It's a pretty surreal environment at Pismo Beach - you can drive cars and All
Terrain Vehicles (ATV's) right along the ocean and into the dunes. We sat by the
fire, our backs to the dunes, watching the ocean. From behind us, buzzing over
the hill, would come a squad of ATV's, all lit up. They'd zoom by and into the
night, and the quiet would return. Verrrrry X-Files...
Pismo was incredible, though a
real adventure at first. AndrewM and I rolled in at 4:00 on Friday to the
Sand and Surf RV Park and immediately agreed that we were not staying there.
Imagine a small road and on either side of it grass squared off into 20' by
20' squares right next to each other. These are the campsites. Half had RVs,
the others tents. On one side of the road are trees blocking active train
tracks and on the other side tress and a freeway. It was a vision of hell.
Why anyone would ever stay there is beyond me.
Thank God for Plan B.
So, we drove to another campsite
(much better, but completely booked up) which told us that we could just
camp on the beach. We drive down and it's true; all these people setting up
camp on the beach (it's a sand dune, ATV park). So we're driving down and on
one side is the ocean, waves crashing on the beach. On the other side it
looks like Lawrence of Arabia with these rolling sand dunes. Gorgeous. There
were all these small camp sites built with RVs and tents. It was very much
like BM without the art and not as centralized. But replace the ocean with
desert and that's it.
Now we had to drive through a
small stream to get there. AndrewM had a Jeep, so no problem. Except that it
was soon to be the highest tide of the year. We had a few hours left before
that stream was a huge river. We decided to set up our tent, so as to not
fight light as well before getting food and supplies. This was real
primitive camping and on sand, so tents could just be set up, they needed to
be staked well into the ground. Well, AndrewM had this twenty foot dome that
we were going to test out, figuring we could all sleep in there. So, he and
I started to build it (it's massive) pole by pole. Then the 50mph winds
kicked in and we're trying to hold the dome from flying away, while bending
PVC and getting the entire support structure in place. Talk about difficult.
The entire thing moved about 100 feet from the time we started building it
to the end. Finally we get it built and AndrewM's Jeep gets stuck in the
sand. Now, we're fighting light, AndrewC has just arrived and needs to be
picked up because his can won't get on the sand, the tide is coming in, we
need to get food, my cell phone (and everyone's contact point when they
arrive) is running out of juice, it's starting to get cold, and everyone is
en route. We get the car unstuck, go pick up AndrewC, who goes with me to
the supermarket. We get all the food and then get back to find out we're all
stuck on the town side of the river where we can't cross and get back to our
tent, which has all our gear.
So we wait by the river with many
other cars and watch this bizarre "Demolition Derby" rally as trucks and
Jeeps try to make it across the river. (It's now very dark too.) Some cars
make it across and some don't and just sink in the water until someone comes
along to tow them out. An Isuzu Trooper got destroyed in it. And we're
standing there drinking beers and watching each truck try to pass, like some
twisted game show.
Finally my phone rings, everyone
else has arrived. We fetch them and the water goes down enough to where we
can get them across as well as all the food we had bought. We had only two
cars that could get to the camp.
We hung out all night and then all
slept in this great huge dome tent and were woken up at 7AM to the sound of
what seemed like the Long Beach Grand Prix. ATV's and motorcycles screaming
past the tent in rapid succession. All over the place. It was rough. But
once you got over that, the beach was beautiful, the dunes immense and
everyone happy. The people with us are so alive and so ready to take things
on. I love everything that we do in this community 'cause it so strong. More
to come for sure. It was a great, relaxing weekend. A couple of us stayed
until 11PM Sunday, getting home real late.
But it was amazing.
