California Day One

Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Los Angeles to Pismo Beach, California

Well the netbook booted just fine after riding all day in the saddlebag.

What an amazing first day. Is it better, I wonder, to have your best day of vacation be the first, or the last day?

Yesterday was mostly all airplane. So it counts as a work day. The time difference between East and West Coast caused me not a bit of trouble. Being a world champion sleeper, and having shorted myself with preparations Monday night, I simply slept through the extra three hours last night. Easy.

I woke refreshed and finally surrendered my watch to California time.

After breakfast I caught a cab from my LAX Travelodge Hotel to nearby Eagle Rider motorcycle rentals. Business acquaintance Mark Bastarache of Business Network hooked me into a discounted Harley-Davidson rental. I picked up a beautiful Road Glide, blue, for my trip on the Pacific Coast Highway (PCH), U.S. 1.

Hey, wait a minute. How can we have two U.S. Route Ones? There's one of those on the East Coast too. Our part of the country being settled so much sooner, surely we were first. Shouldn't California's be U.S. Route Two?

Everybody at Eagle Rider was great. I packed the bike, left a bag behind with my Aquarium business wear for the IMAX convention next week and promptly made my first foray onto the famous Los Angeles freeways. Yes, they are as bad as you have heard.

My task was to shoot up the 405 to catch 10 west to Route 1 north. Seems simple, right?

Well thinking myself clever, I opted for the car pool lane. It was the only lane appearing reliable. The others were rubber banding severely at every exit and on-ramp.

Unfortunately once in the lane I felt bound by the double yellow line. There had been broken white lines here and there where cars could merge in and out of the car pool lane. I entered at a set. But when Route 10 appeared, no broken lines did. By the time I determined to sneak across, I had missed my exit. I might have made it on I-84 back home. But in L.A., once out of the car pool lane there were still five lanes to cross to make the exit.

I went on by I-10 and took Santa Monica Boulevard exit. Based upon my glance at the map before I left, I figured how far can it be to the ocean? So I turned left, west, and started down the Boulevard. Hey, just like the popular song, “All I wanna do is have some fun, I gotta feeling I'm not the only one . . . 'till the sun comes up over Santa Monica Boulevard.”

Only the “Boulevard” looked very much like a dirty, gritty, four lane city street with curbside parking and a stop light every block. After a bit of this I figured it was not what I sought for vacation riding. Glancing at my AAA Triptik map, I turned left again, heading back south to pick up I-10.

A bit more stop and go city driving and I was zipping along again, headed as west as you can go in the U.S.A., to the Pacific Coast Highway. I was there in no time.

(Yeah, I know Hawaii is further west than this. And Alaska stretches nearly to Russia, just ask Sarah Palin. Let's not get technical. Okay?)

Weather was gorgeous. An above average 80 degrees. Sunshine. Brilliant Sunshine. It felt great!

Seems to me the only way to survive New England is to get the heck out to someplace warm at least once per winter. But then again, I did not grow up there, so I am not fully acclimatized.

I had started the morning with my light pair of winter gloves. When I hit the PCH I switched to fingerless, also zipped the winter liners out of my leather jacket and riding pants.

At first it was still very urban. Then there it was, the vast Pacific Ocean. Beautiful. Bluer than the Atlantic. Visibility to the horizon.

California gives every appearance of having, just very recently, fallen into the sea. To the west is the ocean. To the east are steep, very steep, hills. Sometimes the hills are maybe a mile away, sometimes they reach right to the water.

There is no transition here. Steep hills, mountains even, then the sea. No Piedmont nor gently rolling hills. Only abrupt, steep, deeply cut, hills.

California's geography looks very young. Features are sharp, angular, extreme. Every where water runs it cuts very deeply into the hills and mountains. I am no geologist, but it does not look like they have a bit of granite in the place. Maybe farther back to the Sierra Nevada. But here on the coast it looks like sand and mud, not even rock. Little scrubby bushes cling to the hills and sparsely so.

Then I got to Malibu and amazingly there were houses everywhere. They were right down on the beach, with the road hard on their backs. Even crazier, houses were clinging to these obviously eroded hillsides.

I'm no architect nor engineer. Even so, it seems to me any fool can see that the soft land is continually falling into the ocean. How do the people who live in these houses sleep at night? I would be pacing the floor, on the uphill side, ready to jump out before the house tumbled down with the rest of the sand into the sea.

It is hard for me to summon much sympathy for mudslide victims. When you moved in, wasn't it obvious the hill was just waiting to let go?

On the other hand, people live in New Orleans several feet below sea level with only an Army Corps of Engineers mud dike holding the water away. In Florida they rebuild after every hurricane. Even I live along the mouth of a river supposedly protected from flooding again like it did in the 30s by several dams upstream. The year my son Trever was born, hurricane Gloria paid a visit. We didn't move inland.

I turned up Malibu Canyon Road and cranked the big Harley up the hill through twists and turns clinging on the edge of a very steep and deep canyon.

