Metropolitan Mobile Home Parks

During the past year while traveling we have not always parked our rig in rv parks. Some people may think that we are always camping out in beautiful forested locations. In actuality there have been quite a few times when, because of visiting family or wanting to see historical sites in cities, we have chosen to park in mobile home parks in metropolitan areas. That has been especially true for Desert Hot Springs, Los Angeles, El Paso, San Francisco and now Sacramento. Some of those parks have no age restrictions and we have seen rather large families squeezed into a double wide trailer. In our last park there was a young girl living with her dad in the fifth wheel next to us. Her dad said he was borrowing the trailer from his Grandfather for six months so he could attend a school nearby. I am sure hard economic times have created many of these situations. The park where we  were located in Los Angeles was the ideal situation with stores and a park within walking distance. Yesterday I walked around the area where we are now located, about 15 miles from downtown Sacramento. It is mostly a commercial area and the only shop I found interesting was an antique store. There is a store for motorcycle accessories, appropriately called Suicycle. Also a shop claiming it has home alarms, Hue and Cry. A tree cutting service advertises that it has cut enough wood since 1970 to warm all of Sacramento. In a strip mall I noticed a small store which advertises that it is a casino, opened around the clock for its patrons. It looked quite small, a rather innocent-looking place. I think I will steer clear of it.  One could draw the conclusion that we have been hanging out in some very shady metropolitan areas and, in reality, we  have not found that to be the case at all. Many of the parks have strict rules about who can reside in them, and even fuss if lawns are not mowed or leaves picked up. Of course many of those rules do not apply to people like us, the transients. It is fortunate for us that these parks always keep a few spots for us, the people on the move! Today we had plans to do some touring in Sacramento but the rain has been rather steady all day. We headed to the closest theater, only about ten minutes away. We saw Alice in Wonderland in 3-D. I found it to be an absolutely, delightful and charming movie.  I liked it better than Avatar.  It is also wonderful in that it speaks to the issue of  female empowerment. Children's fairy stories have progressed a long ways since the time I heard them!