Winter 1998 - San Diego to Cincinnati
Journals - 31 January 1998
Day 3
31 January 1998 (Ococillo SVRA; mileage = 45.8) -- X - We woke up to find
some people from Maryland in the site next to us. They had a van with bikes
on top. He's a professor on sabbatical and they're touring all over the
place for a few months. We did have to pay for our campsite, but only $3
each. They did have a hiker/biker area, but we sure couldn't have found it
without being told where it was. We expected to leave there and climb
another thousand feet or so to Julian, but as it turned out, we descended
the whole way. That was pretty cool! We had soup/salad and apple pie in
Julian. I went into the cat store to make Chris happy, and we pretty much
descended the whole rest of the day, too. We stopped at Tamarisk campground
in the Anza Borrego state park and talked to Glenn, who was on duty, for a
while. He was super nice and we talked about bike touring and about life as
a park-ranger wanna be. We decided to take 78 to Salton Sea, instead of the
way Chris came in. It was nice and flat. We had some head winds, but I
guess we were descending enough to make up for it. The scenery is really
neat. I liked the barrel cacti growing up out of the rocks in the
mountains. We only had 3 hours' riding time today, so conditions were
obviously better than the last 2 days. Where we are camped is a weird place
where off-road vehicles come to drive around in the desert. They have
picnic tables with a shelter over each one scattered all over the place.
And it's free! There's a big, sandy spot up the side of a mountain, and
people on 2-, 3- and 4-wheel dirt bikes, as well as dune buggies and
regular trucks, are going up and down it. Really weird. It's like skiing
with a motor. Some people next to us just brought over a lamp for us to
use. That was really nice. We had a Knorr and some garlic potatoes for
supper. It was quite yummy! There's no water here, so we're on the
conservation plan. It actually rained a little. It looked like it would,
which made us nervous to just camp anywhere because it's a giant flash
flood area.
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