Pismo Beach

Oct 18, 2019

After our long day yesterday, we slept in and had a relaxed morning before taking a quick 15-minute walk into the town of Pismo beach.  The town itself is a typical tiny California beach town with a large number of fish and chips restaurants.  After a quick and cheap Subway lunch, we stopped by the Old West Cinnamon Roll store.  The store itself was a plain doughnut shop looking but the Cinnamon Rolls were Instagram worthy and totally delicious.  Olivia chose the one smothered in creamy white frosting, sugared animal crackers and sprinkles of course.

Afterwards we walked back to the RV and took care of some chores such as doing a sewage dump, refilling water and cleaning the RV.  For us doing a dump and water refill always takes about an hour as we do the dump, flush the black water tank because our tank sensor will be stuck at 1/3 full if we don’t, then I got to hook up our drinking water filter system before empting, flushing and refilling our fresh water tank.

In anticipation of the unreliable water of Mexico and points, south I have a rather extensive water filter system.  First, the water goes through a standard Camco inline 100 nm filter before going through a ClearSource water filter, which has a 5 nm filter and a 0.5 nm carbon filter before it goes into our fresh water tank.  From our fresh water tank, we have Acuva water filter, which uses another 5 nm water filter and Ultraviolet light to kill any organisms in the water.  I figure with 5 stages of water filtering we should be able to use water from pretty much anywhere.

Our big activity and the reason why we came to Pismo Beach is that it is one of the few places one can rent an ATV or Dune Buggy and drive on the sand dunes by the beach.  I had researched rental firms and decided that Sunbuggies was the best so after doing our chores we went to the Sunbuggy office book a buggy.  Sunbuggy had ATV (All-Terrain Vehicle) which could be ridden by kids as young as 8 but unfortunately Olivia is only 6 so we had to go with the much more expensive 4-seat dune buggy.  We went with the morning first ride special which was 30% off but it still came out to almost $300 for a 2-hour ride.  For those more budget conscious, the ATV’s were around $50.

After making our reservation, we headed back to the campground where Holly made us a dinner of Olive Garden leftovers with some extra vegetables and fried rice.  After that, we did some homeschooling for Olivia and it was time for bed.  We did not actually do much that day but if felt like a very full day.