At the end of January, Meowmy and I took a lovely trip down to Southern California for a week. We headed down Highway 101 towards Santa Barbara, stopping for the night at Arroyo Hondo Vista Point between Gaviota and Goleta. It’s a perfect overnight spot on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean, where we watched a beautiful sunset and met a local van dweller who stays there often.
After a nice stroll down to the beach, we continued South with quick stops in Santa Barbara and Emma Wood State Beach, just North of Ventura. We saw a lot of beach front RV campgrounds between Carpinteria and Faria Beach too, something to note for future trips. Then we headed to Aliso Creek Rest Area, a popular overnight stop a few miles after San Onofre State Beach and ten miles North of Oceanside. Meowmy highly recommends getting there before 8pm because it’s fill up quickly, despite being a fairly large rest area with a lot of parking. Meowmy took me for a long walk around the big park, I even climbed some trees and made some new human fans that took photos of me. Due to it’s busy nature, this rest stop can be quite noisy at night with all the traffic coming through, especially the big rig trucks.
The next morning we headed to Fiesta Island for the San Diego Vanlife Connections Meetup. We were one of the first ones there so we got a nice spot with a view of Mission Bay. Over 100 vans and RV’s showed up that day for a fun and successful meetup! Meowmy made a lot of new friends and many people liked our turn-key solution rig. There were a lot of great van builds to see and the night ended with a bon fire. A bunch of vanners decided to overnight outside the Fiesta Island gates, but it was pretty busy that night, so we didn’t stay there. We heard that you could overnight at Ocean Beach Park as it’s only closed from 2-4am but Meowmy thought it looked a bit shady, so we headed to the San Diego Zoo, where we heard you can overnight in the parking lot without any trouble. What a peaceful place to spend the night!
Our fourth day consisted of driving back North to Westlake Village where Meowmy visited with her best friend from college. Lisa took us on her pontoon on Westlake Lake and I enjoyed watching all the ducks and birds. We spent the night in Agoura Hills, then took off to visit Kyna, the lead singer of the band The Go Ahead that Meowmy manages. They went out bar hopping in the historic Montrose downtown area where some movies have been filmed while I lounged in the RV.
We took off for Grover Beach the next morning to visit JC and Carly who just had a baby, then headed to Paso Robles where Meowmy went cider tasting with her friend Heather and we spent the night watching the amazing Super Blue Moon. The next morning we headed home. What a great week!