Travel from Bakersfield to Long Beach, California

We drove our coach 129 miles, about three hours of driving, from Bakersfield to Long Beach, California.

Here’s a map showing our route, heading south:

Route map

An interactive map, with potential stops pinned:

Leaving the KOA:

Leaving the KOA

Always nice to see a Dutch Bros:

Dutch Bros

CA-99 freeway entrance:

CA-99 freeway entrance

Very California: bare hills, big pipes, grapes, and a pump jack:

Very California: hills, pipes, grapes, pump jack

Truck bypass:

Truck bypass

The Petro was a fuel stop option, but we didn’t need it:

The Petro was a fuel stop option, but we didn't need it

I’m sure there are hills up there somewhere:

I'm sure there's hills up there somewhere

Ah, there they are:

Ah, there they are

Rest area:

Rest area

Watch out birbs!

Watch out burbs!

A dump station at the rest area:

A dump station at the rest area

Tejon Pass, elevation 4144 feet:

Tejon Pass, elevation 4144 feet

Lake Hughes:

Lake Hughes

Downhill:

Downhill

Truck bypass:

Truck bypass

Exit to Santa Monica:

Exit to Santa Monica

Playing Weezer’s Beverly Hills when approaching Beverly Hills:

Playing Weezer's Beverly Hills when approaching Beverly Hills

Playing Everclear’s Santa Monica in Santa Monica’s unclear traffic:

Playing Everclear's Santa Monica in Santa Monica

Exit to Long Beach:

Exit to Long Beach

Los Angeles River, actually with water in it near the coast:

Los Angeles River, actually with water in near the coast

Long Beach:

Long Beach

Arriving at Golden Shore RV Resort:

Arriving at Golden Shore RV Resort

Driving to our site:

Driving to our site

Our site:

Our site

Bakersfield KOA Journey

We stayed at Bakersfield KOA Journey in Bakersfield, California. (Campground Reviews listing.)

We do like the convenience of KOAs for one-night stops. This was another fairly fancy one, and we appreciated the on-site restaurant.

Dates:

Check in: 2025-10-31
Check out: 2025-11-01
1 night

Weather:

Sunny
High temp 78°F, low 52°F
Negligible wind, gusts to 6 MPH

Noise:

Nearby road noise and sirens
Distant train horn noise
Some neighbor noise

Site:

#136, pull-through, gravel
Didn’t need to disconnect toad, and didn’t, since only one night
Used air leveling, since only one night
Gravel driveway about 105 feet long by 16 feet wide
12 feet to neighbors on both sides
Picnic table
Tall trees, too close to the couch
Clean site
Elevation 360 feet, front facing NE

Utilities:

50 amp power, a little inconveniently located near the front of the site
Didn’t hook up water or sewer

Internet (in usage priority order):

Starlink: 40-60 Mbps down, 15 Mbps up, 25 ms ping
RoamLink: 7 Mbps down, 7 Mbps up, 120 ms ping (RoamLink uses whichever is best of AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile)
AT&T: 270-330 Mbps down, 8-16 Mbps up, 70-130 ms ping (I have AT&T on my iPhone)
Campground Wi-Fi: not used

Amenities:

Garbage dumpsters
Pool
Onsite restaurant

Campground map:

Map

An interactive map:

Our site:

Our site

A tree is a little too friendly; really should be trimmed more:

Tree

We always enjoy when a RV park has an onsite restaurant; this one has the Crest Bar & Grill:

Crest Bar & Grill

Menu:

Dinner

Sites are a bit tight, and very few long enough for us to not have to untoad, but we’d be happy to stay here again.

Travel from Paicines to Bakersfield, California

Back to our regular posts….

We drove our coach 225 miles, about five hours of driving, from Paicines to Bakersfield, California.

Here’s a map showing our route, heading southeast:

Route

An interactive map, with potential stops pinned:

Didn’t see any of the wild pigs:

Didn't see any of the wild pigs

Narrow bridge in the campground:

Narrow bridge

Tres Pinos:

Tres Pinos

San Luis Reservoir:

San Luis Reservoir

Petro lunch stop:

Lunch stop

BK for lunch:

BK for lunch

Joining I-5 South:

Joining I-5 South

Closed rest area:

Closed rest area

Next one was open, though:

Next one was open, though

Classic BMWs:

Classic BMWs

Exit to Bakersfield:

Exit to Bakersfield

Bakersfield Auto Mall:

Bakersfield Auto Mall

Arriving at the KOA:

Arriving at KOA

KOA check in:

KOA check in

Guided to our site:

Guided to our site

2026 travel plans

I hope you enjoyed the posts reviewing 2025. So what are our plans for 2026? Read on!

