California

California may have high taxes and believes that everything will cause cancer, but it also has many great things to offer. Mountains, beautiful beaches, the ocean and sunshine. One of our favorite national parks, Joshua Tree, is also in California.

Beautiful sunset from Palm Desert California

We have been in and out of California since launching in 2016. We have driven north to south a couple times, and entered and left the state on the eastern border many times.

We have been in California longer than any other state.

Our first trip in, we entered California on the north end coming down the legendary Pacific Coast Highway. We ended up crossing the state completely north to south. We came in from Oregon, and ended up in Tijuana. We visited 4 National Parks, and spent time on the beach. I will say, I was pleasantly surprised with the landscape, and wasn’t expecting it to be as beautiful as it was.

As we made our way south, we decided to stop in Northern California. We picked a spot that was close to the Redwood Forests. Our campground was outside of Klamath CA, right on the Klamath River. We were minutes from the beach, the national parks, and about 20 min from Crescent City. Again, there has been rain, but it cleared up enough for us to adventure out and see the sights. The area is beautiful, seems to be under a constant fog though.

On moving day from Cloverdale to Yosemite, we happened to plan our route to visit the Jelly Belly Factory. And it was awesome! Here are some pics from our time there!

Doing a tour of the Jelly Factory in the fall of 2016

We had originally planned on spending two weeks here. But, with the changes we made to our schedule to make it down to San Diego for Emmett and Grandpa Ed’s Birthday, we shortened our stay to a week. We got there and settled in, and spent a day at Yosemite National Park. Then it started raining. It rained pretty hard for 4 days straight, and cleared up on moving day. It was good, we had been moving a lot and needed to recharge.

We Spent 19 days in San Diego. It was awesome, we were parked in Harmony’s Dad’s back yard with full hook-ups! We were a few blocks away from both Pacific Beach and Mission Bay. It was great! We spent time at a bunch of cool places.

From San Diego we went over to Palm Desert CA, and explored Joshua Tree for the first time. That is where we got the idea to upgrade the RV and found our current RV.

Moving into the new RV

Trip #2 down to California was almost a year later than the first, right after the holidays of 2017. This time we drove down I-5 with Menifee as our destination. We were heading down for the Fulltime Families Winter Rally.

We got down the state much quicker this time, but ended up spending almost two months in several locations. we spent the better part of a month in Menifee, which is about a 100 miles north of San Diego. From there we enjoyed hanging out with a bunch of other families on the road. We went to Disneyland with Harmony’s Dad, and enjoyed the mild Southern California winter.

We also went over to Palm Springs again, and visited Joshua Tree a couple more times. We were surrounded by friends again and spent our time relaxing in the warm sun. On our way north we stopped at an area near Pinnacles National Park. This area is beautiful, and we loved the landscape and scenery.

Then again during the fall/winter of 2018/2019 we spent several months in and out of Southern California. Again enjoying the warm weather and spending time with family and friends.

Check out the posts below and see some of the great places you could visit in California.