This morning Richard dropped Elaine the Elantra off at Enterprise Rent-a-Car in Napa and then walked the 15 minutes back to Newman. The car rental was $44 and we used $12 of gas yesterday. We enjoyed having a car for sightseeing and errands yesterday, but we are thinking whether or not we even need to get another tow car if we can pick up rental cars wherever we go? I would need to sit and do the math on the initial investment in the vehicle, plus the annual depreciation on the vehicle, then factor in any repairs and maintenance, add in the annual insurance cost, Provincial licensing, plus the cost of the tow system, and then do a cost benefit analysis vs renting cars wherever we go. Right now I think I’m leaning towards just renting a vehicle when we need one, if its feasible to do so, but again I haven’t done the math yet.
Where is Stan the man when I need him? Stan was my numbers guy when I worked at the Bank. A wizard with stuff like this!
We left Napa around 10am and our GPS said that our drive would be just about 2 hours and 45 minutes. Richard was counting on the drive being much longer though, because we had to go through what he thought were some heavy traffic areas in San Jose, and Oakland.
The morning started out sunny in Napa, but as we drove south, we started to see some haze and clouds. The scenery was nice though with lots of rolling hills and agricultural land.
We had to take so many different highways today to avoid Sacramento and San Francisco and we eventually ended up on Hwy 101 South again for most of our drive today.
Here we are getting on Hwy 101 South towards Los Angeles.
When we got off Hwy 101 on Hwy 156 the scenery definitely changed.
Nice tree lined Hwy.
Hwy 156 led us onto Hwy 1, California’s major north-south state highway that runs most of the Pacific coastline of California.
We travelled through Watsonville, California where the winter strawberries that you will be buying in Canada are grown, if you aren’t getting Plant City, Florida strawberries. We always check out every package when we are at home and we prefer to buy Plant City strawberries, if we can find them in Canada. We also drove through Castroville, California which surprisingly is the ‘Artichoke Capital of the World’. The artichoke is actually the state vegetable of California, even though the part you eat of an artichoke is a flower and not a vegetable! March is apparently the best time to buy an artichoke. I didn’t snap any photos of the artichoke fields, but they are a very densely leaved plants, that grow low to the ground. I had never seen artichokes being grown before. Richard hates artichokes, so if I buy them, I’m eating them on my own!
And shortly after leaving Castorville, we arrived at Marina Dunes RV Resort. We actually beat our GPS by 6 minutes today based on the calculated time the GPS had estimated, when we left Napa. That was a first for us! We are usually way behind our original GPS timing.
The check in for this RV Resort in Marina Dunes was all done on-line. This morning I checked in on my phone when we were still in Napa, then I received a confirmation email telling me what site we would be in. When we arrived we stopped at the bulletin board outside the office at Marina Dunes to pick up our tag for the front window, and a brochure with the wifi code and information about the local area. When we finished parking Newman I hit a link in the email that they had sent me this morning, letting them know that we had arrived. What a slick operation! This is the only RV park we have ever stayed at where we didn’t have a 15 minute delay upon arriving to check into the park.
In the background you can see the dunes from Marina State Beach. After we got settled and had our lunch, we decided to walk to the beach.
Going for a walk to the beach. The entrance to the beach was half a mile from our RV Resort.
As you can see there is a lot of sand that has left the beach.
The vegetation has changed from what we experienced in Napa. We are definitely in a more arid climate, with cactus and scrub.
This guy who was fishing was waiting for the fish to bite.
The guy with the helmet on was waiting for some wind, so that he could go paragliding.
This guy was waiting for the paraglider to take off, so he could get a video.
This guy was waiting for the surf to come up.
And this girl has been patiently waiting to get rid of her coat, sit outside and feel some heat in the sunshine! Finally today the temperature hit 18C in Marina, California! It has taken 9 days since we left Vancouver Island to finally feel some heat in the sun!
After we waited awhile for the paraglider to take off, and realizing he was waiting for the wind, which had died, we decided to walk to Walmart on the other side of the highway from our RV park.
Thank goodness for Walmart! With no car, we are very thankful that Walmart was a short 18 minute walk away from our RV Resort.
That ‘I just shopped at Walmart look!’
Walking back to Newman. The RV Resort is not full and we have a good ‘back in’ spot. Our bedroom is at the back of Newman, so if we were in a spot across the road from us, the highway noise off Hwy 1, would be coming into our bedroom all night. As it is, I can hear the traffic outside on Hwy 1, but it shouldn’t bother us as much at the back of Newman, when we go to bed.
We have been patiently waiting since we planned our RV trip to Florida, and also booked our visit to the Monterey Peninsula, to play ‘The Inn at Spanish Bay‘ at Pebble Beach tomorrow. Pebble Beach is my favourite golf course, and I have definitely played a lot of golf courses all over the world. We have also played Spyglass Hill Golf Course at Pebble Beach, so to be able to check one more Pebble Beach golf course off our bucket list tomorrow will be outstanding! The temperature is supposed to be 14C and sunny for our round tomorrow. Richard has another car rental arranged for the day, so we can also explore 17 Mile Drive before our round. I’m getting excited just to go to the Pro Shop, to see what souvenirs I can pick up from our visit! I still proudly wear my Pebble Beach golf jackets that we picked up last time we were here about 8 years ago!
We’ll tell you all about our day tomorrow at The Inn at Spanish Bay. I’m sure you will be patiently waiting for the blog tomorrow to hear about our experience at Pebble Beach, but I will have to delay it a day, so we can enjoy the full Pebble Beach experience! Please be patient, I’ll get back to you shortly!
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