LONE PINE TO HOME, VENTURA, CA

Saturday, 5-9-10


For breakfast I fix a can of corned beef hash and fried eggs. Fred is not impressed.


We are heading home. And guess what…the wind is blowing.


Before leaving we check out the Lone Pine Movie Museum. We have driven by it for years and have never stopped. Today we decide to stop and we are glad we did. First we watch a 15-minute movie about the movies that have been made in the Alabama Hills: Gunga Din, Star Trek, of course all kind of westerns, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, John Wayne. But did you know Iron Man was also filmed in the Alabama Hills? The snow-capped Sierras popping up behind the dark brown Alabama Hills are often used in scenes requiring a backdrop of what would appear to be the Himalaya Mountains. So many movies were filmed here I can’t even begin to name them all.


Next we drive out to the Alabama Hills and take a little side road to “Horseshoe Meadow”. There we find a BLM “Tutter Creek” campground with great camp sites and the Sierras in the distance. Only $5 a night. That’s our kind of camping! We make a note to stay here the next time we are in the area.


We leave town and I drive the boring, tiring, tedious, and what seems to be the never-ending leg to Mojave where we stop to get gas. Fred takes over and drives all the way home while I read our trip journal out loud. We are surprised at how many things we have already forgotten.


We pull into our driveway and it feels somewhat strange. Our cat Prissy is no longer with us and she is not here to greet us. That’s sad. We open the door and the house seems so huge. Do we really need all this space? After all, we have been living in a 12-foot van for 30 days and we did just fine. And do we need all this stuff? How much stuff do two people really need? But it begins to feel good to be home. We turn on the fountain and listen to the familiar sound of water falling as we walk along the path bordered by our plants and flowers. My, so many weeds have popped up in one month.


Everything looks the same but different. We have mixed feelings about being home. Our trip was not what we expected. The weather was not what we had planned. Nothing seemed to flow the way it usually does. But, in spite of all that, we agree we had a great time. There is something so intimate about sharing our little van, something so close about eating together at the campfire, something so loving about sharing chores and making the best of unexpected situations.


We both agree it’s a bonding time, a time for reconnecting. It’s our time to build memories and more intimately share life together. I guess that’s why we named our van “GUD HPNS” - because it’s a good thing.