#416 Neal Taylor Nature Center, Santa Barbara, CA

Lake Cachuma Sunset

The blessed day had finally come. The job we applied for was site host starting July 17 till May 1st. They had asked us if we could be there in 30 days and I said sure. I didn’t want to have to drop everything and hurry there but I wanted to make sure we got the job. I said we’ll be there well we took the job not even being a hundred percent sure what our duties were. I knew wintering in southern California for free sounded great to me. I had asked if the job would have anything to do with bathrooms and they said no. They had described that we would be doing a Bat presentation on Saturday nights as they have a colony of 350 that live on site. We would also ride around in a golf cart on the weekends letting people know about the Nature Center. We honestly knew very little else. I just had a gut feeling it would be a good thing.

We pulled up to the Lake Cachuma entrance and by now we have already realized that there is a difference in the weather here compared to Santa Barbara. Lake Cachuma was so appealing because it would have Santa Barbara weather which is kind of perfect. In the summer maybe 75 78 degrees and in the winter low of 45 degrees.

Keep in mind we've already completed completely committed to doing this but we started realizing that Lake Cachuma can be a hundred and ten degrees in summer and in the winter it can be 35 overnight. It does warm up pretty nicely by noon in the winter. It would not be Santa Barbara perfect but it would have to be okay. Another thing to keep in mind is if I were to come back again I would not do it in the summer I would come in the fall when it's already cooled off.

We figured that when we got there the guy might have been in a three-piece suit or a park ranger uniform. I was just so pleased that the guy that met us was in something of a casual golf shirt and shorts. It just gave me such a good feeling that everything was going to be okay as he was kind of laid-back looking. He was quite professional but at the same time he had that kind of California dude look and it just made me feel so good.

He was a guy my age somewhere between 50 and 65 and just as friendly as could be. His name was Ross and he would be our go-to guy as Julie the executive director had been taking some medical leave for some surgeries that were still healing.

I had asked where our site would be and he said #49. I looked at a campground map and it was kind of in the middle of everything as this part of the campground had sort of a trailer park feel to it. If I could pick my site it would be on the edge of the woods but in this case, we don't get to pick our site so we just had to be gracious and not think about it.

He helped us get backed in and said are you guys just get settled in and we'll see you maybe tomorrow afternoon at 3 p.m. for a meet and greet.

We got hooked up and turned on the air and relaxed and began to realize hey we're finally here. We let Bert out to take a sniff around but we had decided we were not going to let him have total freedom because we didn't know what the rules would be. He could certainly go out in the evenings but we couldn't just let him run wild, especially being brand new.

It was so nice to be here as it was very beautiful. The lake is 6 miles long and we walked down towards the marina as they had some live music going. It was really cool and we had a sandwich and a drink. The food was really tasty but kind of campground overpriced it was kind of like a $16 hamburger.

We still really felt good about being here. I thought it was funny that I was sharing my picnic table with about six or eight bees. They really like licking not just sugar but everything like even the ketchup has a certain amount of sugar in it so they were just liting on everything. I was making a point of ignoring them because they're harmless. I poured a little Coke into a puddle on the corner of the table and let them be attracted to that and lick that sugar so they would leave me alone. I remember people looking at me like why aren't you killing them and I just don't do that. I was quite patient with them as they were annoying but harmless.

There was a little bit of camp, free Wi-Fi there and that helped reduce our usage but we had a decent signal and life is pretty good. We were able to find some TV channels and we just kick back for our first evening and felt good about being here.

The next day was Sunday and they met with us and just gave us an indoctrination and then they said just get to know the place and be comfortable and we'll meet with you a week now for your first day of work. The executive director had been away from her job for a good bit because she had had hip surgery or something of that nature. A guy named Ross was our go-to and I didn't know it at the time but he's actually the husband. I guess they were partners in running the nature center. If she needed something he helped out but until she recovered he was doing it all and working full-time as a carpenter. He was our training guy and I didn't have any complaints. In my first week, I was trained on how to promote the nature center by riding around in a golf cart on Friday evenings for two hours and about four hours on Saturday mornings. The other significant thing was India and I learned how to do the going batty presentation where we did a talk about our bat boxes that are in the backyard. We made an effort to be informative and make it lively and wonderful. and we had at its peak 200 bats in each box so it was a pretty cool deal. I got pretty good at it after a while and I became good at riding around in the golf cart too because I learned how to create quick relationships with people.

