Our drive from Pigeon Forge to Chattanooga landed us here late in the evening in need of a place to park for the night. Chattanooga being near the Georgia border, we actually crossed back into Georgia and found a BP truck stop with room for us to crash.
Well, the time has finally come. We have been thinking about this for awhile but this is the first time we are blogging about it here. For the last 2 months since we have been full time traveling in our beloved 25 foot Airstream. As much fun as we are having seeing the country, we have always felt a bit of emptiness. Having such a large tow vehicle like the diesel van towing around a big travel trailer just didn’t let us into some of the more interesting campsites we wanted to see. Ultimately we decided that the rig is just gonna have to go to allow us to get closer to nature.
We got into Corpus Christi, TX pretty late the night before and found a Walmart to boondock at for the night. It was our first night of boondocking since replacing the house batteries in Tucson. I wanted to make sure it was working properly and it would handle our power load when we are not plugged in. The last time we boondocked in Tempe, Arizona, we woke up in the morning with not enough electricity to even run the fridge on propane mode. Our new batteries on the other hand performed like rock stars all night. They provide enough juice to let us even run our TV in the morning for Ava to watch PBS kids before we left for Padre Island with power to spare.
Look at what we have here. People sleeping in a Flying J *slash* Best Western parking lot for the night. Some would call them crazy. Some would call them lucky. Some would call them full-timers. I would say we are a little bit of all three.
Before our last mini trip to Malibu Creek State Park, a lot of people warned us of how scary the road was to get there. We had a flashback to our first little trip to Lake Isabella. Narrow, windy mountain roads with rock overhangs on one side and a cliff down to oblivion on the other.
Well, that nightmare did not materialize. In fact, the trip there was as uneventful as one could imagine. A short drive up the 101 where most of the way was a 6-lane freeway with just the last 5 miles or so a straight 2 lane highway. I think the fact that we did not come from the ocean side of Malibu was the difference. Las Virgenes Road goes all the way through to PCH (Pacific Coast Highway, AKA California Highway 1) and it dumps you off right next to Pepperdine University. I am guessing driving a big RV thru the road to there would not be too pleasant.
We are a young family traveling the country in our Airstream. To read more about us, click here.