When directions get you confused...

When Patti had looked at the route for driving from the campground to Solvang on GoogleMaps, she thought it indicated that we should go the opposite way on Paradise Road and that it would still come out on route 154. So, even though the Garmin indicated we should turn left on Paradise Road as we normally do to go toward Santa Barbara, we turned right to see where it took us. Within a mile or so, we ended up at a river ford and decided to turn around.

Well, on the way back from Solvang, the Garmin has consistently tried to get us to take a different route to get to our campsite. Normally we save the address of the campground in the Garmin, and in this case, that address is at the turn off of Paradise Road, about a mile and a half from where we are parked (that narrow winding road that we came down with Miss Doozie on Monday). In this case, we saved the place right where Miss Doozie is parked, so the Garmin is trying to get us to a place that is well off any roads that it knows. It has consistently tried to get us to take the Arroyo Burro Road which would take us beyond the turn off that we take for the 1 mile narrow road into the campground. When we returned this afternoon, we decided to take Julie (the Jeep's Garmin's name) up on her directions.

The route took us across the river ford - we didn't get pictures on the way down - but we did on the way back:

We drove along the river for a ways - we could see Rancho Oso campground across the river, and, in fact, we could see Miss Doozie too!

We used the binoculars to determine which one was Miss Doozie...

But... when we got to Arroyo Burro Road....

We're at the turn off for Arroyo Burro Road!

Uhm... This isn't going to work...

We could see that the road did in fact go down the hill and probably forded the river and probably would end up near the campground on the other side... but... no Julie, we're not going that way...

Having crossed the river though, we decided to do some more looking around. There were a number of National Forest Service facilities around, including a campground with a camphost.

We were in (or at the edge of) the San Rafael and Dick Smith Wilderness Areas

Camphost motorhome - the site comes complete with a corral... but no Verizon signal for phone or internet!

Video of the crossing on the way back:
https://youtu.be/Y0IUQfu3DJ4

Moral of the story: GPS devices are great to have to help with directions, but sometimes they aren't very sure of where they are either!