Santee, California

It is moving day for us.  We left Lake Havasu City and drove about 300 miles to Santee, California, which is just south and east of San Diego.  Before I go more into Santee, let me tell you about the drive here.  The route I chose was to get back to Interstate 10 at Quartzite and then drive west to Blythe and pick up Highway 78 to cut across California diagonally to hook up with Interstate 8 and proceed into the San Diego area.  This part of Arizona and California is pretty much the same, nothing, just desert.  However the rock formations were unusual.  As we went through the smaller hills they were actually just huge piles of boulders.  Think of a small pile of stones you see on the ground and multiple that so that the pile rises to a 1000 feet.  These rocks were HUGE and in HUGE mounds.  I am not a geologist but if I had to speculate I would say these were made from a huge explosion that created a crater and then threw the debris.  They were just amazing. 

Next up was an interesting set of hills that definitely looked man made and surrounding these hills was a chain link fence topped with razor wire.  What is going on here?  A quick check of Google revealed the area is a gold mine.  Something like the second largest gold mine in the US.

Next up as we approached Brawley, California is a town called Glamis.  Now there is no real town here that we could see, but what is here is miles and miles of sand dunes and huge flattened areas for RV’s.  This is an off roaders paradise and you could see it by all the tire tracks in the sand.  It would be a blast to take an ATV or dune buggy and drive around on these.  To look at these dunes go to Google Maps and search on Glamis, CA.  This should bring up a map of highway 78.  The dunes are below Highway 78 on the screen.  If you scroll around you can see how far they go.  There are two huge RV storage lots at either end of the dunes with hundreds of RV’s being stored.  I am guessing the off roaders leave their RV’s in storage then just drive out towing their off road vehicles and then go pick up their RV to camp for the weekend. 

Ok, moving on to Santee, CA.  I picked this town as it had the nicest rated campground that was reasonably priced in the San Diego area.  The ones nearer the city received poor reviews as being very cramped, run down and expensive.  We do have a little drive to get to the city but I think it is worth the drive to stay in such a nice campground.  This campground, Santee Lakes, is owned by the water district and it is a combination park area, with a series of small lakes, and a 300 site campground.  The sites are level, well spaced and the park is very nicely maintained.  You can take a look at it at www.santeelakes.com.  If you look at the campground map we are in space 281.

Here are a couple of pictures

We are here for a week and will be doing some sightseeing as it has been a few years since either of us has been in the San Diego area.