Double Fun @ Anza Borrego — March 2019 (Part 1)
February 27–28, 2019.
Oh man, was this going to be fun. A trip like no other (so far). A trip with a twist. A trip that was actually two. Let me explain.
For a while now, Anza Borrego Desert State Park in California has been on my list of places to explore. Like Death Valley — which we’ve visited quite a bit and recently hiked for three days — it’s a great place to visit during the winter because temperatures in the summer can get rather unbearable — so much so that certain roads in the park are closed from mid-June to September. The problem is that the drive to-and-from Anza Borrego is a bit too long to make our normal 6-day jaunts worthwhile.
So you can imagine my excitement when I realized that there was an opportunity to nearly double the length of the trip and cut the driving in half, all at the same time! See, it turned out that my Pops and step-mother were going to be vacationing in Anza Borrego for part of March, and that meant that I could take a page out of @DVExile’s playbook and leave the truck in California between trips. We’d drive down as normal; explore for 4 days; fly home… and then reverse the process for a second trip 10 days after the first.
It was glorious! And, not any more expensive than two trips would have been — the cost of flights essentially the same as the cost of fuel to traverse the entire west coast.
Having figured this out with only about 3 days before departure, it was with some hasty research and planning that we were ready to go in just the nick of time, and we set out south at 7:00am — a long two days of driving ahead of us to reach our destination.
Time passed slowly but steadily as we drove through the rain and snow towards what we hoped were warmer days — our bags full of shorts and t-shirts. With stops for food and fuel, we made reasonable time — luckily missing traffic in major metropolitan areas as the miles-upon-miles of I-5 stacked up behind us.
Every once in a while, we’d get a nice little sun break.
Eventually we made it to the Bay Area — a short, 7-hour pit stop — before continuing south. Again, food and fuel were our only stops — warmer climates and dirt roads calling our name. As we neared our destination, spring was clearly in the air — the hill sides along the I-5 Grapevine covered in California poppies.
Some taco-truck fixings for lunch and a couple more hours of driving and we found ourselves on the final approach to the park. Not only that, but @mrs.turbodb realized that we could actually make part of that approach on dirt rather than pavement — so we pulled onto our first trail and aired down the tires. The afternoon sun was out, and it was windy!
As is typical for me, I gave the truck a once-over as the tires aired themselves down (I can’t recommend a set of automatic tire deflators enough). Usually this inspection turns up nothing, but that was far from the case today. Sometime during our thousand-mile paved journey, the inner boot of the driver-side CV had torn — the telltale grease covering the surrounding area.
That was a bummer — I’ve been lucky to this point to not have a boot tear on any of my CV axles — but not the end of the world. Our CVs can run for quite a while with a torn boot — so rather than replace it with the trail spare in the OSK, I decided that we’d just let it be for the remainder of the trip, and we’d fix it when we got home. You know, the knowledge of it’s imperfection nagging at me all trip!
At any rate, we carried on, this first trail being a nice change from the pavement of the last two days, even if there wasn’t anything truly outstanding about it.
As the trail wound around through the rocky hillsides, we got out to inspect a few old homestead sites. In each case, the buildings — and frankly any indication a homestead had previously existed — long gone; still, the stop was a chance to stretch our legs and enjoy the outdoors.
Eventually, the trail afforded us our first glimpse of Anza Borrego Valley — stretched out as far as the eye could see below us. It was spectacular.
To see what we saw, and the rest of the story, check out Double Fun @ Anza Borrego — March 2019 (Part 1) at adventuretaco.com
