Monday, April 2, 2012

San Francisco, CA - There Goes the Neighborhood

We’re staying in a town south of San Francisco called Pacifica for the month of April. It’s about 240 miles up the coast and much of it goes through wine territory. Now, this is not the Napa Valley but we noticed all of the vineyards as we drove north. These were huge vineyards and I expected to see the name of Gallo.

As we drove north we noticed that many of the farmers put their picture on the roadway in their fields. Here’s one with the farmer and his dog. We saw pictures of fathers and sons and many of wives and husband.
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We arrived yesterday at our resort about 3:00, registered and found our site. Interesting thing - the coast gets all of the west winds from the Pacific Ocean. Whoa - these are pretty steady at 20 - 30 until they gust higher.

There’s a song in an old musical called Flower Drum Song where a young woman sings a song called ‘I Enjoy Being a Girl.’ Yesterday, when the wind was gusting to 40 or 50 mph here on the coast and the temps were in the low to mid-50’s, I was inside the RV changing it from the travel mode to the camp mode when I looked out at Gary getting the elecricity and water hooked up. The song running through my head was: ‘I Enjoy Being A Girl.’ Vacuuming the house is not my favorite chore (one I do whenever we get to a new campsite) but, I’ll take the inside jobs to the outside jobs any day - especially a day like yesterday.

Now, I know that April can be cooler along the coast up near SF: the average high is 69 and the average low is 49, but I’m thinking that this is an average - that the temps might be above 69 part of the time. Silly me. It seems that this spring has been much cooler than average and also much breezier.

This resort is located right on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The RV’s in the outside row, of course, have the premier spots and can look out on the ocean. Beautiful views. However, these sites are not so prime as the resort learned recently. Unfortunately everyone now knows that the cliff is made up not of solid rock but of shifting sand, which eroded quite severely a week of so ago in some severe winds and rains. Chunks of a trail outside the campground and some of the asphalt in the campground actually fell into the ocean. Luckily no RVs fell and no one was injured but the sound of the cliff falling in to the ocean did wake people up. When they opened their windows in the morning, some of the RV’s noticed that they were much closer to the ocean than they had been when they went to sleep.

Here you can see where the cliff fell off. The trail used to go all the way through.
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Here is a look up from the bottom of the cliff and you can see where the sand has fallen. If you look closely, you can see some of the posts lining the campground on the edge of the cliff here.
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Slowly but surely over the next week, they moved RV’s out into sites further away from the edge and today, the whole front row is empty and a fence has been placed over these sites. How scary is all this? And, here’s a picture of the row of campsites near the cliff. When we arrived these campsites were completely full but obviously, they’ve moved the RV’s out of this area to study and analyze the situation.
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We arrived after the cliff had fallen but before they had put up the fence. We are pretty far in and for once, I am happy to be here in the cheap seats and not closer to the high rent district near the ocean.

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