Wald's World On Wheels: Bakersfield, CA

Bakersfield in itself isn't much of a destination when visiting California, but Katherine's longtime friend Becca hooked us up with a free spot to park the camper for a few weeks...and I don't typically turn down free! Becca's dad lives in Bakersfield on almost 2 acres of land and conveniently has an RV pad with full hookups in his backyard. Thank you Russ for letting crash in your backyard for two weeks!

Staying with Russ was better than Disneyland. The kids would spend hours in the backyard where he used to raise goats, horses and cows and now has old cars and other treasures for the kids. The kids built a track around the backyard where they could ride their scooters as fast and long as they wanted, something that every RV park we have visited prohibited. In addition to all of the free space we had, Russ, a jack of all trades, helped out with some of the projects I had on the camper as well as my truck. This included spending an entire afternoon installing a train horn on my truck,a birthday gift from Katherine and the kids.

Bakersfield is a great base camp to visit some of California's more popular attractions. We didn't want to pull the camper from one end of CA to the other so we left it parked in Bakersfield as we made day trips to some of California's best destinations. From Bakersfield it was a 150 mile drive to Sequoia and Hollywood and 200 miles to Yosemite. A 400 mile round trip to Yosemite makes for a long day on top of the hiking and sightseeing but it was very much do-able.

The agriculture industry is huge in California so we thought it would be fun to head out to a local farm to pick some fruit. It was a short 10 minute drive to the Murray Family Farm where the kids had a great time picking buckets of their own fruit.