look out area 
anyway, and then this rainbow appears below us.  Whoa, 
heavy!
We had a circular rainbow a thousand feet below us, with our 
shadows like a shaft of darkness cutting down into the 
centre of the rainbow itself.  This was almost spiritual.  

We found a campsite, got settled, paid our fee, then headed 
back to the rim.  The clouds had totally disappeared.  
Christa was blown away.  We hiked lots, sat and stared at 
the canyon.  We met another young couple.  We chatted, and 
they invited us for drinks later.  We watched the sunset, 
and went to make dinner.

We met our new friends for drinks.  They got us very drunk.  
Remember we're at 7,000 feet?  I didn't.  Whoa, big drunk.  
Yuck.  Good thing was I didn't get cold that night, even 
though we had no hook-up and there was at least 2 feet of 
snow on the ground.  

The next morning in the parking lot outside the showers we 
met a fellow and his young girlfriend who were heading from 
North Carolina to California in his 1970 bus.  They tipped 
us off to a good natural food store in Flagstaf with great 
granola.  All right!  We headed out of the park by the East 
Drive to US 89, then south to Flagstaff.  The scenery on the 
East Drive (AZ hwy 64) is incredible, although some of the 
signs for "trading posts" in the Navajo Nation were pretty 
sad: "FRIENDLY INJUNS AHEAD, GET 'UM GOOD DEALS."  I'd 
thought we'd moved beyond that, but just goes to show 
stereotypes still work for some people...

In Flagstaff we found the farmer's market natural food store 
(with a nice bakery next door) without much trouble, and 
stocked up on stuff, granola included.  From there we 
dropped down to Sedona where we spent the night.  Much 
warmer.  

We woke up in the morning to find one of our nice new rear 
tires has gone flat.  Pumped it up, got it to a mechanic in 
Sedona.  Nine bucks later, we're on our way.  We worked our 
way along AZ89 up and down steep twisty roads through Jerome 
and Prescott, then onto US60 across the desert towards 
Blythe.  Back into California, and out I-10 west.  About 20 
miles later, we pull off the Interstate at Wiley's Well 
Road, and headed south past a state prison.  The road turned 
to gravel, and we went another 10 or 12 miles.  The "free" 
campsite here turned out to cost $14.00, but the camp host 
was kind enough to volunteer that we could camp free a few 
more miles down the road on the Bureau of Land Management 
Land.  So on we went.  Another 6 or 8 miles later, we found 
a spot we could break through the low berm left by the 
grader on both sides of the road, and pulled off into the 
desert.  Fifty yards off the road, I foundnd a level spot 
and turned off the engine.  Quiet.  Very, very quiet.  We 
washed, ate, and piled into bed.  

By the light of the next morning I realized just how much we 
are in the middle of nowhere.  Didn't Charles Manson roam 
these parts?  After exploring the desert on foot for a 
while, we packed up and fired up the camper.  I worked us 
back onto the road, and pointed us south again.  After all, 
why re-trace steps?  The road HAS to lead somewhere, right?  
After about 10 miles the road starts to fall to pieces as we 
climbed into some desolated hills.  But there were still 
tire tracks!  If they did it, so could we!  Another 15 miles 
and we unexpectedly hit a paved road.  I looked at the sun, 
and turned right.  We're on CA78, heading south, 20 or so 
miles north of Glamis.  Nice country.  Past the Imperial 
Dunes recreation area and into Brawley.  Cool Mexican food 
for sale in the stores here.  We worked our way along 
secondary roads to near Ocotillo, when we had to join I-8 
heading west.  We fought a strong head wind until we climbed 
into the mountains.  After passing through snow just east of 
San Diego, we dropped down towards the Pacific and rolled on 
over to David Schwarze's place.  

David was just moving in to his new (very nice) place, so I 
helped him move a few heavy or awkward things, then we 
ordered pizza and retired to his hot tub.  Ahhh...

We spent a couple of days with David, getting the camper 
ready for Mexico.  Insurance at AAA, last minute spare 
parts, and a really fun cruise of some of David's favorite 
San Diego junk yards.  Incredible junk yards!  Splits, 
loaves, vanagons!  Rust free!  These yards must be 
Volkswagen heaven!  As David was punching his ridiculously 
powerful Mustang 5 litre down the freeways, I could see the 
hills of Tiajuana to the south.  I was getting excited (and 
nervous!) about what lay ahead.

The morning we pulled out, we double- and triple-checked 
that we had everything we thought we'd need.  Spare parts.  
Tools.  First aid stuff.  Full water tank in the car, full 6 
gallon tank on the roof.  Full (1 gallon?) solar shower on 
the roof too.  We drove to San Ysidro, and filled up with 
gas.  We practiced filling up Mexican-style: making so damn 
sure we had a FULL tank we left a half gallon on the 
pavement.  We fit another 6.5 gallons of fuel in our (rated) 
6 gallon jerry can and threw that on the roof, too.  There.  
That gave us well over 400 miles cruising range.  Checked 
the oil level again, checked the tire air pressure again.  
Ok.  Our trusty camper was ready!  We changed several 
hundred bucks American cash into pesos, and heading for the 
border crossing.  

I got that border-crossing nervousness again.  Would the 
Mexican guards hassle us?  Christa was silent, and I could 
tell she was nervous, too.  We'd agreed we were going to get 
through Tijuana as quickly as possible, and head directly 
south to get as far into the country that afternoon as we 
could.  Christa was to be my navigator, watching for signs 
to Ensenada, directing me through the city, with the AAA 
Baja California map folded to the Tijuana city inset 
clutched tightly in her hands.  

Tall chain-link razor-wired fences lined Interstate 5 as we 
cruised down the last couple of miles of the American 
freeway.  Signs in Spanish warned people not to run across 
the highway.  The US Border Patrol were everywere in their 
big 4x4s, and just before the crossing, a small army of them 
were stationed at the side of the road with big guys 
watching traffic from the hoods of their trucks.  Oh, great.

At the border, traffic widened to 8 or 10 lanes southbound 
to pass through the inspection booths.  Traffic crawled but 
never really stopped, and as we rolled up to the booth 
ourselves, we saw there was no one in any of the booths!  
Traffic just rolled south into the country unimpeded!  I was 
so blown away by this I actually stopped for a second, 
hesistant to just DRIVE IN to a foreign country, until an 
angry horn blast behind me persuaded me to go with the flow 
and not draw attention to myself.  So we drove into Mexico 
without seeing a single Mexican official.  Welcome to 
Mexico!

Tobin
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tobin T. Copley                  Currently              =============  
(604) 689-2660                    Occupationally       /_| |__||__| :| putta
tobin@freenet.vancouver.bc.ca      Challenged!        O|             | putta
                                                       '-()-------()-' 
Circum-continental USA, Mexico, Canada 15,000 miles... '76 VW Camper! (Mango)