“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” – G.K. Chesterton
I don't like flying. For two reasons:
1) something that heavy should not be able to stay in the air for that long traveling at that speed (engineering is scary) and
2) I feel like you miss all the really good stuff.
Obviously this is not an option when I go overseas because I have neither the time nor the money to take a steamer across the Atlantic (...that reminds me - there is this really great book by Seth Stevenson called Grounded: A Down To Earth Journey Around The World that you should really read if you have any interest in this sot of travel.) but it is a possibility when we travel in the US.
I did a cross-country trip in 2007 the details of which would be far too long to include in a post here. And then last year I drove from LA to San Francisco. My husband was invited to do a poetry reading in Long Beach and it just so happened that we had vacation scheduled. We usually went to New Orleans at that time but figured, why not, and hopped a plane to LA.
We took the Pacific Highway 1 all the way from LA to San Francisco - a whopping 8 hours and 400 miles or something like that. We managed to get lost only one and a half times (the half only because the sign was covered and the ocean wound up on the wrong side).
The Pacific Coast Highway is listed as one of the top 500 Drives of Lifetime by National Geographic and it does not disappoint.
We started out in the early morning from Long Beach (which by the way doesn't believe in tea. You really need to get on this Long Beach. Not everyone in the US drinks coffee.)
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Which his unbelievable high, like hand shaking as you're driving sort of high. Just high. So high.
If you're a Kerouac fan than you already know the meaning of Big Sur in Kerouac lore. It recounts the time Kerouac stayed at Lawrence Ferlinghetti's cabin in Big Sur. It's a heavy book, as Jack was battling both public demands and his increasing spiral into acute alcoholism.
“The empty blue sky of space says 'All this comes back to me, then goes again, and comes back again, then goes again, and I don't care, it still belongs to me” - Jack Kerouac
Along the way you'll also run into these guys:
This is from the Sea Elephant Viewing Area - located about 7 miles north of San Simeon.
San Simeon takes you right into Monterey, the beautiful city of John Steinbeck:
There I was witness to a controlled burn:
and from there it's just a quick drive to San Francisco where your journey ends here:
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