This year will be a bit different: we’ll be staying in one place for longer than we have since starting the RV lifestyle, then will do a trip through Canada to Alaska and back, followed by a cruise to a different part of Alaska.

In previous years, we spent one, two, or occasionally three weeks at each location, or only staying one or two nights if we were “sprinting” across the country. But now we are spending the first three months of the year in one place, in Phoenix, Arizona. For several reasons: to spend winter in a sunny warm area, to attend baseball spring training games, and for a change of pace.

In April, we will head over to Los Angeles, California, then “sprint” up the west coast to our home base in Shelton, Washington, where we’ll stay for about seven weeks — also longer than usual.

In June, we’ll head north through Canada to Alaska, where we’ll knock off our penultimate state, and seven of the eight National Parks — driving to two, a couple of flying day-trips to four parks, and taking a boat day-trip to one. Plus of course lots of other sightseeing, while continuing to work (yay for Starlink!). We’ll head south through Canada again towards the end of August, arriving home early September.

Astute readers will notice that I said we’d miss one of Alaska’s National Parks; that’s because one of them (Glacier Bay NP) can’t be easily reached from our travel route. There’s no road there, and would require both a plane and boat to reach (and an overnight stay). We read that the usual way to access it is via a cruise ship… so we decided why not, let’s go on a 7-night Alaska cruise a couple of weeks after getting back from our RV trip! That’ll be a fun experience; our second-ever cruise ship (the first was a very different 4-night cruise to Mexico in 2010).

That takes us to around the end of September. After that, we’ll probably head south again to spend the winter somewhere warm… probably with another Disneyland visit (since we’re Magic Key holders until November), and maybe back to Arizona again, or perhaps somewhere in California, Texas, or even Florida; we haven’t planned that far ahead yet.

A lot of this is still very tentative; we’ve currently booked some key campgrounds in Alaska, plus the National Park excursions and the cruise. But we haven’t yet booked stops along the way.

It’s a long way to Alaska, but this route should be a little shorter than last year, at around 10,000 miles total, depending on where we finish up for the year.

Here’s a map that shows the country and state outlines, colored time zones, our travel route, and pins for stops. Our route begins in Phoenix, heads north up the west coast, through Canada on the eastern route on the map (the Alcan Highway), up to Fairbanks at the northernmost point of our route in Alaska, then south to Seward, Homer, and Valdez, before returning through Canada on the western mapped route (the Cassiar Highway), and back home to Shelton, Washington. The map doesn’t show plans beyond that, but might be retracing our steps back to Phoenix or similar.

2026 route map

Another variation of the map, that shows a little more detail, but the borders are less visible:

Route map 2026 plan

And here’s the route of the cruise ship:

Alaska cruise route

It’s going to be another busy year. I hope you’ll follow along via this blog and the YouTube channel.

2025 stickers

On the passenger-side slide-out, we have a large sticker with the Sinclair Trails logo, a map of the US showing the states we’re visited, a QR code for the website, and stickers with the SinclairTrails.com domain name and @SinclairTrails social handle:

Stickers on side of RV

The states sticker consists of separate stickers for each state, applied to a base sticker. Our rule is that we have to have done something in a state for it to count (e.g. camp, eat in a restaurant, or explore something, not just driving through). Once we have done something in a new state, we add its sticker. We’ve now visited all of the contiguous states, 48 out of 50; just Alaska and Hawaii to go:

State stickers

These stickers tend to fade fairly quickly; here’s what they looked like a year ago, for comparison:

States map

We may get new stickers that include Canada when we visit Alaska, since we’ll drive through part of Canada to get there.

On the driver-side slide-out of the coach, we have stickers for each of the National Parks we have visited, that being another of the goals in our travels. We visited 5 more parks in 2025 (plus revisited several), so have visited 52 of the 63 parks; just 11 left:

National Park stickers

Of course, we’ve also visited numerous National Monuments, National Historic Sites, and other classifications. With 433 units of various types in the National Park System, not to mention parks administered by states, forest services, etc, we had to cap the memorializing of them somewhere! National Parks are the goal; others are gravy.

However, inside our coach we have a framed board with a wooden map of the US, around which we add stickers and pins for any kind of attraction we visit (we get stickers if available small enough, but tend to get pins instead). It’s populated a bit more since 2024, 2023, and 2022, though still some space for future attractions:

Sticker and pin board

The wooden map has pins for states we’ve visited; the pins feature the state flags:

Sticker and pin board

Fun memorabilia.

