Really starting. day 5 for me, day 1 for them

Sunday (Feb 17)

Final packing and we’re off!  Martha doesn’t want to drive the van, so I will be driving every mile of every day of the whooole trip – sigh.  The plan is to take our time and follow Route 1 all the way, staying as close to the coast as we can. This starts immediately after the Golden Gate Bridge. We take the first right into the Presidio, though the rich people neighborhood, up the hill past the Palace of the Legion of Honor, through the golf course to Lands End and Ocean Beach.  This plunks us onto Route 1, to which we will adhere whenever possible for the next four days.

Martha is on pretty familiar ground for a lot of this trip, because the beaches south of SF – Pacifica, Santa Cruz, Monterey – are her absolute favorite places to escape to (she’s a beach girl, remember!).  Our first stop on Sunday morning is get coffee at her favorite coffee stop in Pacifica.  We are sadly not late enough to be able to eat at her favorite BBQ because it doesn’t open till 11.  We roll on down the busy highway, through downtown Santa Cruz, get lunch at her favorite “sushi deli” in Monterey, then keep on truckin’ into the Big Sur experience.

If you’ve been to Big Sur, you may have had this experience.  It is stunningly scenic but not very user friendly for eating or sleeping, using your phone, or even stopping.  There are few places to pull over, few places to eat.  There is almost no place to spend the night.  There was no room at the state parks, so we pressed on with the idea of staying at the campground at San Simeon, 50 miles further south.

Fifty more miles is a lot of curvy coastal road.  Fifty miles of freeway is no biggie, but if your road is twisty and turny enough that you average less than forty mph, well, that’s about an hour and a half of gripping the steering wheel and not being able to look at the beautiful cliffside ocean vistas off to your right.

It was dark by the time we got to Hearst Castle.  I had a minor freakout because there was no campground there, but it turns out it is five miles further down the road.  About three miles down the road, before the campground  we passed a collection of six or eight motels plunked in the middle of nowhere. They no doubt exist to serve the Hearst Castle crowd.  Martha remembered one as being pretty cheap.  We had a quick team meeting, decided that the Silver Surf Motel would be our stop for the night. It wasn’t as cheap as it used to be, duh, but it was cheap enough!  $69 + California tax = >$77. At this point in the day that seemed to make more sense than $35 for a parking place in the dark.  So for our first night of “camping” we have lights, wifi, tv, swimming pool and even a hot tub filled with chlorine and a little water.  We lived like Kings and Queens and Princes for a night!

Monday

Breakfasted about 50 yards down the road, Tyler hit the pool one more time, and we were off. We made the very, very good decision to backtrack about eight miles past the castle (maybe next time) to the sea elephant mating ground we zoomed past at dusk last night. Sea elephants are a trip!

There are about 1500 of them (the sign says) spread along a mile or so of very specific coastline. This particular colony started with four charter members in 1999, and is now a premier destination for these ugly, noisy, very large and sort of smelly creatures.  The cows are not much bigger that a large sea lion, but the bulls are like ten feet long and look like they’d weigh as much as a couple of Volkswagens.  And since this was mating season, the bulls really were having at each other in loud violent dominance displays at the water line.  It was worse than the Republican primary, ha ha.

That turned out to be the excitement of the day.  It was all business after that.  Cambria for coffee, Pismo, Morro Beach, San Luis Obispo(SLO).  Martha (again) knew an excellent place to stop, a little Mexican place in downtown SLO that was really good.

Somewhere in there, I think it was in the hilly countryside between Morro Bay and SLO, we had a near death experience.  Well, maybe not death, but a near vacation-changing, van-hurting traffic accident.  We were bopping along along a single lane stretch of Route 1, among the rolling green hills, playing a silly word game to keep Tyler from getting bored (he had already conquered the most recent iPad game we’d downloaded).  A car going the other direction pulled into the left turn lane, and I happened to notice that the car behind it was smoking badly.  My fleeting thought was that one usually didn’t see cars belching that much smoke on California highways, but it turns out it wasn’t engine smoke, it was burning rubber!  The driver had slammed on the brakes to try to avoid what happened next. In the next instant the front car was rammed so hard it bounced clear across my lane.

