February 2-6, 2026
This was my first ever winter camping trip. It was wonderful!
On the other hand, I had good weather, and my rig was plugged into electricity so I had heat without using my propane, and same with the fridge. And I had great neighbors, and, to top it all off, I had a campsite that backed right up to the Pacific Ocean. How cool is that. 🙂
And yes it was cool, sometimes cold! But the sun was out every day, and it didn’t rain once the whole time I was here. Sure the wind blew … it always blows off the ocean. It’s a rare day when the wind isn’t blowing out here at the coast even if it’s just a breeze. You just dress for it, in layers. It’s all good.
So here, below … the big white truck and Towhee the Trailer are backed up to the beach. With one very quiet neighbor beside me, to the left.
To the right of my rig, in the next camping spot was this (below). A large pond of water completely filling the parking spot! Campground staff had put orange marker cones out so no one would attempt to park an RV there. There had been a big rain storm here over the five days or so before I arrived. I had reserved this spot about a month earlier, so I really lucked out with the weather! But still, the ground was so wet with that rain, that the rain water hadn’t yet soaked in.
Most of the campground was empty (below) so you might think that no one would even try to camp in that pond above. But better to be safe than sorry, so it was a good thing the orange marker cones were out at that one campsite.
Photo below … I’m standing behind my trailer. There’s the Pacific Ocean! Since my table and benches inside my trailer are at the rear of my trailer, I had a perfect view out the back window and out the side window of the ocean, birds, the sunset. This was marvelous!
All of these photos are actually from my second day here, which was my first full day here. These photos were taken in the morning.
I took a walk on the beach. I had noticed a big brown lump on the sand … thought it looked like a llama sleeping, but I figured it probably wasn’t a llama sleeping, eh? Turns out it was a big black tree trunk partially buried in the sand, rotting away. If you enlarge the photo below, you might see what I saw … a fox with a white muzzle at the end of that tree trunk. Wow, a fox, on the beach. Ok, not so much. 🙂 It was actually just another piece of lighter colored drift wood sitting close to that big black tree trunk.
But also in the photo above … look at all those seagulls lined up out there!!! And yes they really were seagulls. Hundreds (thousands?) of them all up and down the beach … likely waiting for the fish to come in, just like that fisherman is in the photo above.
And then I turned around and headed back to the campground. In the photo below, you can see maybe seven RVs. I think there were nine total that morning … in a campground that has 64 sites.
Here’s a closer photo below. There’s a pickup truck and slide-in camper on the left … then my big white truck and Towhee the Trailer … then a large RV with a USA flag on it … then two very small RVs (one white and one red). The little rigs were actually several campsites away.
To take the photo below, I was standing on the beach (you can see some small pieces of driftwood and shells and seaweed that had been carried up there in a storm and a very high tide, right next to those rocks). And you can see that the windows in my trailer had a full view of the beach and the ocean (not blocked at all by those huge rocks). And yet, if I ever was camping here during a super high tide and a storm, I sure would have had saltwater all over my trailer! One of the park Rangers told me that they sometimes block off that whole row of campsites, and then also shut the power off to those campsites, in order to keep people safe. The ocean doesn’t care … it wants to grab those rocks and take them away!
But while I was here, the weather was mild, no storms and no super high tides.
In the photos above, it might look like I’m really close to my neighbors. I’m not. The photo below shows how much space there really is between campsites here.
So then it was noon-ish and time for lunch. So I got back in the trailer and had my lunch and then walked up into the very small town of Pacific Beach. That very small town is maybe MAYBE a two-minute walk away. It has a gas station, a couple of small grocery stores, a couple of restaurants, a small gift/antiques shop, a library, a post office, a small hardware store, a very small school for young kids. I wandered through a few of those places and then walked back to my campsite.
Wow! When I got back to my campsite in the early afternoon, everyone except the camp Host, and me, and that one small white trailer … everyone had left!
All gone.
I wasn’t too concerned, though it felt a little odd. The camp Host was close by … you can see their rig in the third photo down from the top of this blog. I could see them and they could see me. And I had their cell phone number, and they had mine. On the other hand, by 5pm later than afternoon a few more camper folk had arrived. Still, that night, there were only 6 or 7 campers in the entire campground. Boy, this is the place to go if you want to camp right next to the Pacific Ocean in winter! Shhhh, don’t tell anyone! 🙂
How did I get so lucky? This was the perfect spot!
More stories to tell, stay tuned.