I found out right away that I would need an icebreaker like, Hi I'm the welcoming guy! because when they see a golf cart pull up they think they've done something wrong.

There are about 500 camping areas at Lake Cachuma and maybe 150 of them had full hookups and about 50 to 70 of them had water and electricity only. Everything else was for tents. They also had yurts and cabins.

We were a little far away from everything so it took about 40 minutes to get to Santa Barbara and it was a heck of a windy wiggly hill called the San Marcos Pass. I did get used to it but it was still a bit of a nail-biter sometimes.

Hiking and exploring

We wanted to find a hike in Santa Barbara so we typically look at what's available on all trails the app

It showed a hike called the lagoon near the campus of UC Santa Barbara.

I think we've benefited from our first visit that school wasn't back in yet but there was a parking lot that you can pay $2 and it would give you several hours on the online app so that worked out well enough.

It was a pretty big loop where you follow the coastline clockwise right down by the water and then up a hill and continue a loop that eventually goes down the hill by the lagoon then back up your parking place.

We found it to be about two miles which is just perfect for us. There were lots of pretty views of the ocean and whenever we got towards the descent we saw something called The Labyrinth.

It was just as cool as can be. There were stones laid out in a meditative walking pattern. I've seen these at this Episcopal Church before and other places but here's a picture of it.

pretty cool so we walk the Labyrinth it's very meticulous or monotonous or something but do we got finished we realize we were only half done so we just had half as plenty it took some time. I have an hour to do the maze.

When we were up on the knoll I took a picture of the rocky coastline against the Pacific Ocean. When we got home I looked and it looks like our cat Bert. I'll show you a picture of the coastline and our cat and you can see what I mean I hope.

Another hike was called Ellwood Park and we soon began to realize that Santa Barbara and the entire region is a resting spot for the monarch butterflies they go from Mexico to Canada and they rest here for a while during the winter. We had hoped we would see thousands but we realized that the article we looked at was from like 1980 when they had a hundred thousand butterflies here. Because of the development and the cutting of the eucalyptus trees, the butterflies are pretty much gone. You might see 5 or 10 or 50 but that's about it. We found out you can find quite a few at Pismo Beach, jumping forward a bit we went to Pismo Beach when the kids visited us here in January. We were thrilled they had 22 thousand butterflies in January so that was a nice treat.

Elwood Park is in a small town called Goleta which is north of Santa Barbara. Most people would consider it Santa Barbara but it's just twenty thousand people. When we were at the butterfly preserve in Elwood in the Goleta area we had a nice hike. I did see something strange on the trail. It looks like somebody had been homeless and they left a bunch of their debris there. I got the feeling they were hauling off a guy's stuff. I'll show a picture of that here.

My heart goes out to the homeless but they sure do just set up camp just any ol where. The trail followed the coastline. It's probably half a mile to get to the ocean and then you can follow the coastline for half a mile and then turn back but we really enjoyed looking at the California coast from way up high. There were some really cool folks flying gliders with white remote controls that were really cool when we enjoyed that.

As long as I'm talking about hikes we did regular nights at Lake Cachuma and there were quite a bit of interesting things to see. It was a little disturbing to see how low the lake was. There was just a dried-up area that used to be a boat ramp. One hike went down towards what we call the Mohawk camping area I found this cool tree that actually looks like an alligator and I called it, Cachuma gator.

What about hikes would be in Solvang it was called Hans Christian Anderson Park it is a horse trail but it does have some pretty tough Hills and some pretty big defense and we can walk and turn that into about two miles we enjoyed that we had to have lots of cool options to make or exercise routine good and quite interesting we did find one called Nottoway Park and that's before we even had any reason to leave pajama we went enjoyed it went up to the waterfall there wasn't much to see there cuz it was so dry but it would be sort of a foreshadowing of our living there because a month or so later we ended up taking a job there I just wanted to talk a little bit about all cool hikes

What other hike we found was called the San Marcos Foothills Preserve.

