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Judy and I love San Francisco.  Although not RV friendly there are a few RV parks to the north and south of the city all of which are only a short shuttle, Uber, or ferry ride out.  Once in the City there are busses, cable cars, and much of the city is easily walkable.  

We usually do a day in which we graze our way through Chinatown.  There are dozens of Chinese delis, small restaurants, and shops with strange spiky fruits.  We just point at the display cases containing odd looking things to eat, or so I hope, and then take a nibble.  Most turn out to be really tasty and even so-so ones are edible.  The Asian soft drinks on the other hand are much more of an adventure.  I expected then to be over sweet but did not expect the chunks of stuff hitting my tonsils resulting in a gag reflex.  Quietly hiding my gag I handed the offending soda to my son saying,

“Wow!  Try this one, it’s really great”.

He suffered the same syndrome as I did and then refused to talk to me the rest of the day.  

Chinese meat markets are really interesting.  Live turtles, reddish dead chickens hanging by their necks, and unrefrigerated gelatinous mystery meats. Judy points out one of these and whispers what the hell is that.  A very short and shriveled Chinese gentleman started yelling “tuddle, tuddle, tuddle” while pointing a finger at us then jerking it toward the street with every “tuddle” iteration.

We quickly left the store and only later realized he was answering Judy’s question by pointing at the bin of live turtles.  

Judy and I have a fondness for chow fun.  This is a chicken or beef dish which uses fat, gummy rice noodles.  Our favorite Chinese restaurant  (Lee’s Wok) has the best we have ever eaten. We have been going there for 30+ years watching this family own eateries children go from toddlers to wait staff.  While in San Francisco we tried and failed to purchase fresh rice noodles.  No one seemed to understand what we were asking for.  We told our waitress at Lee’s Wok about our problem.  She pulled out a business card and wrote in Chinese something to the effect that “these dumb round eyes would like to purchase chow fun noodles.  Please help them as they mean well and are good tippers.”Carried that card around in my wallet for about 2 years till we got back to SF.  Pulled it out in the first grocery store in Chinatown to more blank stares, some mutterings in Manderin Orange or some other dialect,  and a wave down the street to the next store selling food like materials.  After about 5 of these move on to the next place results we finally found a store where they actually had rice chow fun noodles, but they were dried.  Judy made the mistake of asking one of the staff 

“How do you cook these?”

The lady that was helping us had no idea, but one of the other staff did.  Only problem was she did not speak English.  For the next five minutes we were regaled with a back and forth conversation in Chinese followed by a broken English translation as these two women yelled and I mean YELLED at each other across the store. The conversation that went something like this:

扴果笑山卜木火火

She say boil water

口廿卜火女木火  口廿卜火女木火

Put noodle in water

日尸田手廿竹月女  戈山土月弓女木尸田水口日 卜廿土口山火尸木土竹十大中

Stir

:卜火土

Take out of water and dry on a towel.   

On and on this conversation went with animated hand gestures, Judy asking more questions filled by more yell talking.  While this was going on a and elegantly dress Asian American quietly walked up behind us and whispered in perfect English

“They have no idea how to cook them”

I somehow managed to get my quaking body out of the store before I broke down in laughter till I cried.  God, I really love Chinatown. 

We now make our own chow fun noodles due to watching YOUTUBE videos.  They are relatively easy and the specialty flours can be purchased online or at an Asian market.  Some of the larger Asian markets even have fresh noodles.  Forget the dry ones they suck and we never did figure out how to cook them up to Lee’s Wok levels of goodness.

From SF to  Monterey is a relatively short day on the now straight and cliffless highway 1. The closer you get to Monterey,  the more likely you are to find two of my other California classics, calamari and artichokes.  The Monterey area is where they grow and catch the best of each.  Go into any restaurant, bistro, or bar anywhere there and have the best squid you have ever eaten.  You can get it fancy or simple; it doesn’t matter where, as it is just as yummy even when it is listed as “hockey pucks” on a sports bar menu.  Artichokes are a staple at every fruit and vegetable stand in the area, where they sell them at different prices for different sizes, the bigger the better.  A little bread, cheese, wine and artichokes dipped in garlic butter is about as good as eats get.  

