Coyote Lake (4)

Camping in really nice sites is like getting a surprise present every weekend, especially if you have kind of forgotten the campground since you were last there. We stayed off the highways almost all the way there, enjoying turkey club wraps in the car so we wouldn’t be hungry. It didn’t actually cost us any more time than sitting in Friday traffic, so we arrived unfrazzled and unhungry, with some daylight to spare. Site 44 is all the way at the end of the lower campground loop, so as we were driving through, counting off numbers, we could see this one on the horizon. “Could it be?” we were thinking. And as the confirmation came once we passed 43, we both said, “Yes!!” out loud. It is such a nice and unobstructed view. You can fully see the lake and there is no one right next to you. A satisfying score indeed.

This is the campground with wild pigs. Right away, we spotted a whole herd (bunch? muddening? baconnette?) running across the marshy area below. The binoculars came out and verified the pigness. We spent the remainder of the daylight watching them from inside with the heater running.

There is a lot of wildlife in this park actually. We hiked up to the top of “Mummy Mountain” on Saturday and found ourselves needing to carefully and slowly pass through a herd of calves as their mamas watched us suspiciously. There were cute little spotted fawns up there too. Lower down we saw tons of ground squirrels (a scurry) running across the trail, and a flock (rafter) of wild turkeys. P.S. now that I’m looking things up, a group of pigs is called a passel, a team, or a sounder.

The view from the top spanned all the way from the barely visible tall buildings of downtown San Jose, to the distant passage that eventually leads to the Salinas valley. Below us were the sprawling communities of Morgan Hill and Gilroy. And after coming around to the other side of the ridge, we were treated to gorgeous views of Coyote Lake. Pretty cool and well worth a five mile hike.

We squeezed in plenty of lazy time and nappy time. After dinner, the porcine parade came out again and we watched from a respectable distance. Wild pigs are impressively fast, and while we weren’t quite sure whether they were the kind with tusks, we didn’t want to press our luck with a close encounter.

Richard tried getting in a Sunday morning bike ride while I slowly showered and got moving. He doesn’t usually do that, but it does the trick for getting his ya-yas out for the day. As we were hitching up, we saw the adorable VW bugs and vans we had noticed in the campground, all group together for a photo. We figured they must have been part of an organized gather.

It was bumpy highway drive back, with a stop at Randy’s to deliver Dory2 for a once over. It is super weird not coming home with a Dory. We do not like it. But it’s ok. It’s good to get her a check up. Hope to get her back in time for a premium site in Wrights Beach next weekend. Premium site joy is the best.

Total miles: 84.3, 16.8 mpg, 3 hours (avoiding highways). Site 44, so nice, no hookups, plenty of solar. Sometimes 1 bar of 5g, sometimes nothing. Great dump.