Agreed and great photo!

Sorry to read you had mixed issues with this area! My husband worked at Sugarloaf State Park which is close by. Spring Lakes is a nice spot in the suburbs off Hwy 12 in Santa Rosa. Like everything else these days, a lot has changed. Hope your journey from now on will not have such a negative experience . It gets very cold there when the sun goes down…for California.

Good to hear you got through the deluge safely. It appears we're on parallel schedules - we left Tucson on Tuesday for a manageable four day drive home. Even finished early enough in the day to squeeze in rides in Socorro NM and Catoosa OK. Hope get some clear skies to enjoy the scene on the coast on the rest of your trip.

They really are an attractive bird. I was happy to get a good look at one, because we don’t have them further north.

Glad you were able to drive without incident, given the weather. We were thinking of you and wondering how you would manage with the rain. All's well, and that is good.

What a beauty!

It could be that. They were certainly well aware of the situation. I was surprised at how gracious they were once they decided to let us off. Something they said in our final exchange made it sound like they were hoping that if they held out long enough Airbnb would cover the loss for them. Fat chance on that!

As I sat hear reading this on the 6th- the day it was posted- I was pretty certain based on the byline date that you'd managed to survive. Glad to know you were eventually excused from paying Airbnb hosts for accommodations not used due to circumstances. Perhaps as they experienced the storm themselves they grew a conscience?

I stand corrected. Rachael reminds me that we have used Airbnb a few times in Europe - including for an upcoming booking in Mallorca. I don5 recall any documentation hassles, but maybe it’s because we were already registered in USA.

Yup. We’ve done the right thing here. I’m just hoping we can get out tomorrow, but that’s looking doubtful too. Bad news for a Morro Bay meetup though - we’ll just be making a beeline north once we can move.

Well, some part of could be due to Grampy crabbiness? I can imagine your frustration though. We nearly always stick with Booking unless there’s no alternative, but even there well run into the occasional obnoxious hassle - they want us to wire cash in advance, for example. When something like this comes up we nearly always cancel and look elsewhere.

I can’t speak for Airbnb in Europe, because I’m not sure we’ve ever booked with them there. I will say though that even over here we like them less all the time and tend to avoid them too.

I read the AirBnB doings with some interest. We have not used AirBnB, until forced to by the place we will stay in Paris. To sign up, AirBnB demanded a photo of a passport (but not too many mB) plus a live current photo from their App (difficult on the desktop!) plus time to, presumably, run a facial recognition on the two, plus time for the host to approve the deal. We were ready to dump the whole thing. In the end, this one booking produced multiple SMS, at first to our not yet functioning European phone, and scads of emails documenting each tortuous step. Is this just AirBnB in Europe, or is it standard and I am just crabby? P.S. AirBnB earned a 15% service charge for annoying us with all that.

Good move on staying there. Really bad storm.

I did too, Bill. I was really surprised at how clear it came out. Dumb luck.

Been watching as that develops with a daughter in the hills not far out of Santa Cruz, and having grown up in Mojave with lots of connections still there. I'm gonna guess that trail with the little mud puddles is now a raging torrent.

Good job making lemonade out of the storm!