Monterey California

We made it to Monterey yesterday afternoon. What a cute town...

Today we'll be spending most of the day at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. We're camped out for 2 days, so we'll leave for LA on Saturday morning sometime.

We traveled through San Francisco on Highway 101, so we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge. Erika took lots of pictures with the digital camera on our way across. At the far end of the bridge I missed my turn off and ended up down at the wharf. Signs everywhere said no trucks, buses or vans with more than 8 passengers... I did my best to navigate back to 101. We ended up going the wrong direction and because of all of the detours and closed exits, I almost ended up having to go over the bridge twice. The very last exit before the bridge was open, but then we had to go under the bridge with a clearance of only 11 feet 7 inches. We roughly measured our rig before we left at 11 feet 5 inches... I was VERY nervous about the height restriction, but backing up and turning around would have been just about impossible. With several tourist cameras and camcorders pointed squarely at our rig, we crept under the bridge. Apparently we are under 11 feet 7 inches, because nothing happened. Our radio antenna scraped a bit on the far side, but that sticks up a foot or so more than everything else and is designed to bend over if hit, so we came out unscathed.

The rest of the drive down to Monterey was uneventful. Highway 17 was pretty steep and made me worry about the truck a bit, but it pulled us up, over and back down the other side without any difficulty.

We're staying at a great campground on one of the hills in Monterey. The road here was steep, winding and at times 1 lane, but it was worth it. The fees are only $20.00 per night and there's hot running water, and RV dump station and a great big park for the kids to play in.

Everyone is doing fairly well and (despite a cold) we're still having a lot of fun. The girls were a bit dissappointed that we arrived in Monterey so late in the afternoon yesterday. They had thought that we were going to visit the aquarium right away, but we decided that we'd just spend another night and take the whole day to explore the aquarium.