THE ROAD TRIP
WEEK 3

DAY 17 – Tuesday, March 30

START: Montara, CA

END: Fort Bragg, CA

MILEAGE: 246 miles

HIGHLIGHTS: Golden Gate Bridge, California Coastline, Lighthouses

We woke up this morning to the best view we’d had from any of our hotel rooms so far.  Right outside our window was the great Pacific Ocean beating relentlessly against the beach not fifty feet below us.  I’d slept like a log on our bed’s rock hard mattress, but Lauren was in quite a lot of pain.  We have differing opinions as to the optimal softness of a bed, but I gave her a quick shoulder massage, which got her going.  We took lukewarm showers, dutifully performed our chores of cleaning up the bathroom and sweeping the floor, then headed to the kitchen for our traditional oatmeal breakfast.

The view from the kitchen was even better than the one in our room with a colossal window running the entire length of the wall, giving a full panorama of the pounding surf.  We ate quickly and loaded up the car since the hostel closed every day by ten o’clock and we had to get our car out before they locked the gate.  A moderate drizzle had started coming down so we rushed through pictures of Lauren in front of the lighthouse, and were on our way.

Heading north again we passed through San Francisco and crossed over the Golden Gate Bridge – stopping first for pictures and then getting completely turned around while exiting the turn off.  With our bearings and wits amongst us once again, we got headed in the right direction and crossed over the bridge into Marin County. 

Marin is a county of contradictions as ever there was.  Back in the sixties, this whole area was home to more than a few hippies, people who used slogans like, “Do your own thing,” and “Love is all you need.”  These days Marin is a breeding ground for soccer moms and dot-com millionaires.  The tie dyes, hemp jewelry, VW vans and big fat bowls of Jamaican ganga have been replaced with khakis, polo shirts, Mercedes SUV’s and Venti Chai Lattes from Starbucks.  With the average home going for just under a million dollars, it’s apparent that you’re going to need a lot more than love to stay here long-term.  They still encourage you to do your own thing – provided you’re not doing it on a skateboard in a public area that is.  And with a landscape as rugged and beautiful as any in the country, plenty of effort and foreign labor is still put into maintaining perfectly manicured lawns, bicycle paths and Zen gardens, while ex-hippie software designers pay East Indian gurus thousands of dollars an hour to teach them how to make their lives simpler.  We looked up to our right and saw numerous multi-million dollar mansions perched atop the high rolling hills and then down to our left where several pup tents sat pitched amongst the rocks and cliffs overlooking the ocean.

GRAFFITI LOG: Just north of San Francisco, we passed a green road sign indicating we were entering the town of Dogtown, which originally boasted a scant thirty residents but had apparently gained a couple more.  Somebody had painted an X over the 30 and filled in a 31.  Somebody else had, in turn, painted an X on the 31 and filled in a 32.

Route 1 in Northern California is without question one of the most scenic drives in America, and for views of the ocean, there simply is no competition.  “Ocean view” on the East Coast (and in Southern California for that matter) really means lines of shipyards, beach houses, boardwalk vendors and bikini-clad spring breakers, with an occasional patch of bluish water scattered in between.  But up here, the coastline is fraught with jagged rocks, sheer cliffs and turbulent waves – all elements that render it unsafe for ports and harbors, much less for public beaches.  That all adds up to nominal corporate and commercial interference, thus a minimum of obstructions blocking your view as you follow Route 1’s winding course north. 

That was good news for Lauren who sat comfortably in her passenger seat, awed at the might and mass of the Pacific as it beat against the rocks a hundred feet below, sending plumes of spray into the air.  I was a little too preoccupied trying not to crash through a guardrail and plummet onto those rocks as I navigated the incredibly curvy road snaking along the cliff line.  We stopped often to take pictures at thoughtfully placed turnouts, but eventually I had to force myself to keep driving.  For two reasons really.  First, there was no way, not with a thousand pictures, that we could have captured the scope of the landscape here, much less the striking contrast between the high rolling hills above and the rugged unforgiving coastline below.  But secondly, we were running way behind schedule.  We had foolishly thought we could make it up the California coast and into Oregon in a single day and then start heading east from Washington State in another.  We hadn’t taken into account the fact that we would never be able to safely bring our car above forty-five on these twisting coastal roads.  I don’t know how, but there were several people (as in more than one) who were actually attempting this drive in an RV.  With all that going against us, we had to force ourselves to keep moving forward, no matter how impressive the scenery. 

