I've never driven a vehicle that does this before, and camping California style

The drive from Blythe to L.A. was really beautiful. I made that drive in the other direction when I moved to Indiana a few years ago, but I don't remember it being that remarkable. It could be due to weather, time of day, or my state of mind. Whatever the difference, this time the main thing I experienced was the beauty.

As I left town, I took the 101 freeway out of Los Angeles over toward the coast. At one point there is a long, winding downhill stretch marked as a 7% grade. As I was managing my speed going down the hill, I noticed the van downshift at one point, when I was going about 60 mph. From then on, as long as I kept my foot off the gas and as long as the hill continued to be steep, my van used engine breaking in Drive to stay at 55 mph. Pretty cool! Since then, I've noticed it kick in on other highway-speed down hill stretches. So now I wonder -- is this because I'm driving a van, or is it because I'm driving a much newer vehicle? For those of you with fairly new cars and an automatic transmission -- do they automatically downshift in Drive on steep downhill stretches?

I had picked out a couple of possible places to camp when heading up the coast. The first was Carpinteria State Beach. The location looked great, but the prices were high, so I decided to go look at the place before making a reservation. When I got there, I discovered that the "campground" was a big parking lot. In the middle there was a row of RVs, and closest to the beach they had put out some picnic tables and were renting out the parking spaces in-between for $60/night for vehicles that could fit in them. Mine would fit, but I couldn't see spending $60 for one of these parking spaces:



If the state of California can call this a campground, I feel justified in calling what I do in my van in a parking lot "camping." 😊

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