Just to the east, is the Salinas Valley.  It is amazing how hot it can get there in the summer which makes it perfect for growing garlic.  The town of Gilroy is the garlic capital of the world.  We stopped at Garlic World where they sell everything garlic.  I would suggest that you skip the garlic wine.  There are some things like spam and ovaltine where the flavor is forever etched in your mind. Garlic wine is one of these.  At Garlic World we bought garlic, a garlic press, and some elephant garlic which we roasted and spread on bread for an appetizer, then barbecued some t-bones smothered in more garlic.  It was warm that night so we left the door to the MSP open.  Got up the next morning with our eyes burning from the garlic we exhaled in our sleep.  Climbing down from the cab over bunk I swear the scent got thicker as exhaled garlic breath is heavier than air, which probably explains why the Italians never made a significant advance in aeronautical engineering. Years later whenever I went into the MSP on a hot day, you could still smell it.

Just south of Monterey is Carmel.  Kind of fun to visit and the only place I know of where you have to pay to drive down a street to look at houses.  But we had a lot of fun walking around going into “Ye Olde (fill in the blank) Shoppes”  looking at curios well beyond our budget and thanking God that the kids were all grown as the “you break it you buy it” rule would have put us in debtor’s prison.  

On Highway 1 south of Carmel the road turns into the cliffs of death again so we did not drive very far before we turned around and headed east to the relative safety of Highway 101, then reluctantly headed north and home.  Someday we’ll catch that section of Highway 1 from the south end as it looked like a lot of fun, and you never know, there just might be a snake pit somewhere in that section of my unexplored west.

For Judy and I, RV camping season is all year round.  In the summer it’s the Cascades and fishing.  In the winter it’s snow camping where we try to cross country ski.  But there are those times when the fishing is not good or the snow is not quite right and we are looking to get out of the Oregon rain.  One place we like to go is south on highways 101 and 1 to San Francisco.  We have done this several times as our youngest son Marty is in the Navy and was stationed at Monterey, CA for a couple of tours.  On the way south we would stop at a wide spot on Highway 101 near Stone Lagoon State Park.  This was one of the few places you could camp for free on the beach.  Eventually the State of California decided we were having too much fun and made it day use only.  But before that stupid decision, there were so many RV’s camped end to end that used this area to boondock that we began to call it the RV spawning grounds.  It was such a unique spot that we even used it for one of our group campouts with family and friends. On that particular campout, Marty and his wife Nikki drove up from Monterey to join us putting their tent on the sand just outside our RV’s door

During that campout, the surf perch and smelt were running.  This was an amazing and fun fishing time, well worth the cost of an out-of-state license.  A short trip to Oric, CA and we had our licenses and also got the skinny on how to catch surf perch from the lady owner of the local hardware store.  What she recommended was a perch jig which is a three foot section of leader rigged with two hooks and a pyramid weight at the end.  You bait the hooks with sand shrimp, clams or mole crabs, the latter of  which you can catch for yourself right on the beach.  These cute little guys live in the surf zone making their living by filtering sea water with specialized legs that look a little-frilly first baseman’s mitts, feeding in much the same way that barnacles do.  Unlike barnacles that are attached to rocks, mole crabs are fast little swimmers which follow the tides up and down the beach where they bury themselves tail first in the shifting sand.  They frequently get washed out by the breaking waves, after which they back stroke like crazy then dig like hell back into the sand as the wave ebbs back.  They manage to do this in an eye blink so their amazing antics are usually overlooked by the casual tourist playing tag with the same wave.  They had better be quick as a slow digger is an easy meal for a gull.  They had better be good swimmers as getting washed into deeper water means death by perch.  But as long as they stay on this precarious ledge between winged and finned death they seem to do pretty well for themselves.  As their numbers are near infinite, a minute or two of digging with my folding camp shovel in the wet sand above the surf and I was ready to fish.  

Now I am not much of a surf fisherman.  I don’t have the 9 foot long surf pole nor the waders to stay out in the splash zone and get washed away to sea never to be seen again.   What I do is wait till a wave breaks then run as fast as I can after it down the steep beach slope till I lose my courage at which time I cast my line hard over the next wave, then turn and run up the slope with my line free wheeling off the reel.  If I make it back out of the surf zone alive, I then take up the slack and try to hold the pole high up over my head so that the taut line clears the breaking waves.  If the surf is not too high and the pyramid weight is heavy enough, the weight will work its way into the sand behind the breaking waves and anchor.  When it works it is a beautiful thing.  When it does not, the line gets flattened by incoming waves, I don’t catch fish and get very wet.  

