Skipper Sails: California

Well here I am doing another early morning post. Not much to report this far but I had the time so I thought I'd share. Yesterday we drove from Gila Bend to Pine Valley, California. Pine Valley is a small town close to Julian and about 35 miles outside of San Diego. We were planning to go all the way to the beach yesterday but we seem to have an affinity for mountain towns. Pine valley won us over as soon as we walked outside and felt the wind and warm sun in the air, the grass on our toes, and saw the pine trees above and mountains surrounding us. Its a very quaint and cool town so far! The drive through the desert to get to the coastal areas was intense! I've never seen such rolling sand dunes followed by mountains of rocks on either side of us while we were winding up a 3,000 ft. gradient. We passed through a part of the desert that began the elevation gain and saw a sign that said "Turn off A/C next 10 miles to avoid overheating". This was a little bit daunting because we were pulling a heavy trailer up a sharp long hill with very high winds. We made it, chugging along at a comfortable 40 mph. Japanese cars are the best. Anyway, when we made it to the top of the elevation change we were very relieved and ready to get out of the car for a bit. So we stopped at an observation tower at the top of the cliffs but it was closed due to high winds. Turned out the winds had been about 100 mph that day, pushing against us, and had knocked out all surrounding power.

Here's the lookout from the observation tower deck. We drove from those wind turbines and beyond!