California - Day 7 - Barstow to Santa Barbara

Earl Warren Showgrounds, Santa Barbara

Monday, 7 March 2022

today's route

In 5 hours today, I drove a little over 200 miles and crossed a big chunk of southern California.  The change in topography was striking.  Barstow is actually in the Mojave Desert, while Santa Barbara is, as you can see, on the Pacific coast.

I drove back down I-15 as far as Victorville, then turned off onto CA-19, aka Palmdale Road because it goes to Palmdale (duh), pop. 157,000.  Maybe you can see on the map that from Palmdale down to Santa Clarita and then over to the coast the road goes through a sort of pass between portions of the Angeles National Forest and the San Gabriel Mountains.  The US Forest Service says that this forest is "located within one of the driest, most fire-prone areas in the United States" and, because it sits right next to the 2nd most populous metropolitan area of the country, is especially vulnerable to human-caused wildfires.

I passed the turn to get to Devil's Punchbowl Natural Area, managed by the Forest Service.  Unfortunately, this area is currently closed to give it a chance to recover from the Bobcat Fire from 2020.  It burned for 4 months, partly because of extremely dry conditions and partly because the terrain was so rugged (it is called the Devil's punchbowl) firefighters couldn't get to it effectively.  Apparently the damage was extensive, but I've seen the recovery in Bastrop State Park in Texas that was seriously damaged by fire in 2011, and though it's still easy to see what burned, it's also easy to see how Nature is renewing itself.  So it's reasonable to hope that much of the Bobcat Fire damage will also be repaired in a few more years.

Several times today I crossed something labeled California Aqueduct, a channel with a lot of water in it.  Apparently it was put together in the 1960s to funnel water from the Sierra Nevadas and other parts of the state down to southern CA for agriculture.

Historic Route 66 along here is called the Pearblossom Highway, I'm guessing because of the town named Pearblossom.  Continuing on CA-14 I drove up to Escondido Summit, elevation 3,250', followed by a long downhill road through more of those smooth greeny-brown hills that lie in folds like a blanket on an unmade bed.

I came to Santa Clarita, pop. 229,000 and 1,306' elevation.  (CA announces most of its towns with signs giving the name, elevation and most recent population.  Very helpful to someone like me.)  Your basic city but it's home to the Oak of the Golden Dream, which turns out to be an accurate name instead of just Hollywood hype.  According to "history," gold was first discovered in this area in 1842 by Francisco Lopez, who took a nap under this same oak and dreamed of floating away on a sea of gold.  When he woke up, he dug up some wild onions to eat and found gold clinging to the roots.  When he got it appraised in Los Angeles, word got out and the CA Gold Rush was on.  So much for the Sutter's Mill story.

All along the drive I passed farms - mostly cows, but especially in this area - maybe because of the Aqueduct?  Along here most farms were on those steep greeny-brown hills, some covered with purple flowers.  I saw huge orchards of orange trees weighed down with fruit.  I saw a field of some green crop with workers bending over to tend the crop.  I know lots of people complain about the folks who do these jobs being immigrants, saying they're taking jobs away from Americans, but just thinking about bending over these plants all day made my back sore.  The truth is - as the farmowners here know well - Americans don't want these jobs.  As a people we've gotten soft and entitled compared to the harsh lives our parents - well, mine anyway - lived during the Depression when a job like this would have been welcome.

Near Fillmore, pop. 15,800, I passed a sign for Bennett's Honey Tasting Room on Honey Lane.  Apparently this is a long-established business that offers a wide variety of flavors of honey, depending on what wildflowers the bees were feeding on, as well as beeswax candles and other bee-related paraphernalia.  I understand the tasting part of it has been modified to accommodate Covid safety measures.  It's down a short dirt road, that I wouldn't want to take the RV down but would be fine in a car, so it's someplace to go next time I'm here (if we can ever get past this ghastly virus).

Fillmore was originally established as a railroad town, and the historic downtown is still structured around the train station, a half block from city hall.  We stopped there for a break to walk around the grassy area to stretch our legs.  Looked like a nice town.

We drove through Santa Paula, population about 30,000, that bills itself as the Citrus Capital of the World.  I don't know about that but I can say I saw a lot of oranges on orange trees, also a lot of other crops in fields.

And then I made it to the coast at Ventura, population about 111,000, and picked up US-101 which, along here, parallels the ocean.  A sign told me I was on Historic El Camino Real.  Of course, I'd already found El Camino Real in Texas and Louisiana, but this was a different highway.  California has a Mission Trail 600 miles long that includes 21 missions as well as military forts and a few towns, and has been designated a National Historic Trail.  I was glad to keep going, though, nice as it was to see the ocean, because I kept hearing in my head the song by America called Ventura Highway, and it was driving me crazy.

I got off the highway at Carpinteria, population 13,264 in 2020 and elevation of 7', according to the highway sign.  I'd been in town back in the 1970s to have coffee with the son of friends of my parents, and I was impressed then with the small-town feel of this place.  I'm glad to report that that's still the way the town feels.  This town is squashed between some mountains and the ocean, and it may be that the limited space has helped save it from being overrun by developers and urban sprawl (no place to sprawl).  I couldn't tell just how expensive it might be to live here, but it looked pretty comfortable to me.

And then 12 more miles to Santa Barbara, population 89,000.  I know this doesn't sound like it's a big city, but it sure looks expensive.  To give you an idea, Prince Harry and his wife now live here, along with Oprah Winfrey.

I had a terrible time finding any campground in the greater Los Angeles area, which is how I ended up out here staying in the RV park at the Earl Warren Showgrounds.  But lots of flowers and green grass, a nice change from the Mojave Desert.