2025 travel route

Let’s look back at our coach travel in 2025. You may also want to check out the travel summaries from 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021.

You can also see all of these summary posts together via the Route Summary tag, with the earliest posts at the top, or the latest posts at the top.

We bought our 2017 Tiffin Allegro Bus 40SP diesel pusher motorhome in September 2021, and other than a few times when we’ve been out of it during servicing appointments or flying vacations, we’ve lived in it full-time since then.

When we bought the coach, it only had 5,161 miles on the odometer. In 2021 we drove it about 2,300 miles. In 2022 we drove another 8,772 miles. In 2023 we added 9,945 miles. In 2024 we went much further, 12,248 miles. In 2025 we reversed the upward trend, with “only” 11,524 miles. So we have driven our coach 44,789 miles on our adventures so far, for a grand total of 49,950 on the odometer. (The circumference of the Earth at the equator is 24,901 miles, so we’ve effectively driven it twice around the world!)

One of our goals is to visit every state in the US:

In 2021 we stayed in 7 states: Washington, Oregon, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, California, and Arizona.
In 2022 we added 5 more: Nevada, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas (plus revisited others).
In 2023 we visited 11 more new states: North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Florida, in addition to revisits.
In 2024 we stayed in 15 new states: Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.
In 2025 we completed the contiguous states, with 10 more: New Jersey, Ohio, Michigan, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.

A total of 48 states. Just two left, Alaska and Hawaii! (We’ve been to Hawaii before, but only count states visited since purchasing our coach.)

We also traveled around New Zealand in a campervan in 2025, but I’ll summarize that in a future post.

Here’s a map of our coach travels and stays in 2025, via the excellent RV Life Trip Wizard website, using a variation of their maps that more clearly shows the state borders and color-coded time zones. We started the year in the panhandle of Florida, then the route headed mostly counter-clockwise, with some messy loops in the northeast, finally ending up in California:

Timezones 2025 map

Another variation of the map, with more detail:

Route map 2025

Here’s a slightly out-of-date animated GIF that shows the northeast route, since it’s a bit messy:

Route map 2025

Here’s the route map with the travel in 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021 also displayed in different colors; our 2025 travel in light green, our 2024 travel in orange, our 2023 travel in purple, our 2022 travel in blue, our 2021 coach travel in dark green, and our 2021 Yellowstone rental trailer trip in brown:

Route map for 2021 to 2025

The same map as an animated GIF, adding each year:

2021 to 2025 maps

Here’s a fun variation, showing the 2025 route without the background map:

Route map for 2025 without background

As usual, we revised our route a few times from what we had planned for 2025; here’s an animated GIF that compares what we had originally planned (as shown in last year’s 2025 travel plans post), and what we ended up doing (as above):

2025 maps

Another interesting animated GIF, showing the elevations along our route (also from last year’s 2025 travel plans post); see the elevations and road gradients at the bottom, and a moving dot along the map route showing where those elevations occur (this route has some differences from the latest maps, but I didn’t want to bother redoing the GIF):

Map with elevations

Super flat until we reached the Bighorn mountains and Yellowstone in Wyoming.

Here’s a Google Maps list that shows the places we stayed in 2025.

Fascinating!

Thousand Trails San Benito

We stayed at Thousand Trails San Benito in Paicines, California. (Campground Reviews listing.)

Our second stay here. Our first stay was our very first experience of a Thousand Trails park. Not a super great experience, but not bad enough to put us off TT. (Which we have some misgivings about, but it has been mostly worthwhile.)

This time, the campground was in the midst of a much-needed major improvements to their electrical system, with new 50/30/20 amp pedestals on all of the sites. At the time we stayed, only about the third of the park was open.

