Thursday, June 2nd – San Elijo State Park, San Diego to Casper’s Wilderness Regional Park, Orange County, California - Day 112
Our morning was spent enjoying the San Elijo beach. Gen and the kids went to play in the surf while I packed up. The original plan was to keep moving north to LA potentially looking for another beach front paradise to book a spot at. In the meantime, we decided I’d do laundry while Gen and the kids worked on assignments at the library. The laundry owner was so nice giving me a free machine to do my microscopic piles of whites.
Gen felt like she had missed something in San Diego. We didn’t see the old town, with highly recommended Mexican restaurants, and Balboa Park. The library had given out free passes to the Children’s Museum and the Natural History Museum and this tipped the balance. We decided to drive back into San Diego and try to stay at Silver Strand State Park. They were a top location to find sand dollars. We phoned and they had plenty of availability, so we set course through traffic. An hour and twenty minutes later, we were in the Silver Strand parking lot being told that we couldn’t camp on the beach, unless we had one of four grey water disposal options. We had none of them. We turned into a parking lot to consider our next move. We had a Ranger come up and he tried to make a case to the park supervisor to let us stay to no avail.
We decided to take the waste of a drive and spin it into something positive. We drove through downtown San Diego which is nice but very similar to other cities. Then drove to the old town of San Diego. Gen had read a blog that recommended multiple Mexican restaurants in the area. We found street parking and walked through a delightfully lit up neighbourhood with restaurants and gift shops everywhere. Everyone was out and about, and the atmosphere was very social. We settled into a table outdoors on the sidewalk at Café Coyote. Gen got surf and turf; I got the fajitas. It was all delicious. We even had a pair of wandering guitarists play us a song.
Back in the car after dark, we wanted to drive two and a half hours to the Angeles mountains north of Los Angeles. An hour later I was done with driving. We decided to cut the drive short and headed into the local forest to look for a free camping option. We arrived at 11pm at the closed gate of Casper’s Wilderness Park in Orange County. There was a guy waiting in his pick-up truck outside the gate and he tried to be very helpful to us. He seemed a bit sketchy. A truck pulled in, he talked to them and told us an employee said we could just go in and pick an empty spot. That was good enough for us, we went, found open spot and set-up. We then talked to the truck driver, who wasn’t an employee just a camper looking to ensure no one got robbed (by the guy at the gate), but he said we might as well stay now we are set-up. Good night.
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