#417 Nojoqui Falls Park, November 4, 2021

Longtime neighbors say the word Nojoqui is Chumash, meaning honeymoon place. The word is frequently mispronounced. The correct pronunciation, locals say, is NAH-ho-wee.

I had become unhappy hosting for the nature center at Lake Cachuma as I said in the previous post. I was not a good fit for the personality type of the management. What's worse is they were very insulting when it came to my professional abilities. Our neighbor considered taking a job at Nojoqui falls but it had poor cell service so for them it was a no-go as they have a remote IT job.

I began to think maybe this is a good opportunity for us. She gave me the name of the ranger in charge of that park and I emailed him and submitted an application and the guy said he would like to talk. He needed a host and all this was very exciting so I met with him and next thing you know I’m hired. I told him I could start December 1st because we were going to be traveling to North Carolina for 12 days and that would give Julie our boss two weeks’ notice. He said that would be fine. Everything seemed to be rolling along pretty well. I couldn't believe it but I actually got the job. It's a really beautiful place and they are day use so everybody goes home at 6 o'clock or at dusk. We lock it up so we have the whole place to ourselves. There are no noisy people, no loud music, no camping it's just us. One other host was to arrive later in January he said. In a few days, Dominic my new boss called and said, hey I've got a situation. I know you said December 1st but could you come in two days instead which would be November 4th? I said I want to say yes but I need to find out if the people I'm working for can accept a pretty quick termination so I contacted the nature center and said I would like to give my two weeks notice. I had made the decision that I could take the new job and commute back to Lake Cachuma for two weeks if they needed me to fulfill the whole two weeks’ notice. I sent my letter of resignation and they didn't even care about the two weeks notice. It would have been awkward anyway so a good outcome. Within days we packed up all of our stuff and moved across 20 minutes away to Nojoqui Falls.

I have to admit it was a little awkward at first because I didn't know if homeless crazy people would be trying to come in at night and sleep out in the field or if I was going to feel the necessity to kind of run people off. I didn't know if gangs might come by at night. I talked to the existing host he said you're going to love this job, none of that stuff is going to happen. You will feel secure here. Initially, I thought no coyotes but about a week into it I started hearing and seeing them so we had to make Bert stay in overnight from then on.

One problem was India was not that dissatisfied with the nature center and would have been fine staying there the whole time until May. She likes working with kids but I was miserable and asked her to help me out on this one and we would do everything we could to keep her engaged at the nature center as a volunteer. She could just commute and the director said that would be fine so I thought I was good but since it was all my idea I told her I would do all the work. The job was to clean the bathrooms and emptying the trash cans and landscaping. I wouldn't ask her to do any of that if she would let me quit the other job. Since she's the queen of the universe it really doesn't matter anyway because fussing over her is what I do.

India and I walked up to the actual waterfall a few days later it was just a little trickle.

I think that if you were measuring flow it might fill up a 55-gallon drum and a couple of hours.

We noticed that we have a good flock of wild turkeys here about 25 and it's fun to hear than carrying on in the mornings and in the evenings as they kind of make their rounds. I think watching the males show off is pretty funny as they have their big feathers out wanting to get the females to notice them.

There’s also a fair amount of mule deer that come through and graze about and they're pretty used to people so they're a little bit tame but run whenever necessary. If you stay sort of quiet they tend to ignore you.

We got here on November 4th and we will stay until May.

In December we received significant rainfall. In two weeks we got over 6 inches which is great for us and for California. It made the water fall come alive and I will show the happier falls here.

To me, it seems pretty easy to maintain the place. I just go to the bathrooms each day and just make sure that the toilets and sinks look good and all that takes about an hour. Emptying all the trash cans takes about an hour I guess but you don't have to do it every day as there's only so much foot traffic here.