With over eighty lighthouses to choose from along the entire Pacific Coast, I left the job of selecting the ones we would visit to Lauren.  Her criteria for choosing were essentially the same as mine would have been: ones that were “pretty looking”, open to the public, and not too far off our route.  The first light to fit that bill was Point Reyes Light, though at about twenty miles off Route 1 it nearly violated the latter rule.  We turned off the highway (a relative term) about an hour north of San Francisco and drove down a narrow two-lane road populated by more cows than people.  In a couple areas, the cows were actually open range, meaning there was no fence or any other kind of barrier preventing them from ambling across the road.  It was inconceivable to me that there was a major city less than forty miles from here.  I commented more than once, “We are in California, right?”

We made it to the Point Reyes visitor center without any bovine interference and forced ourselves to laugh when we read a sign declaring that the lighthouse was closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.  Of course it was.  Determined to get a picture anyway, we opened the car doors only to have them whipped open the rest of the way by a gust of wind.  It was about a half-mile walk to the lighthouse so Lauren made use of the bathroom before we set out.  While she was taking care of her business, I took the cameras and went to get some shots of the continually breathtaking scenery.  My heart jumped several times as I was lining up a shot only to be knocked off balance, literally off balance, by a huge squall of wind.  Considering the observation point I was at hovered several hundred feet above the rocks and surging ocean below, and the wooden guardrail didn’t even come up as far as my waist, I stayed low, took my pictures quickly and headed back to the car.

Lauren came out of the bathroom at the same time and we began our walk to the lighthouse, which wouldn’t have been so bad save for the most insane wind I’ve ever experienced in my life.  And I’ve lived through a tornado.  Point Reyes is at the end of a fifteen-mile isthmus that juts almost straight out from the California mainland.  Sticking out the way it does, the Point catches every last draft of air that happens through.  Couple that with the fact that this is an area shrouded in fog for almost one full third of each year, and it makes Point Reyes one of the most dangerous navigational obstacles in the West, and the reason a lighthouse was needed here in the first place.  Lauren and I clung to each other as we walked into the headwind, occasionally knocked off balance by even more sudden blasts.  More than once we stopped just to listen, certain we could hear the sound of an ambulance or air raid siren in the distance.  But looking around at the complete isolation of the Point, we realized that the wailing we were hearing was nothing less than the screeching howl of wind. 

Close to the end of the walk, we came to a canopy of trees that had been bent over by the nonstop current of air.  As we walked underneath, the current somehow got even stronger, channeled as it was through this makeshift wind tunnel.  We literally had to put our heads down and hold onto each other in order to not be blown over.  Out the other side, we came at last to the lighthouse observatory. 

As expected, the steep staircase heading a hundred feet down to the lighthouse was obstructed by a locked gate.  So we did the next best thing and took pictures from a little platform, which gave us an eagle eye view of the light and the surrounding ocean.  The wind up here was as strong as anywhere else and I had a heck of a time keeping the cameras steady to take a shot.  After a few snaps though I ran out of film and battery on each respective camera, so we took that as our sign to head back.  With the wind now at our backs, we made it to the car in no time.  We pulled some peanut butter and Gatorade out of the cooler, made sandwiches and headed back to highway.  Driving north again, the rest of the day was spent merely navigating Route 1, stopping occasionally to take even more pictures of the coastline we simply could not get enough of. 

At some point, Lauren turned her attention away from the view and concentrated on updating the journal we had been keeping since our first day on the road.  I’ve road tripped several times in my life, and on each trip I always had it in my head to keep a travel journal but never worked up the motivation or patience to start, much less keep up with, one.  It’s an easy trap to fall into.  You get busy on the first couple of days, drive for longer than anticipated and by the time you get to your hotel, all you want to do is veg out and go to sleep. 

But with this trip I had an added incentive to stay on top of writing down our experiences – namely this travelogue.  Even though I tend to have a pretty impeccable long-term memory (just check out my humor column if you don’t believe me), the pages of our journal have proved invaluable for filling in the gaps and settling disputes between Lauren and myself as to exactly when, where and how certain things happened.   As I sit here, still working on this novel-length piece over two years later, I am more thankful than ever for our diligence. 

I will say, having two people on this trip certainly made it easier to stay up to date on our journaling.  As much as possible, we both tried to work on the journal at night in the hotel.  Any entries Lauren didn’t have time to finish, she would spend time on in the car the next morning.  Whenever I fell behind, being the driver and all, I had to catch up on my entries between bites at restaurants throughout the day.  Each entry began with our starting and ending cities for the day as well as our mileage.  As a cute little inside joke (until now that is) we also drew a heart next to the name of any town where we had, ahem… marital relations.  For the most part, Lauren was responsible for the task of chronicling the play by play of events for each day.  During longer stretches of driving, she would even update the journal with what we’d done earlier that day.  I spent my journaling time discussing thoughts, impressions, complaints and musings about specific things we’d seen and done and the people we’d met. 

