San Luis Obispo, CA - Nov 2006

Happy Thanksgiving! We are thankful for so many things but one thing came to the forefront during our stay at El Chorro County Park -- it's that we are pretty good at making the best out of what sometimes appears to be a not so great situation. We've found that we can usually find something good about each and every place that we stay, but sometimes it's easier than others. El Chorro was one of those places where we had to really dig deep to find something good, but in the end, we left with a list (a short one albeit) of good things to say.

We picked El Chorro for several reasons. The first and primary one being that it was a first-come-first-served campground with full-hookups -- to us that meant that we could arrive at the beginning of what would be a very busy holiday week and most likely get a site where we could hang out over Thanksgiving. Another plus -- the park had pretty cheap weekly rates and also an off-peak discount, so planting there for a week wouldn't break the bank. Another good thing was that it was close to a good sized town -- San Luis Obispo, so most likely we would be able to find a restaurant to enjoy a decent Thanksgiving meal. And finally, it was very close to Pismo Beach and Morro Bay and that would allow us to do a little touristing. Well, two out of four turned out to be all we got.

We arrived on the Tuesday morning before Thanksgiving and found it to be a cute little park -- paved sites, full hookups, shade trees and large shrubs between the sites that provided some privacy. However, when we drove around the campground we didn't see any open sites. It turned out that all the hookups sites at the campground were full and we discovered that, while it is a first-come-first-served campground, groups can reserve the park and reserve they did -- to the tune of all 45 sites occupied for the whole week. What made it especially aggravating was that I had called that morning and the administrative office said that they did have sites available, what they neglected to say was that they were in the primitive section -- not in the full hookup area. The campground hosts told us that the entire hookup area had been reserved for eight months! Now why do you suppose the administrative office didn't tell us that? Anyway, we drove to the primitive area and were disappointed to find little more than a dirt parking lot. I immediately began calling other RV parks in the area, but soon discovered that every park within a 50 mile radius was booked solid for the week -- grrrr. So we filled our water tank and then drove around the dirt parking lot and picked a site on the end and grumbled about having to spend Thanksgiving week in such a lousy location and with no hookups to boot. Leveling was a challenge and we had to haul out and arrange all four bags of our leveling blocks -- the site was that far off. By now, I'm thoroughly disgusted and took off to the pay station to begrudgingly give them some money. I walked up the hill to the pay station and found out that, unlike the full hookup sites, these "lovely" primitive sites had no discounts whatsoever -- no off season and no weekly rate. So we ended up paying only $1 per day less than the folks in the lush, full hookup sites -- what a rip off! And to top it all off, there was no dump station in the park and we had to pay $2/day per dog -- geez, was I pissed off at that. As if my dogs were going to do something that would mar their lovely dirt parking lot.

Okay, now the good things. We got our satellite and tv dishes set up quickly -- what with no trees to block our view to the southern sky! Then our neighbors from our previous campground (Laguna Seca) showed up and parked next to us. Dick & Elaine (now fulltimers) were from Katy, Texas and we had fun visiting with them while at the park. I felt bad because we had told them about this place and they moved from the lovely vistas of Laguna Seca to this not so great place based on our suggestion. The park had lots of trails and Frank was able to get some great exercise going up and down Eagle Rock hill. We did find a great restaurant in town (The Apple Farm) to enjoy our Thanksgiving meal and we even found a good Mexican food place for another night on the town. The botanical garden in the park was actually quite good featuring a lot of exotic Mediterranean varieties.

One day we drove over to Morro Bay and we had wonderful weather and enjoyed exploring the bay and getting up close and personal with the famous Morro Rock. There is a surfer in the bottom right corner of this photo -- showing you the size of this lump of volcanic explosion. We checked out the Morro Bay campground while there too and found it nice, but once again totally booked for that week and also lacking hookups. Oh well, maybe some other time.

On another day's adventure we took off to Pismo Beach and really enjoyed this cute town. There had to be at least a half dozen very large RV parks here and when we drove through a few of them, we noticed that they were filled to the max. The only place that had a couple of openings was Pismo Dunes County Park. It wasn't a surprise as to why they had a couple of openings -- the park was a long, narrow, one-row strip that was wedged between the freeway and the train tracks and their holiday rates were $43 per night. Amazingly, almost all of the 150+ sites were occupied. Mostly by off-road vehicle enthusiasts (who probably have lost most of their hearing so wouldn't notice the train noise!)

Our favorite adventure in Pismo Beach was the Monarch Butterfly Grove. Sitting right next to the state beach, this relatively small grove of eucalyptus trees is home to hundreds of thousands of monarch butterflies who migrate there during the winter months. On the day we visited, the butterfly count was only in the tens of thousands, but it was still an impressive showing. During cool temperatures, the butterflies "sleep" in clusters in the tree branches and when the air temperature reaches around 50 degrees, they start to become active. We were there around noon -- just as the butterflies were coming to life and it was magical to see hundreds of them swirling and flitting all around us. Sadly, the light in the grove was dappled sunlight and that made it difficult to take photographs.