Rambling Redwoods Campground and RV Park – Crescent City, California

We’ve slowed down our travels a bit for a few reasons. The first is Covid-19. We wanted to protect ourselves and slow the spread, and avoiding crowded areas was our best option. The second is David’s Mobile RV Service, which has many great clients who refer other great clients, and David has built himself an active business in the Crescent City area. We still identify more as tumbleweeds than redwoods, but if we’re going to put down some tentative roots, among the redwoods is where we’d like to do it. This campground might be the best-kept secret on the Northern California coast. Nestled in the redwoods along Highway 101, you can sleep among the trees and be part of the forest, but without giving up things like cellular service and easy access to groceries. We decided to hunker down for the winter here, and moved to a long-term spot back …

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Rambling Redwoods Campground and RV Park, Crescent City, California

We are spending the winter in the redwoods! We spent most of the summer on the coast in Crescent City, but by October, the coast gets extra windy, making the RV feel like a boat. So we moved a tiny bit inland where the wind is blocked by these magnificent trees. We love this area so much that we decided to stay through the winter. We have never experienced a Pacific Northwest winter, so that’s an adventure in itself. We were warned to expect lots of rain and to prepare for moisture control. Honestly, the rain was an understatement. We did get a dehumidifier to help with the condensation inside and it’s helped a lot. We had a white Christmas: with hail! Big huge hail that looked like snow more than a few times. We’re staying at Rambling Redwoods, which is right on US-101. It’s an appropriately named park, with …

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A generic update!

It’s been awhile, friends. Work has been keeping us both busy, and there just hasn’t been a lot of energy leftover for blogging. Which is great in some ways— David loves his job as an RV tech! And tiring in others— I’m a tax preparer, and I haven’t had much of a break thanks to covid. Living with chronic illness and disability means I’ve got time to work or time to take care of myself, but not both. (Let this be a lesson to anyone who thinks full-time RV life means full-time vacation!) We are still in Crescent City, California. We absolutely love this area, and hope to explore more of the Pacific Northwest when we are able. We’ve decided to spend the winter here in Crescent City, and experience a PNW winter firsthand. One of the reasons we’re sticking close to our current favorite city is Covid-19. It had …

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Easiest moving day ever!

We moved a couple miles down the road. We love Shoreline RV Park (they’ve renamed to Lighthouse Cove but all the signs still say Shoreline) but they now have a 30-days-in-1-day-out policy. Instead of moving two days in a row, we booked a week at a cute park nearby. We made it easy on ourselves by overlapping our reservations so we didn’t have to leave by checkout time, and could roll out whenever we wanted in the afternoon. So worth it! Since we were moving so close and the new spot is right on the bike trail, we didn’t even do our usual “truck Tetris” putting everything in the truck. We loaded all the plants in the wagon, strapped it to my bike, and I biked to the new spot while David drove the RV and cats. I got the better end of that deal. 🙂 It was only 2 …

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Tour Through Tree, Klamath, California

This tree is centuries-old and a cheap ($5) tourist attraction worth seeing in the Klamath area. Small cars can drive right through the tree, but there’s no way our truck would’ve made it. So we just enjoyed hanging out in the shade of a tree that’s already outlived us 10 times over. Truthfully, it made us a little sad to see such an ancient living tree butchered like this. The tree still produces sap, constantly attempting to heal the damage. It continues to grow, with one branch in particular that resembled an entire new redwood. These trees are just incredible. When you visit the tour-through tree, do NOT bring your RV! The hill to get to the tree is steep, narrow, and there’s not much room to turn around when you get there. However, we had no problem taking our Ram 2500 up to the parking area next to the …

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Rainy Weekend and Snacky Sunday

It was a rainy weekend in Crescent City, so I did a few things inside the RV while David took a few urgent repair calls. There was another Siete cooking class… I missed out because I was a little too exhausted this week. But look at these adorable gifts! I did make one part of the dish made in class: chorizo refried beans. Two cans of pinto beans blended with a packet of Siete chorizo seasoning. So good with chips! There were naps. I reorganized the cooking gadgets cupboard. We’ve grown a lot since the first time we did this: we love our 3-quart Instant Pot so much that we decided to get a 6-Quart with an air fryer lid. The air fryer broke recently, and we replaced it with an Instant Pot brand air fryer lid. Our two saucepans are in the top shelf behind the blender cups and …

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Where are we now? Traveling from Arizona to California

Our plan was to spend the winter in Arizona, then head back to Northern California after tax season ended. In Arizona, we could visit my parents and David could work on snow birds’ RVs. Plus Arizona is nice in the winter (for about 2 months, anyway). In January, after a couple months in Goodyear, AZ, we decided to move closer to Quartzite for the rest of our stay. We booked a month at a small sleepy little park where David had worked a couple jobs. But the day we arrived, a very friendly orange tabby and self-appointed welcoming committee came up to our rig and taunted our cats. Even Lillian, an endlessly laid back and friendly cat, had reached her limit, growling through the screen door at him. After the first night, the cat tried to get into our rig, which caused a scary fight between our cats, and no …

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New favorite phone app for exploring nature!

We’ve been loving the Seek app for identifying plants when we’re out exploring. The app uses your camera and image recognition technology to identify plants, animals, and fungi. It’s a fun addition to stopping and smelling the flowers. It “gameifies” being outside, by giving badges for discoveries and offering optional challenges. They’re cute features but the coolest part really is the identification of plants, animals, and fungi. Seek doesn’t store or transmit location data, and you don’t even need to create an account to use the app (but you can if you want to). The app is totally free from iNaturalist, which a collaboration between the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society. It’s available for iOS and Android, and it does require internet in order to access the iNaturalist database and use the app. We haven’t had luck using it for bugs or animals yet (except humans …

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Where has the time gone?

It’s been a busy 3 months since our last post. All things considered (hashtag 2020), we are doing well and hanging in there. We have many updates to make! Since we left Austin, Texas in June, we’ve been to New Mexico and Northern California. We’re still in NorCal right now, in the middle of fire season and a pandemic. Jen survived the extended tax season (and is now going into extension season), and since RVing is one of the safest ways to travel and vacation right now because of the pandemic, David has been extremely busy repairing RVs. For the last 2 months, we were at our very first work camping gig (stay tuned for a blog post about that), where we had lousy cell service and no internet access. Now that we’re back in civilization with cell service, we plan on doing a lot of updating and catching up. …

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