Ray and Lori's Bogus Adventure: Flagstaff, Sedona, Jerome and finally Malibu!

By the time we got to Flagstaff, my lungs were not any better. Even standing outside the truck talking to Ray was causing me to be short of breath. The elevation of Flagstaff is 7000 feet. I told Ray that I thought we had better not go to the Grand Canyon at all, as it is higher again. We had been there about 8 years ago with Jim and Marline, and the overwhelming beauty of it would have been great to see. But seriously, I just wanted to get to the coast so that I could hopefully breathe a bit better.

As we had arrived in Flagstaff at about 1:00 pm, we decided to take a drive to Jerome which was about an hour and a half away. And then we would go into Sedona for dinner. We took the scenic drive through to Sedona (which is on the way to Jerome). It was the most amazing drive that we had been on. The roads wound their way through the canyon which had that rich red mountains.

There was quite a bit of smog in the air, so in this photo you can not really see the beautiful red color of the mountain side.

We made our way to Jerome which is an old mining town. Silver and copper was mined at one time in Jerome. The current population of Jerome is less than 500 people. They sport a fire hall and a police station. The little town winds its way down the side of Cleopatra Hill. There are tiny little shops and restaurants and with tourism now being important to the economy there were lots of people milling about. For the motorcyclist the ride from the west side of Jerome through the mountains is a spectacular drive. As you wind your way through the town, you may quickly see the garage door which is built into the mountain side. We could not get a photo of it as there is absolutely no where to pull off to take the picture.

We found this young lady making animals our of clay. She had a table full of giraffes, zebras, elephants, turtles and even a moose! We bought a giraffe from her, and she let me take her picture for our blog.

We spent about an hour and a half poking through the shops of local artwork and locally made jewellery. Then we drove back to Sedona to have some dinner. The major thing that attracts people to this city of 10,000 are the beautiful red sandstone formations which are called the Red Rocks of Sedona. When the sun is setting at night the colours are a brilliant orange-red. Over the years there have been many movies shot in the Sedona area. One of the older movies is Stagecoach which was shot in 1938. The elevation of Sedona is 4500 feet,and yes my lungs were not happy with that!

After having a nice dinner we drove back to Flagstaff. Flagstaff is fairly large with a population of 62,000. The city is named after a Ponderosa Pine flagpole which was made by a scouting party from Boston to celebrate the United States Centennial on July 4th 1876. There are many of those Ponderosa Pines in the area and our campsite was nestled in some of those large pine trees and with the wind blowing through the trees, we had an excellent sleep.

We were now on a mission to get to a lower elevation which would also bring us closer to Cia, Derian and kids in Thousand Oaks. Our goal for the day was to stop in Barstow California for the night. We crossed into California at Needles where we had to go through the Agricultural "border". As we waited in the line up the motorhome in front of us was getting a thorough search by the guards. They even went underneath the motorhome searching for what I am not sure, as this is a check point to make sure that you are not bringing specific vegetables and fruits into the State. Fortunately for us, we only had some potatoes and a bagged salad. They were interested in citrus fruits and tomatoes. Had we gotten searched, it would not have been a big deal for us. While in Needles we gassed up the truck and and at $5.09 a gallon it was the highest price yet that we paid for gas.

Driving towards Barstow was interesting. We were definitely in the desert now and what I found most interesting was the the cactus looked black and dead like they were starved for some rain. But it rarely rains in the desert so why would they look like that. Maybe there had been a fire, but the sage brush was the usual sage "green" that it is supposed to be. So not sure what was going on with the cactus.

Barstow is in San Bernardino County and is about 55 miles north of the city of San Bernardino and has a population of about 23,000 Barstow is also home to Marine Corps Logistics Base. This town is also in the Mojave Desert so is hot and dry. We camped in the only campsite the town has. It was small but the sites were spotless. It was so nice to sit outside in the heat, but it did get a bit cool as it got dark. My lungs had improved 100% at this lower elevation! Here is Ray sitting back and enjoying a well deserved drink.

While in Barstow, I called to reserve our campsite at Malibu for the next couple of weeks. We do not normally reserve sites but as the Malibu RV campground is very popular it is recommended to pre book. The young guy I spoke with on the phone was very wishy washy telling me they had no sites on the ocean side available for the two weeks I was asking for. So I confirmed that there was a site on the ocean side for Saturday and Sunday night and booked that.

We headed off about 0930 on Saturday morning. With a low gas tank (yup,,,you know where I am going with this), I asked Ray if he was going to gas up in Barstow before we left. Ray said no, we would get gas at the next town which according to the GPS was about 13 miles down the road. So off we go and as we come into the next "town" there were no services whatsoever. Ray asked how far was the next town,,,,,,29 miles away was Kramer Junction. He said we can make it! We got to about 16 miles outside of Kramer Junction, and Ray said that he thought we should go back to Barstow because if we got to that town and there were no services, we would be screwed because we would not make it back to Barstow or the town of Mojave which was about 20 miles past Kramer Junction and we definitely would not make it there. So we found somewhere to turn around and backtracked to Barstow. We did not run out of gas, but we also did not want to take the chance of running out in the middle of the Mojave desert either! All in all, we lost about 45 minutes. When we did finally get back to Kramer Junction, there were no services there so good thing we did turn back. Kramer Junction was quite interesting because for somewhere that has no services it has something else that we had not seen. There was acres and acres of solar panels. In the middle of nowhere!

As we got closer to the Santa Clarita which is where we would meet up with the Interstate 5, the traffic got crazier! We branched off towards Simi Valley and I called Derian to find out if any of the roads through the Malibu Canyon would allow the 5th wheel, if not then we would have had to go north to a town called Oxynard which would take us over to the Pacific Coast Highway and into Malibu. Derian gave us the name of the cut off that we needed to take and as we were only about 30 minutes away, he said to call them once we got set up in the campground and they would come down to visit us.

We pulled into Malibu RV campsite around 1:30 pm and went inside to check in. While in there we asked again about staying in the same ocean side site for two weeks. The very nice lady working the counter told us that should not be a problem (not sure what that young guy the previous night was talking about). As we are at the counter, Derian walks in. We were thrilled to see him and looked outside for his truck to wave at the kids. His truck was there, but so was their trailer! That had booked in the site right beside us! What a wonderful surprise that was to have them camping with us!!!!

Here is a picture of Ray riding Riley's bike and wearing his safety glasses!