Travels in a Tin Can

for $10 each); Free coffee in Yosemite KOA - donations essential; Free night
at a campsite. This last one was actually a godsend as we had spent the
evening searching for a site and nearly cried with relief when the owner let us
stay at no charge.... except we had to endure a timeshare hard sell the next
day.
More beneficial VAT included: use of a natural - if smelly - hot springs
in San Louis Obispo on the west California coast; Free breakfast and email
near the Sierra Nevadas; a movie and opportunity to buy cheap barbecue
food on site in San Antonio; (genuinely) free coffee and doughnuts in
Homosassa and the introductory video explaining about how to kill crayfish in
Lafayette.
The Avila Hot Springs campsite deserves more of a mention because I
want to put across just how smelly it was. Certainly the odour has stayed with
us – despite countless scrubbings with perfumed soap - and I just wish that
this paragraph could have been written with ‘scratch and sniff’ ink. We could
smell the springs, like rotten eggs and onions, before we even parked and you
could see the steam rising up into the evening sky. However, nothing
prepared us for quite how hot - or indeed smelly - the water would be.
We were also very surprised at how busy it was, with about ten people
ranging in age from us up to, well, old. We managed to stay in for about 15
minutes but our bodies still felt (and indeed looked) like they were in the
boiling water all evening. The heat was lovely but did send us a little crazy.
We were not the only ones affected in this way, as three Chinese ladies who
had been chanting in Emma's changing room then performed a carefully
choreographed hopping dance beside the spa when they left.