Rodriguez Road – September 2010
Labor Day Weekend – September the 5th, 2010.
By: Roberto L. Miranda
No matter where you are located in the world, the Holidays are better if you stay home. You avoid traffic and huge crowds, unless you like both of them. We learned that the hard way over the years. But, we also learned that we can squeeze ourselves in the middle of the three day weekend and enjoy a day trip close by.
We meet at south end of San Clemente / Christianitos off ramp at the Carl’s Junior. We ordered scramble eggs burritos to go and left as planned by 08:30. Cat Head was the last one, and he lives practically the other side of the highway. We drove down 5, get out 78 to Ramona; Rusty joins the caravan; we continued to Ramona and fill up with gas at Main Street and met with Bob. We took a shortcut, a better road than the GPS/MapQuest one. We noticed that Camel tours are available to tourist close to San Diego Wild Animal Park; both links are below for future reference. We passed some Ostrich farms as well, with eggs for sale!!!
San Diego Zoo Safari Park
CAMEL RIDE SAFARI
Julian Chamber of Commerce Welcome Page
Anza-Borrego Desert - Oriflamme Canyon Trail
Fourth Annual Jeep Jamboree at Borrego Springs: Off-Road.com
We left Julian town behind, where the best apple pies can be found, and did a quick stop at an RV campground. We air down and unleash the towed vehicles and hit the trail. We are about 4000 ft, and you could have some snow in winter time, but summer/fall it was perfect. We slowly climb the hills, and later, even slower, went down the mountain for the zigzagging trail. The Oriflamme, Chariot Canyons are easy trails. Rodriguez Canyon road could be easy, or super hard, depends the line YOU choose. We called the extra credit lines.
Before entering Rodriguez Road, we did a lunch break at a shady spot, and we chat for a while, rest, and interact with our friends. We knew that we need to recharge ourselves before entering the last and hard section of the day, Rodriguez road. There is a hiking trail that goes from Mexico to Canada, quite interesting to know.
Those extra credit lines are the reason to be here, Rusty has been working on his suspension and we decided to do some test before finishing the job, so a place that we know well and it is close by is perfect to accomplish that objective. The skid plate was not installed, our fault, so we had extra careful crawling rocks. Alexis did the right think, with no skid plate either, he stay away of trouble. Just one rig went for the extra credit lines. Another group was working they way through the third one, so we skipped that one, but to be honest, I’m not sure if the 80 will fit the rock garden that we saw, we will find out soon, when more work is done, and proper armor is installed.
We finished the trail, no carnage, no breakdowns and smiling. We said good by and later on, some of us stoppeed at Julian town to have dinner and get the famous apple pie for our loved ones. That’s all folks!
P.S.: Apar, thanks for taking care of dinner’s bill!!! That was nice!!!
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