I slammed my brakes harder than I ever have in my three years of driving the Sprinter.  That thankfully slowed us down juuuust enough to give the unfortunate first car time to clear space for us. We sailed between the two ruined cars amid a spray of fiberglass bumper pieces and taillight shards.  We were fine but kind of shook up.  Tyler was in the back seat in his car seat with his seat belt in place, otherwise he woulda got hurt.  The boxes of books and maps I have stashed under the seat unsecured had flown all over the f—ing place.  It was a wake up call for why you really do follow procedure and secure things, especially important things like your family.  It happened so quickly that 20 minutes later it was like it never happened, we were happy and carefree and eating lunch at the Mexican place Martha knew (of course!) in SLO.  A couple of seconds or a couple of feet different and it woulda been a different story – whew!  Thank you powers that be that may or may not be up there watching over us! (probably not, but giving thanks is a good thing in itself, right?)

Martha wanted to go to a place called El Capitan State Beach for that night.  She had been to its neighboring park, Refugio State Beach, and she wanted to check the other one this time.  We got there about 5-ish, figured out how to work the automatic credit card-taking registration machine, and scored the second best site in the place!  pretty awesome.

Tuesday

Hated to leave that place, but after chilling for an hour or so, we embarked on the day in which I would drive the entire length of LA from Oxnard to Newport Beach without touching a freeway!  Makes me tired to even think back on it, but it was oddly exhilarating in its way.

Martha’s Yelp find for today was a really nice little coffee place in downtown Santa Barbara (Handlebar Roasters, I think?)  Just having an excuse to leave the highway and soak up the comforting wealth and security of SB was worth it, but the coffee and the almond croissant were very tasty, as was the Italian sub I got for later from the shop next door.  Tyler and I waited in the van for Martha to rummage the SB Goodwill, but she came back empty handed.

We stopped in Ventura to frolic on the beach for a while, and had a lot of fun – Tyler again wore me out.  There’s a storm a comin’, so the surf was rough. There was a bite to the wind and there was lots of kelp annoying the fishermen, so it was not an ideal beach day from Martha’s POV, but we did accomplish our goal of having fun on the beach!

We are commited to following Route 1, all the way through LA down to Dana Point where we are reserved for the evening.  Along with being a fascinating socio-cultural slice of the good the bad and the ugly of LA, it also turned out to be as good as any to make it through the city time and traffic-wise.  All things considered, I’d much rather spend time at a spot light on Sepulveda Blvd than in a rush hour snarl on I-5.

Oxnard is kinda ugly and Route 1 goes right through the middle of it – reminded me of San Pablo Ave in Oakland.  But after Oxnard you’re back in farmland for a while, then you have the excellent experience of 30 miles of Malibu!  Not much there really, beautiful ocean on your right, mountains on your left, expensive beach houses often behind high walls, with the occasional famous (Zuma, Topanga) canyon cutting off into the hills.

Right after Malibu, boom! we’re in Santa Monica!  Here is one of the high points of Martha’s whole trip!  EBay entrepreneur that she is, the Santa Monica Goodwill is legendary in her circles for its quality goods.  Not necessarily for stuff that you, I, or even she would want to wear, but designer-y stuff she can sell online with a good markup.  We find it two blocks off Route 1.  She dives in and me and Tyler head off to find food, which we all badly need, since it’s been a long time since that pastry in Santa Barbara.  The women on the sidewalks here are crazy fine!  Actually, I think they are just regular fine but they are dressed very, very well!

Back to Route 1, we menfolk are adequately fed, but Martha was not happy with the gluten content of what we got her so we need to find a gluten-free something from somewhere. Eventually somewhere south of the airport (Route 1 crosses an LAX runway!) we drive past our third Whole Foods, but the first one with available parking.  Shopping Whole Foods is not a five minute, in and out kind of thing.  We are not even in Orange County yet!  We  are definitely not going to make our campground before dark.

More of the endless boulevard, Manhattan Beach, Redondo Beach.  We lose the ocean feel for a while when the road cuts inland around the surprisinglty large mountain which is the Palos Verdes Peninsula.  It is now nighttime.  Long Beach, Boca Chica Lagoon, past the incredibly long Boca Chica State Beach, on to another lagoon then Huntington Beach, Costa Mesa, the ever so upscale Newport Beach, then some open space, Laguna Beach (one of my 80’s favorites), finally the beach where I had reserved a spot tonight, campsite #121 at Doheny Beach State Beach in Dana Point.

The forecast was for stormy weather today.  It didn’t really happened, but now, when we are finally settled in it starts to rain fitfully. It blows and storms pretty good later that night, so we get to enjoy the delicious experience of being warm and dry and listening to the sound of rain on the roof!