On that particular campout, conditions were perfect with my line just clearing the waves.  As each of these waves broke batches of silver smelt erupted into the air above the wave crest and fell haphazardly onto the back of the wave as it passed.  In the trough behind the breaking waves were harbor seals torpedoing parallel to the beach face, only having to keep their mouths open to fill their bellies.  It did not take long before I had my first perch, sometimes hooking two at a time.  Marty was fishing next to me having just as much fun.  Somehow he got the pole into Nikki’s hands, who being a city girl had not yet mastered the run-cast-run technique.  She soon hooked one and managed to reel it in.  Then, much to everyone’s delight, walked up and down the beach dragging the fish in the sand behind her trying to get someone to take it off the hook, which no one did as it was just too damn cute.

The spawning grounds did not have much in the way of campground amenities being essentially a wide spot on highway 101.  What it did have were portable vault toilets which Judy would use being as there were no pits underneath them.  Still I had to assure her that there were no beach snakes.  While there might be water snakes on the other side of the highway next to a small freshwater lake, the only way one was going to get into the outhouse was to slither out of the grass next to the lake, crawl across a busy highway, then after managing to trip the latch with its forked tongue to get inside it would have to intentionally crawl into a plastic vat of toxic blue chemicals.  Only a Trump voter could be that stupid.  

“Check it anyway” she ordered.  

So I, being the loving and obedient husband that I am, said “yes dear” as all husbands do who think the women ride the short bus when it comes to logical thinking.  That is why you almost never see a woman rise to a high office to become a “war president”, as they are generally incapable of understanding that sometimes it is necessary to kill innocent women and kids because some despotic leader wants the oil for himself rather than letting you have it to fuel your RV.  

The spawning grounds also had dumpsters.  I found this campground feature particularly useful as I had forgotten to toss shit from the previous summers camping trips which had been fermenting in the RV’s cubbies for a few months.  One of the items was our Wal-Mart BBQ, which had been sitting since the previous August hidden under a soggy Astroturf rug.  This might have been OK but I had also forgotten to clean it when I “stored” it.  The whole inside was fuzzy with green and white mold which is also, by the way, the unofficial flower of the State of Oregon.  Into the dumpster it went along with a plastic bag of cans which I had intended to recycle but was now afraid to open, a partial bag of damp cat litter, and a stack of last years Weekly World News minus the pictures of the page five girls.  I know I am pathetic but I just can’t resist headlines like “ET Endorses Bush for President” And what insidious bastards the ETs turned out to be, destroying this great nation of ours without ever having to invade. 

Into the dumpster the BBQ goes.  A few hours later as I am tossing the remains of our breakfast into the same dumpster, I am astonished to notice that the BBQ was gone.  While there is no doubt in my mind that given the amount of mold inside it that it might have been capable of some rudimentary form of locomotion, I sincerely doubt it could have managed to crawl out.  Somebody had dumpster dived and taken it!  Even the white trash of Waldport (my home town) would not have done this.  However, that evening when I returned with the dinner leavings, it was back pretty much in the same spot in the dumpster, which partially restored my faith in the intelligence of the RV community.

The next morning dawned bright and sunny.  Judy and I were up early digging at low tide for our supply of mole crabs to be used on the incoming tide to catch even more surf perch.  Judy looked up from her chore just as this large and frightening looking dog tongued her in the face.  Obviously the dog’s looks did not match its personality.  The woman with the dog immediately began to apologize.  As Judy raised her eyes to say it was all right, she found herself staring at the woman’s crotch which was inadequately covered by a leopard spot thong clearly visible and framed through a pair of see-through purple exercise shorts.  Judy quickly moved her eyes off the offending thong and up the woman’s body to find that she was now staring at what once might have been the biological versions of the Grand Tetons but had over geologic time eroded into gelatinous mounds which were barely concealed in a low cut swimsuit covered up by a see-through top.  Choking back a gasp Judy turned her face away and caught me still staring in awe.  Although this lady was well past her prime I, like most normal men are suckers for Sluts-R-Us outfits, and, being past 50, well past 50, my standards as to what fills out the outfit have slipped a bit.  Although inappropriately attired we had a pleasant conversation with her, finding out that she had just gotten the dog, a black and white purebred WTF and that she was a little worried about it as the breed has a fierce reputation.  I guess the lick sort of settled that question for her.  But all in all we had a nice conversation with her and the most recent guy she was shacking up with who was hanging on her like the stains on Monica’s blue dress.  It was going to be another  great day at the spawning grounds.