Lauren’s mom bought us a journal from CVS at the beginning of the trip.  The hard cover protected the pages, which were likewise made of heavy stock and didn’t tear easily.  Had we just used a standard notebook, the pages would already be ripping and falling out from constant flipping back and forth.  At the end of each entry, we made sure to leave a few blank pages where we would later paste in pictures from the day.  This became a little tricky on days when we saw or did a lot – trying to ascertain just how many pages to leave open before starting the next entry.  Another tricky thing happened whenever Lauren was ready to start working on the current day’s entry before I’d had a chance to jot down my reflections from the previous day.  More than once she asked me questions like, “Okay, how much space are you going to need to talk about the Arch?  How many pages do you want for the Grand Canyon?”  And I would have to make my best estimate as to how much I actually had to say. 

In addition to writing down the ongoing narrative of the trip, we also used the back pages of the first journal (we ended up going through three by the end) to keep several logs – some just for fun, others with vital information.  One of the just-for-fun logs was Lauren’s Pee Log, which had tick marks for every time we had to stop the car for no other reason than to let Lauren empty her bladder.  Our other logs included a postcard log, documenting who we’d sent them to; a film log, documenting what was on each roll; and a digital camera log, documenting what was on each memory stick.  These latter two were exceedingly helpful in the ensuing months as we got film developed and flipped through CD’s full of digital pictures. 

By now, well into our third week on the road, my favorite morning ritual had become listening to Lauren read out loud from the previous day’s journal entry.  We would laugh and sigh, fully rapt in the immediate nostalgia that a journal can produce.  The recitation would ignite further conversations about the things we’d seen and done and naturally segue into other topics from there.  Even now, over two years later, these three books, purchased for less than ten dollars at stationary stores across the country, are our most prized possessions from the trip – maybe even more so than the pictures themselves.  Sometimes on slow boring evenings, we’ll still pull those journals out, randomly pick a point and just start reading to each other, transporting ourselves to wherever we were on that particular day via the vivid memories that our entries awaken.   

Lauren finished writing about Point Reyes and read it all back to me before we made it to the Point Arena Lighthouse just after five o’clock.  This light actually was open to the public on Tuesdays, but it closed at three-thirty.  Of course it did.  Set in place in 1870 to warn mariners against the hull-tearing rock that it sits upon, the Point Arena Light now resides on private property surrounded by vacation lodging and wedding pavilions.  While it would have been incredibly romantic to spend the night in plush accommodations in the shadow of another lighthouse, the two-hundred-dollar a night price tag was a bit out of our range for this trip. 

A gate blocked the road that led to the lighthouse and hotel village, so we took our pictures from a distance.  On our side of the gate, the real estate was presided over by even more cows, who were fenced in by barbed wire on their eastern side and a sheer cliff on their west.

We stopped at a quaint privately owned gift shop on the way out where Lauren picked up a figurine for each of the lighthouses we’d seen today as well as some other lighthouse paraphernalia.  While the shop did have shotglasses, I thought it would be silly to buy a glass for each and every light we visited on this trip.  I knew we had a lot more to go. 

Our intent at the beginning of the day had been to make it to the Redwood Hostel at the very top of California.  Ha!  We didn’t make it half that far.  We drove for maybe another hour until we hit Fort Bragg, stopping early for two reasons.  First, it was already getting dark and Route 1 is not the kind of road you want to navigate for very long at night.  But second, and more importantly, it was Tuesday night and after a month-long hiatus, the Fox hit, 24 was on.  We stopped at the Driftwood Motel and a got a room that was cute and cheap and had cable TV, then went out to find some dinner. 

In my two years living in California, it never failed to amaze me just how much an entire state could consistently screw up a food as simple as pizza.  But it’s a depressing truth.  I’ve deduced that you simply cannot find good pizza anywhere up and down the entire Golden Coast.  Why I chose to ignore what I knew to be the truth that night, I just don’t know, but we grabbed a pie from a place down the street and made it back to the room in time for 24’s opening stopwatch.  As predicted, Jack Bauer kicked all sorts of ass, while the pizza merely sucked it.

After all the graphic violence, in which viewer discretion was advised, Lauren and I shut off the TV, turned out the lights, and created a little of our own viewer discretion… adding another heart to our road journal.