After a couple of days of acclimatising to our new time zone, we were ready to pick up our campervan! We headed over to Lost Campers in Inglewood, LA, to meet our ride for the next 96 days. Her name is Susan, she was born in 2014 and she’s a Dodge Grand Caravan. The back seats have been converted into a living space: you can either make it a sofa with a table or into a double bed.

Susan and Aleks

Lost Camper in training

We explored Walmart and stocked the van up with food and drink to last us a while. Driving over to Walmart was an expedition in itself; something you never see in all those movies set in LA is how absurdly spread out it is and how long it takes to get everywhere. It’s like someone took London and melted it in the sun.

Stocked up and ready to roll we set about finding our first campsite for the night. The plan was to head to Joshua Tree National Park but it was too late to get there the that day so we needed to find somewhere on the way, which proved to be harder than expected. We found a state park and called ahead to check for spaces, it was closed. We found another and called them too, the number no longer existed. Finally we found a State Recreation Area which seemed to be open late enough for us to get to so we headed off hoping it would be fine.

Driving in the US is certainly interesting. Much is said on the internet of the classic differences between driving in the UK and US: being able to turn right on a red light, the common practice of undertaking, etc. What was our biggest difficulty on our first day driving in the States? Using the GPS to navigate LA’s labyrinth-like road network. I daresay that this blog will soon contain some more niche anecdotes about driving across the pond. One quirk we found, on the way to our campsite for the night, was a toll road where, along the same, long stretch of highway, two of the lanes were a designated “expressway” in which you could go if you paid a toll, while the remaining lanes were free. Needless to say the “free” lanes did not live up to their name; we crawled along for 26 miles whilst the express lane cars zipped past us! Moral of the story: get yourself an expressway transponder.

Eventually we got to Lake Perris State Recreation Area, where we stayed for the night. It was dark when we turned up but a sign in the entrance kiosk told us to go ahead and pick a campsite; we could pay in the morning. Nothing quite compares to the feeling of discovering you’ll have somewhere to sleep for the night when you were previously a bit unsure! We headed in, chose our site and settled in for the night. Our first campervan dinner was cheese and tomato sandwiches, prepared by the light of our head torches! We then switched the back from the sofa-and-table setup to the bed, and hit the hay.

Waking up to beautiful, warm sunshine that morning was gorgeous.

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