The other jobs are just being a presence here and using the leaf blower to keep things kind of tidy so people don't fall into gopher holes and break their ankles. It's a real laid-back job and we like it and we have become involved with the UU Fellowship ever since we got here. Ever since we got to Lake Cachuma we would go every Sunday and sit in the kind of a wedding venue reception area. They decided to have a video service there live for people who don't have good internet. I just wanted to come to meet some people because all the UU have been shut down for 2 years and we just wanted to be with some people. About the time that we had started our new job, they have been having in-person services. We're meeting in person in the sanctuary but everybody has masks on and everybody has to be vaccinated. In a perfect world to me, if everybody's vaccinated the masks would be less important but they're just trying to answer to a higher calling from either their hierarchy or a Santa Barbara County ordinance, I don't know which.

In December it's a little cool at night maybe 45 and once in a while there's frost but by 10 it's sunny and nice between 60 and 70 so that's a pretty decent winter. It's not Tampa but it's alright during the day.

There were some problems with the co-host but I also wanted to talk about all the good at Nojouqui. It was great to have the place by ourselves. At night it was very dark and quiet. There was a little bit of concern about a coyote you came by now wanting to eat the cat. When they heard him out there just screaming and howling and barking and I just couldn't understand why I was carrying on walked out there and shined my light and sure enough there was a coyote just carrying on like no tomorrow. Could figure out whether it was screaming at me saying you have no right to be here this is my territory or if they were lost looking for the pack. I have no way of knowing, just very weird. We loved visiting with our flock of turkeys. They would come by every morning. We spent a lot of our social time in Solvang and Santa Barbara. We became quite involved in the UU fellowship and joined one of the small circle groups and met every two weeks for the whole time we were at Santa Barbara. We became good friends with everyone there were about eight to ten of us and was quite wonderful. It was a long drive from Santa Barbara all the way up to Nojouqui but once I caught the best sunset ever at El Capitan State Park.

As it became closer to Christmas I mentioned to Ben our son that maybe a great Christmas present would be to fly the kids out for a visit We would have to get this approved with the other child which was born our daughter Savannah but has decided she's a guy now and changed their name to Xavier. I must be old school but it doesn't make a lot of sense to me but I'm trying to be supportive or at least not mean. Both kids thought it would be a good idea so I had to try to find out when or how to do it. Was spoke to Ben more about it he said unless you just think that Christmas day is critical flights would be a third of the price in mid-January. We got everything all firmed up and got some flights and a hotel set up and sure enough, I had two kids that came out to see us for 5 days and 3 nights. The truth is flying out and flying home is two of those days. When the kids settled in we took them on a hike up to the falls and we all had a nice time going up to a local restaurant every afternoon. We went to ostrich land but surprisingly they had been fed so much that morning that they were kind of bored with us when we got there. We went into Santa Barbara one evening and had dinner at one of our favorite restaurants. We showed around town and some of our favorite haunts. We went on a road trip on the third day and decided I wanted to show them the butterflies that Pismo Beach and some of Big Sur. We went by and saw the elephant seals near Cambria and they were birthing babies.

It was all very exciting and there was still a certain amount of sparring with some of the males but mostly it was just good to see the kids and hang out. There were some negatives so I just didn't want to not mention some of the great stuff that happened as well and their visit was one of them

The cohost at Nojoqui falls was a difficult person to live beside. He had really loud music at night and he seemed to be more difficult once I asked him to tone it down. Once he realized that it's not my thing he made it even louder so it was horrible. I had traveled to Toro Canyon a few months prior as we were doing a county parks tour trying to visit all of the possible hosting opportunities for the next season. That way if you saw an opportunity online and you had visited you know whether you would like to host there or not. Sometimes you get lucky and you can talk to the host that's there and they tell you the good things or the bad things. I had already met a ranger named Alex at Toro Canyon one afternoon and he said I don't really have any host positions available these days but maybe Rincon will be available in a month or so.