It had a pretty well-developed Trailhead parking area and we got out and just started walking down but was like a dirt road we went down to a pretty large descent and the only real complaint we had is it was unmarked in almost every way so we got to a point to where the road just kind of came to a barricade and we begin to realize that will this doesn't go anywhere it's like private land we backed up a little and we found a little cat path that just one of the side of the hill and we could we manage but there was just no real markings to let you know where you were so we got lost a few times trying to get back to the trail. Not lost as much as just we were on private land and we were a little spooked about that because we don't want to be bothering the ranchers. We meandered all around and got back to her car but because of all the bunny trails, we were pretty wiped out. It's one of those hikes where it didn't go as planned but it went well enough, we were so tired when we got done.

India settled into her role working in the nature center gift shop and the donated used book library. Sometimes she could guide elementary kids at the center and she enjoyed her work at Cachuma. Another part of my job would be to do handy things around the place and the first thing on the agenda was to create an irrigation system that had kind of fallen on hard times. The source of water was there and they had lots of fittings but it was just roped off with police tape and a big mess. I was proud of how I was able to get in all back together and working again. Watching everything begin to turn green again was great as it looked dead. It was really just dormant but it looked really dead.

Pretty soon I started realizing that the people managing me are detailed oriented and I'm more of a getter-done kind of person and it seemed like sooner or later that would be a conflict. I remember being asked to check the fluid water levels in the batteries in the golf cart so I looked at each cell and there was more than enough water covering the cells and to me, that means they're fine. At some point, my supervisor said what criteria did you use to decide that they were okay? I said well the water was fully covering every cell he said well that's just not what we need and that's not good enough. He started finding all kinds of information on the internet and all that said we were supposed to measure it in a certain way and all this stuff. I mentioned I’ve seen dispensers before that if you put distilled water in it and pushed it down over the cell it automatically stopped when the water level is proper. Maybe we could buy one of those? Then I looked and saw we already have one so I’m thinking what are we even talking about?

At some point, my supervisor said I'll just take care of the battery issue you. You focus on other things. That was a polite way to say you're too stupid to put water in a battery and I took a little offense to it but had to move on.

Things went smoothly for me for a long time the only problem I can offer would be when I said I need these pipe fittings and this pipe and such it would take three weeks and lots of email discussions before we actually would get the parts. It would just take forever for anything to happen but eventually, the parts did arrive and you know I got a lot done. I started doing some testing and I realized that the sprinkler system timer zones were not all obeying the digital controller. It had seven zones and the timer would function properly on only the first three and ignored all the rest. I try to reset it I tried this I tried that. I called technical support and they said you got a bad timer.

I got to thinking about how they would have a hard time buying anything although it's only about 60 bucks but they would not want to buy anything quickly. I thought for my purposes is there a way to get this thing to work without new parts? I got to thinking the flow requirements were actually pretty small for each zone so I condensed all seven into three zones and it worked great. When I told Ross about it he said you need to as immediately as possible return it to where you found it and I just don't know why you would do such a thing.

Well, I thought that sucks because it was a great solution and it was working great but we needed to make it not work again. I allowed it to continue to work great hoping the request would fade and it did and it was allowed to continue to work great.

The golf cart

On a typical Friday, I started my campground rounds and I didn’t get too far when the golf cart stranded me as the battery was dead. It had been plugged in for many hours that week but dead all the same. It was a bad situation but I managed to get it home to the RV and using my charger I made sure it was charged all night so it would work the next morning. When my supervisor found out he got excited and said no one will ever charge my golf cart with anything but the proper charger. I said, the charger is broken, but that was irrelevant. I was a little surprised because I thought I would be congratulated for getting the golf cart back up and going so I could keep the rounds going. I just think sometimes people like rules for rules' sake.

The following week I began to try to figure out why the golf cart would sometimes charge and sometimes not charge because you can hear a humming noise when it was working. It would be very inconsistent so I took the cover off the charger to try and figure it out. I found there was a circuit board down inside the charger and if the relay inside it is not working properly it just won't charge. I suggested to the staff that maybe we should order the circuit board and they were on board with that. I started looking into where to buy one I talked to the dealer. He said before you order that we have had some problems with the quick disconnect on those and if you will just cut that out and crimp the wires together in a more correct way I think your problem will go away. I did that and you know the problem went away it started consistently charging. I just told the staff that I had fixed some bad electrical connections and they were happy.

