#414 Bolado Park, Tres Pinos, California

I wanted to stay at a Boondock on the way south and there was a place about an hour below San Francisco. It was in a national forest even by a lake but the weather had turned towards very hot. Although it was amazing up at Olema it appeared that it was going to be about a hundred degrees at this National Forest an hour or south. 100 degrees is not a good time to boondock. With our generator can only run one air conditioner and you never really get comfortable you just survive. We needed to find a hookup. There were all kinds of possibilities from Monterey going south on Big Sur and I thought this was a possibility and I kept finding that they were either no availability or was 180 a night or they wouldn't allow anything over 25 ft. As it turns out that's fine because later in this adventure we went down the Big Sur in just a passenger truck but I would have had no business going down that road pulling a camper so it worked out just fine by them not having anything available.

We had stayed at a fairground in Tres Pinos a few years back and thought we would try it again. It was quiet there before but now things have picked up a bit. I called the office and they said they didn't have availability until Monday and I need something Friday. I mentioned to the office folks there used to be no RVs here and max availability. She said she wasn't sure but it could have been because of the pandemic or possibly because of the fires that had been here lately. There were lots of people living at the fairgrounds now. It’s more like a trailer park and since it's such a small town I think they don't mind the income. I reserved a site for Monday for a week. I called her back the next day and I said I'm kind of in a pinch, are there any cancellations or any sites of any kind? She said well if you don't mind not having sewer I could put you down in some other sites for a few nights and then move you back to one that has sewer later. I said I'm really glad I called back because I don't even need sewer unless I'm at a place for about a week. She said, in that case, come on it's fine I'll put you down there where do you have water and electricity and I said that's all I wanted anyway so everything was great and I headed that way.

It was more than 2 hours it was more like three and a half and other than just stopping somewhere in the heat we didn't have much of a choice so we just had a long drive that day. I'm always concerned about Bert in these situations because he's back in the camper and if it's 100° Outdoors it's probably getting close to a hundred in the camper. We don’t want an overheated cat so most of the time we would run the air conditioner off the generator as we were going down the road to keep him in good shape.

We arrived and introduced ourselves and got checked in and she said are you aware your registration is out of date and I said what? She said it's not going to bother me too much because it proves you're the owner but you need to get that taken care of. The truck was fine but the camper was completely out of date on the license plate.

We settled in up was under a shade tree but it took a little parking to get it just right. We were as happy as a clam way away from everybody, 50 amp service, and water. Man, I was like a fat rat in a cheese factory.

As we were parking the RV I noticed a stray cat wandering about 500 ft away. I didn't give it a thought but for whatever reason the next day he had decided to live on our roof of the RV. He was up there every day and when I walked towards him he would run away but I think he wanted to be fed and I avoided that because it would just encourage him. I've also found that stray cats and Bert fight so we don't want that. We went into Tres Pinos and looked for the Mexican place we had been to 2 years earlier but it had died of covid. There was a cowboy steak house that we eventually went to but for our first night we went on down into town to Hollister which is about 15 minutes away. What are pretty predictable so we got to get a bite to eat, check by the hardware store, groceries, fuel, and then head on back. We spent most of our days hiking and having relief from the heat with a full hookup. We went on a cool hike at a park and I didn't know where we were at the time but we were actually walking the fault line. We had been on a hike we found on the All Trails app located in the called Hollister Hills State Vehicular Recreation Area.

When we got there it was kind of a bit remote we had to pay 12 bucks to enter. Lots of people were doing all kinds of off-road vehicles and dirt bikes and quite a few people were camping in RVs back up in there but no hookups. The road became a one-lane one-way dirt road and it hugged a hill. You had to watch your step or fall off the cliff. We got to the trailhead and started enjoying the walk and we kept seeing seismograph equipment and such and wondered what was going on. We walked parallel to a dry creek bed the whole time. When we were finished and on the way back we saw a building called Faultline Motorsports and I'm like wow we were walking the San Andreas fault the whole time. All I can say is wow It would have been one thing to have done it on purpose but to have done it accidentally, that was funny.

While we were at Tres Pinos we wanted to go to one of the national parks nearby called Pinnacles. We didn't know quite what it was but it was very interesting rock formations. I knew it can get really hot there but I looked at the elevation and thought it would be a little cooler. I had convinced myself it wasn't going to be that hot but it was. We should have been there early in the morning maybe 8 am but did not. We got lucky because we found a hike that was shaded about the whole way. When we got to the namesake of the trail called Moses Springs it was so cool it was just a tiny little spring filling a tiny pool. Pic It came from the Bible story of where Moses touched a rock and water came out.

We hiked every other day went here and there and at some level, we were just kind of surviving the heat and getting to know California before we checked in at our new job. I asked India if it would be nice if we could check out the Big Sur. It was just too me too much to do in one day. We could tell that if we went South we could get on the 101 eventually and then it would go to a place called Morrow Bay we would go then North through a town called Cambria. This is where Hearst Castle is then you would be on the Big Sur for 2 hours plus all the way to Monterey.

Cambria appeared to be the midpoint so we looked for a room in Cambria. Everything seemed to be about $150 for just a cinder block room and I thought well gee I'll keep looking. I looked on Air BnB and then I found a place on Craigslist that was an entire house with an ocean view for about the same amount of money so I jumped right on it. I made a reservation and that would be our halfway stop this would turn into a scam and I talked all about it in the next post but that kind of sucked the wee bit.

Since there's so much detail on the other post I'll just say that we finished our Big Sur Adventure got on back and I'll leave the details for that other post. By the time we got home, it was about time to go on down towards Neal Taylor Nature Center, our new job.

On the night before we left a new stray cat showed up and we have to assume this one was not friendly. He must have been the mob boss of the stray cats in the area. We had had no problems with the other kitty for 8 days but on this night we heard a big catfight noise outside. Bert might have been in trouble because he was laying on the side with his paws up in the air. That was either a defensive position and he was doing okay or being on your back with your belly exposed was not a good place to be for a cat. Regardless I broke it up and he was not allowed to go back outside after that. He was pretty spooked and he seemed wounded but not too bad. No noticeable cuts or bleeding.

We needed a 2 hour stop between Tres Pinos and Santa Barbara so we picked a place called Paso Robles and we stayed at a Harvest Host there for one night.

Fairground in Tres Pinos, California

Address: 9000 Airline Hwy, Tres Pinos, CA 95075