Sometimes, despite the planning, the same site doesn’t meet all of our requirements. In this case, across Easter weekend, we changed sites each night; four nights, four sites.
First site was pragmatic, we didn’t want to drive from Oakland to the Alabama Hills after work.
Panoche Hills BLM on the west end of the San Joaquin Valley. Arriving after dark, there were two distinct sources of excitement. The first was following hares up the road in the dark waiting for them to dash into the bushes on the side of the dirt road. The second was the brief period of ethereal space opera sounding over the hills at night. Beyond that, I think we had the entire area to ourselves (it is a small BLM reserve)
Four wheel camper advantage, pull over and pop the top…
The next day, we arrived in the Alabama Hills. The choicest spots were taken, but we still found a nice site behind some rocks.
view out the back door
dusk
However, the next morning, I noticed a site up above opening up. A short move later and we were further up the hill in the rocks.
She LOVED this site..
Sunday afternoon, Em suggested we bail a day early to make to visit the Carrizo Plains on the way home.
Stopping by the painted rock (while B checked out the nostrils)
We moved to the Keyesville Recreation Area, and I have never seen the Kern River so full, and very few camp areas so filled with trash. It must’ve been a wild long weekend there.
Although we didn’t stay overnight, our final destination before going home was the Carrizo Plains to see the Superbloom..
Another advantage of the FWC, photog perch.
