Inland on the 101

We did not want to meander along the Pacific Coast Highway 1 as we did our last trip up the coast so we are following 101 and at this time it goes inland away from the coast which is all good since we had laundry to do.  Something that is hard to find the time to do while on vacation and definitely while on the coast, just too much to see and do.

We made a stop in Gilroy, California, nation capital of garlic.  Oh yea, take a whiff of that fine aroma of garlic, thank goodness we don’t mind the smell but it was overpowering at times and made my eyes water.  We stayed at Gilroy Garlic USA RV Park as we have in the past but things were not as good as they were the last time, a whole lot of neglect was going on.  Check out our separate blog for more information.

It’s a lot warmer inland and we even had to run our air conditioner but just one more day of this since we are putting on the miles now so to get on the Oregon Coast sooner which is our favorite part of this adventure.  After laundry and other chores we went over our travel plans to get a better idea of just how far up the coast we plan to take at this time and we may not be going as north as we originally planned.  But that is what is nice about who we have become, changes do not make us crazy, it makes our plans more fun that we are flexible that we can change them and just go with the flow.  We also have not turned on our TV since we left the fair and not sure if we will or not. 

Sunday we drove 136 miles to Santa Rosa via the Golden Gate Bridge.  We have driven on all the bridges in the San Francisco area and we are so grateful that this is our second time over the Golden Gate Bridge since the fog was so thick we could not get any good photos of it. 

We have also been coming across some weird things…we stopped in Arroyo Grande, California at a Wal-Mart and an Albertson’s and apparently we were in a “Bagless” county.  They wanted to charge us 10 cents per bag or we should have brought our own as we were told several times by clerks.  We opted to put our stuff back into the basket and take it like that to our RV…seriously has anyone ever heard of such nonsense?

We are travelers for goodness sake, so how on earth are we to know these rules if they are not posted. 

Now for yet another weird event…we knew the direction we wanted to go to cross the Golden Gate Bridge but our GPS would not take us on 85, so as we do many times we ignored her and just went onto 85 anticipating her to start telling us we were off route.  Only this time as we got onto 85, very strongly she told us we were in violation of RV weight restrictions and should immediately exit.  WTF!  We remembered being told when we worked in Saratoga something about that road being restricted but nowhere and trust me we looked everywhere, nowhere was it posted so we stayed on the 15 or so miles until we knew where we wanted to get off and of course we had to mute our GPS because she was very insistent with each exit we passed that we were in violation.

Tomorrow we plan to put a few hundred miles on the road, enough to get us to the coast once again but for now we are hanging out at Sonoma County Fairgrounds RV Park enjoying one more night in the air conditioning to keep us cool from all this heat.  Life certainly is grand!

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