Still in the USA

It has been a week and a half since we pulled out of Hollister in that horrible rain storm, and we are still in the USA.  We had planned all along to take some time visiting family in Southern California before we headed across the border, and we have another week or so until we leave the USA.  On the day we left (1/16/19), the storm that we rode through was REALLY nasty – we had torrential rain and strong winds almost the entire way to Paso Robles, where we stayed a few nights at Allegretto Vineyard Resort.  From there we made our way down to Los Angeles to be with our son Daniel, his wife Bethany and most importantly the grand-kids!    There were also a number of details related to trip, bike and gear prep that I needed to finish up, and I took the opportunity to do that at Daniel’s house. 

We left Los Angeles yesterday and have rested in Temecula for a few days, in part to give me a chance to get this web site up and running in a more proper fashion.  It has taken a lot of time to learn WordPress, figure out how to mirror the web site on my laptop (so I can update it w/o an internet connection), etc.  But it is getting easier.   Still, I hope you can follow us on the Xplore2Gether Facebook page (link on menu on our home page) as well as this blog.  The Facebook page will likely be a place with more frequent updates, because it is just so easy to do – but I will try to keep this blog going as I have time, and hope I can enlist Carol to add some content to share the load and give a different perspective.  

We will be wandering around Southern California for about another week – so if you are watching us on the map link (see link on home page menu) you will not see us in Mexico for another week or so.   Also – you will note some gaps in the map;  I’m still getting the hang of using the Garmin Inreach that tracks us and generates that map – it isn’t always on when I think it is on!   And you also may notice a strange round trip from Temecula to Anaheim last night – there is a story there.   I play the guitar – it is one of my main passions in life.  I’ve always carried a travel guitar with me on our motorcycle trips, but for this trip I found a new guitar-like instrument that I could bring with me, a “guitalele” – it is tuned similar to the guitar but at a higher pitch, and has the body size of a tenor ukulele, smaller than any travel guitar I’ve owned.  Short story is when we got to our hotel in Temecula, I reached into my dry bag to pull out the guitalele and it wasn’t there!  I had left it at my son’s house in LA.  He graciously agreed to meet me half way, and I made a mad dash back to meet up with him to recover it.   Whew!   Happy to have it back.