As I carved the canyon I wanted to stop and take a picture of this amazing topography. I saw turnouts, advertised by signs a quarter mile in advance. But each turnout was lined with no parking, stopping or standing signs. I didn't get it. Why have a scenic turnout, if no parking is allowed? Not knowing the local custom I rode on.

Then I saw a sign for a “vista” and there the parking signs allowed me to stay for 10 minutes. That's where I grabbed some photos.

It was amazing to me how rural the canyon was. All the sudden you went from packed city to wilderness. Such extremes compose California's charm.

As I popped out of the canyon top I rode a bit more up the mountain. It was noticeably cooler. Not knowing how far it was to the very top, I turned around and headed back down. As I entered the canyon, a sign explained the no parking, stopping, standing turnouts. It said, “slower vehicles use turnouts.”

Since the highway was only two lanes, trucks and Winnebagos and such pull into the turnouts to allow faster vehicles to pass. Glad I wasn't parked in one, defiantly taking photos. They do run trucks and trailers up and down these roads.

Back along the coast, the PCH went from two lanes to four, then back to two. Again, it went from house lined to completely rural in a matter of yards. I guess there are some hills too steep even for these crazy Californians. Or maybe there just aren't enough Californians to build out this far.

They have a unique idea of freeways here. Instead of building over or underpasses, they simply declare that “freeway ends” with “cross traffic ahead.” It's all the same road, the speed limit drops from 65 down to 55. Nothing else changes. Once past the intersections a sign declares “freeway begins” and you can crank on another 10 mph.

I actually started out on Route 101. From Los Angeles to San Luis Obispo Routes 101 and 1 have an on-again, off-again, relationship. They split at Buellton and reconnect at Pismo Beach. It is marked as though you're always switching from one to the other. There are lots of signs offering 101 access once you're on 1.

At Buellton the geography changed dramatically. The ocean was gone and I was twisting and turning through cattle country with rancheros and very few signs of civilization. Another dramatic and abrupt change in scenery.

Vandenberg Air Force Base gets the shore on this part of the PCH. It's a missile test range. So I guess they don't want to be shooting rockets over the highway. Amazingly, you drive right past rifle ranges, I mean right off the highway. You could walk to them. Fortunately they shoot away from the road.

Rather suddenly once again, the country flattend out and changed from cattle to crops. Vegetable farms and packing plants stretched for miles.

Guadalupe was a working town. It looked like a hundred farm towns I have visited. One strong main street. Plants and trucks and tractors and mud dragged onto the highway at either end of town. Dying retail in the center. Old houses built right to the road. Pool halls, bars and VFWs and churches for Sunday cures to Saturday debaucheries.

At the northern edge of town I stopped to add a few layers and switch back again to the winter gloves. The warm sun was drooping in the sky.

A glance at my vintage Triptik and San Luis Obispo seemed a reasonable target for what was left of the day. That's where Routes 1 and 101 part ways for a hundred miles, with a ridge of mountains between them.

For a bit before that, the coast cut back into Route 1 again and I was enjoying the PCH with an ocean view. Just above Pismo Beach 1 rejoins 101. And just before it does, it skirts along a coastline cliff. I saw a couple of cool hotels and then I suddenly was back up to 65 mph on the 101 freeway.

As I rocketed toward San Luis Obispo, I was having a conversation with myself inside my head. The more I talked to myself, the more I became convinced that Pismo Beach scenery back there was pretty sweet. And now I was headed back inland. It took me a few miles to decide. Then I got off an exit, crossed over, and got back on the freeway retracing my tracks back south.

It turned out to be an extraordinarily good decision.

The cliff side hotel gave me a good government rate and a beautiful room overlooking the ocean. The sun was low and warm and casting long shadows and soft colors. Out over the water there was a low line of clouds miles away.

Perched upon the cliffs, an amazing gazebo dotted an impossible point of land. Before I walked out there for a better look, I called the wifey at home. And in our less than half-hour conversation, my beautiful scenery disappeared. That low line of clouds was a fog bank. I watched it roll right over me and the hotel. The sun was still up. The ocean and cliffs were gone.

They did not reappear the next morning either.

Meanwhile the hotel restaurant was under construction. Fortunately the desk clerk steered me to “Steamers” a short walk away. The restaurant's theme is “a mile of clams.”

I also took a walk on the beach. Beach access was via about three stories of steep staircase.

Returning to the hotel, I decided to take a dip in the pool. It was heated and open until 11 p.m. The air was misty, a light drizzle going. I started out in the hot tub then took a dip in the pool and then back to the whirlpool. Had the whole pool area to myself.

Back to my room late, I dressed and finally walked out to that gazebo. The hotel had bright lights shining on the cliffs and the rocks below. Very nice.

Finally I sat out on my room's porch with my net book and tried to capture today's scenes, Pacific waves offering a bucolic symphony.