In late October one afternoon, we were out and about and our host neighbor called and said there was a problem with the golf cart. We had a habit where she would plug in the golf cart around 2 on Fridays to make sure it was charged up for my rounds. Our friend said when she plugged it in and it made some sparky noises and the cord was smoking and melting and then the breaker tripped. She said I got to tell you it's kind of scary so you might want to come and take a look at it.

We headed on back and I walked up to the center to look at this melted cord. I thought she had exaggerated but wow the cord had really melted and part of it was stuck in the outlet and the breaker was tripped. There was a black soot mark on the outlet. Here we are again with the golf cart again and my life will be better if I don't get stranded tonight. There wasn’t much time to do any fixing as it was time to do my rounds. I did the rounds for about 2 hours and the battery survived. When I got back I looked down at the RV and I had an electrical cord end in my inventory. I cut off the melted part, put on the new end, plugged it in all night and the problem was solved.

The next day our neighbor said hey they got pretty excited about the whole cord thing and wondered what exactly happened and she told them how it had melted and how I had fixed it. Now they kind of want to talk to me about it.

I said okay so I got an email from the staff saying the cord to the golf cart was repaired in an unauthorized way and in an incorrect manner which caused their outdoor outlet to be damaged and this is just unacceptable in every way. Until further notice do not drive or use or have any interaction with the golf cart until we can get it repaired by a professional. I said okay, but I am a professional and I did repair it properly and if they're talking about that black soot mark on the outdoor outlet I didn't do that that was part of when it failed and melted. The whole thing just stung a little bit.

So all week went by and now it's around Friday midday and I haven't heard a peep out of anybody so I sent a message saying, has the golf cart been repaired and should I do my rounds? After quite a few hours they said let's just not worry about it this week.

I said to myself okay so when Saturday morning comes am I'm supposed to be out there at 7:30 doing the rounds? They haven't said one word. I didn't quite know how to act because these are the hours that I'm supposed to give them each week and it's a fairly significant part of my job description. I haven't heard one peep. I sent another email saying should I do my rounds on Saturday because I haven't heard anything. Hours and hours went by and finally, they said we do not need you to do the rounds today either. I tried to put forth something positive so I said should I just maybe rake leaves or something to get my hours this week and they said that will be fine.

During this same stretch the lights in the hall when working. I took a look with a meter to see if they had power. I took the light switch out and bypassed the switch with a jumper and they came right on so clearly it's just a bad switch. I put it all back together and picked up a switch at the hardware store and in the next day or so I put the switch in and it worked perfectly.

A day or so later I got an email from the staff. It has come to our attention that you replaced a switch in the Nature Center without pre-approval or my authorization and this is absolutely unacceptable. You need to show me exactly what switch you switched out and this cannot happen ever again. It seemed pretty hostile and between this and the golf cart, I began to be feeling so insulted that I’m kind of wondering if I'm even in the right place anymore.

The same neighbor called one afternoon as she had had some frustrations with the rangers and the nature center style of micromanaging and she was kind of looking for a job. She asked if we had ever heard of a place called Nojoqui Falls and I said yes we're done a hike there. She said why don't you ride by and see if it would be a good place to host and if there is a cell signal there. We rode by and found our phone just barely worked there and when I told our neighbor this they were disappointed because they rely on the internet and good phone service to do their job. It’s an IT remote job they do from the RV. They were disappointed that that job wouldn't work for them, but it started appealing to me.

I told India I was becoming unhappy and could we consider taking the job. She wanted to be supportive but she hadn’t had the problem I had so leaving wasn’t good for her. Over the next few days, I told her they were driving me crazy and if we did leave maybe she could commute and keep her job and that seemed like a good compromise. I met with the ranger at the falls and he offered me the job and the next thing you know we are calling it a day at the nature center. We left on November 4th. The good was good but the bad had just become too much for me to have any peace working there.