As things deteriorated with the co-host so badly at Nojoqui I asked my ranger for some contact information for Toro. I had thought that it might be good if I could just move to anywhere but here. I contacted Alex again and he said actually my timing was quite good. He said, I could use someone at Toro on the first of March as the current host is leaving on April 8th. We would co-host for one month but then you'd be on your own. I said that would be great if we can work it out with my current ranger up here. I would like to end my stay at Nojoqui and come on down. There was some negotiation or some discussion with the Rangers they decided they could live with me right starting another job somewhere else because of the Stuart situation my co-host.

Within a day I was given the green light to host at Toro and this was around Thursday. I was told that the ranger had Monday and Tuesday off so Wednesday would be a good day to arrive. I told him it would be great if I could come down maybe earlier and bring the kayaks so we agreed on Saturday and that’s what we did. When we arrived we spoke to the co-host Kristy to reassure her that we were quiet people and we were glad that here she was a pretty quiet person also because what I really wanted was serenity in the evenings.

When we returned to Nojoqui I decided to move my rig as far away as I could from the cohost to have a little peace in the evenings.

I moved the rig to a corner of the park that was about 400 feet away. We had plenty of water in our tank and I was able to plug into an outlet that was nearby and that was all we needed for the evening.

At this point, I was only planning on solving the problem of being away from his noisiness for one evening at a time. I could not possibly have a plan I just knew I was leaving Wednesday morning and I needed to get as far away as possible from this guy until then.

I disconnected and raised the RV to get it level but had not considered how much of a slope there was in the parking lot. I had my front jacks fully extended and I still wasn't level. It's not great to have it fully extended because that's like 18 inches or 20 inches of hydraulic ram travel and that's quite a lot.

I decided I need to lower and regroup and put some blocking under the front jacks. I rested the RV on a tripod stabilizer that's not designed to carry the full weight of the RV but it can be used for short periods.

You can always look back at what you should have done better but I should have done two things. I should have had the wheels chocked so the RV couldn't move. Two, I had it in my mind that we needed to just kind of start from scratch so I raised the other 4 hydraulic jacks to get a fresh start. These jacks were acting like wheel chocks.

First I lowered the front jack and rested the RV on the tripod stabilizer then I retracted these rear jacks to start the leveling process from scratch. To my sadness, the RV rolled forward and rolled over the yellow blocks I had under the front jacks and crashed into the tailgate of the brand-new truck.

Of course, this destroyed the tailgate forever but no other damage to the truck. However, I noticed the left middle jack had gotten into a bind, and as I started to retract it wasn't working properly anymore. It was working in big jerks so the hydraulic ram shaft had been bent.

Now the thing that's going through my head is because my co-host is unfriendly I moved and when I moved I did this and when I did this I've done thousands of damage to my equipment.

It's all his fault.

In some emotional way, that's true but no matter what the reason was for my moving the rig it's still my responsibility to think safety first and chock the wheels and do all the right things. I couldn't really blame it on the other guy I had to blame myself.

There was a little rambling there but mistake two was raising the rear 4 jacks because they were acting as chocks.

To fix the tailgate or replace it and replace the jack ended up at about $2,500.

I decided to move the rig to the outside of the fence and connect to an existing full hookup that was there for the rest of our stay

I was able to get a 50 amp service from across the way where there was a full hookup for a third site that they don't use right now.

This required a little creativity because to make a hookup I had to create an outlet and I knew it would only be for a moment so I just hardwired my cord into the service pole.

I was always concerned that one of the rangers would come by and say what are you doing but it didn't happen because they usually come by on the weekends.

I'm not sure how but I did not have to interact with the ranger much and they didn't ask why is my rig at a different place so I was glad.

This is a really long intro or description of why things are so bad at not away but I managed to not interact with the other guy at all and left Wednesday morning and came to Toro to start my new job.

Nojoqui is a park in Santa Barbara County, California

An 85-acre county park with a playground, picnic area & an accessible waterfall measuring 80 feet.

Address: 3250 Alisal Rd, Goleta, CA 93117