Dates:

Check in: 2025-10-20
Check out: 2025-10-31
11 nights

Weather:

Mostly sunny
High temps 65-82°F, lows 48-54°F
Little wind, gusts to 17 MPH

Noise:

No road noise
No train horn noise
Little neighbor noise

Site:

#C-010, back-in, gravel
Needed to disconnect toad, parked beside coach
Somewhat level site; a little high on passenger side; used hydraulic leveling
Gravel driveway about 60 feet long by 12 feet wide
75-95 feet to neighbor on passenger side
32 feet to neighbor on driver side
Just grass between sites
Picnic table
Fire pit
Tall trees
Somewhat clean site
Elevation 720 feet, front facing north/east/south/west

Utilities:

50 amp power, conveniently located
60 PSI water, conveniently located
Good sewer connection, conveniently located (1 10-foot pipe needed)

Internet (in usage priority order):

Starlink: 76-108 Mbps down, 22-44 Mbps up, 30 ms ping
RoamLink: 50 Mbps down, 3-5 Mbps up, 125 ms ping (RoamLink uses whichever is best of AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile)
AT&T: 101-145 Mbps down, 1-5 Mbps up, 70 ms ping (I have AT&T on my iPhone)
Campground Wi-Fi: none

Amenities:

Garbage dumpsters
Pool

Campground map; much of the campground was being renovated at the time of our stay:

Map

An interactive map:

Our site:

Our site

The tree next to our site:

Tree

During our stay the electricians needed to make some modifications to the pedestal; replacing one of the breakers:

Electrical pedistal

And installing a ground rod:

Electrical pedistal

Can’t get packages at the campground, so we used Amazon lockers in Hollister (30 minutes away):

Amazon lockers

And the nearby post office in Paicines (9 minutes away):

Post office

Pool (and ex-hot tub):

Pool

While there, I added a Pokémon Pokéstop at the playground:

Pokémon Pokéstop

Other sites:

Other sites

New big solar array over storage area:

New big solar array over storage area

A big stump with a bird box:

Stump with bird box

Lots of gnomes around the place:

Lots of gnomes around the place

Cat:

Feral cat

Deer:

Deer

Birb:

Birb

A mostly peaceful campground. We’d be happy to stay here again.

Travel from Red Bluff to Paicines, California

We drove our coach 297 miles, about six hours of driving, from Red Bluff to Paicines, California.

We had originally planned to do this in two steps, since we like to aim for about three hours of driving per day. But at our first rest stop we decided we’d prefer to have a single longer drive, since it was mostly on I-5, so arranged to arrive earlier and cancel our original stop for that night.

Here’s a map showing our route, heading south:

Map

An interactive map, with potential stops pinned:

Entering I-5 South:

Entering I-5 South

Hey, hay!

Rice field:

Rice field

Our coach on traffic cams:

Our coach on a traffic cam

Swimming pool:

Swimming pool

Rest area:

Rest area

Woodland bridge:

Woodland bridge

Sacramento River:

Sacramento River

Sacramento:

Sacramento

Paladin touching my foot:

Paladin touching my foot

Aquaduct:

Aquaduct

Fuel stop:

Fuel stop

Interesting pea soup restaurant:

Interesting pea soup restaurant

San Luis Reservoir:

San Luis Reservoir

Exit to Hollister:

Exit to Hollister

School bus:

School bus

A trailer that didn’t disconnect the water hose and electrical cable; not a great way to travel:

Trailer didn't disconnect water hose and electrical cable

Road to Thousand Trails:

Road to Thousand Trails

Thousand Trails San Benito:

Thousand Trails San Benito

Narrow bridge:

Narrow bridge

Our site:

Our site

Red Bluff KOA Journey

We stayed at Red Bluff KOA Journey in Red Bluff, California. (Campground Reviews listing.)

Our second stay here. One of the nicest KOAs, though a pity about the location near a noisy freeway and train track. We enjoyed walking across the road to a Shari’s for dinner.

Dates:

Check in: 2025-10-19
Check out: 2025-10-20
1 night

Weather:

Sunny
High temp 78°F, low 52°F
Some wind, gusts to 22 MPH

Noise:

Nearby freeway noise
Occasional train horn noise
Little neighbor noise (some dogs)

Site:

#114, pull-through, concrete
Didn’t need to disconnect toad, and didn’t, since only one night
Level site; used hydraulic leveling, since on concrete
Concrete driveway about 63 feet long by 15 feet wide
13 feet to neighbor on passenger side
0-23 feet to road on driver side
Picnic table
No fire pit
Some trees
Clean site
Elevation 280 feet, front facing west

Utilities:

50 amp power, conveniently located
70 PSI water, conveniently located
Didn’t connect sewer

Internet (in usage priority order):

Starlink: 80-134 Mbps down, 24-30 Mbps up, 30 ms ping
RoamLink: 44 Mbps down, 14 Mbps up, 145 ms ping (RoamLink uses whichever is best of AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile)
AT&T: 340-360 Mbps down, 3 Mbps up, 40 ms ping (I have AT&T on my iPhone)
Campground Wi-Fi: not used

Amenities: