Dancing in the Pacific

The Trip – Day 10

Bakersfield, California – Cupertino, California

Sea Cliff State Park, The Coastal Highway, The Road to La Honda

335 miles

Along the coastal highway

With the shootout at the M6 Corral behind us, we headed toward our next destination – our friends' wedding festivities. We had most of central California between us and the rehearsal dinner we were expected at that night. There are four main south-to-north routes we could take up to the San Francisco/San Jose area, two fast and relatively boring, if we were to believe Trip Adviser, one slow and incredibly scenic, and one slightly boring, slightly scenic and not so slow. We ended up on all four of them.

Oilfields outside of Bakersfield

We were briefly on Route 99 and Interstate 5 and connecting roads between the two. The California landscape was still underwhelming, with oil fields and solar farms providing interest in a not-the-Midwest sort of way. Eventually the arid desert-feel started changing to a greener, agricultural feel. Roses and oleander of assorted colors started to appear in the medians of the highways. Fruit and nut orchards, often lined with palm trees, became more frequent. Hand-written signs advertising avocados ten for a dollar, baskets of strawberries and other fruits lined the roadway as we drove through the most productive fruit and vegetable area of the country. We zig-zagged over to Route 101 which follows in part the historic El Camino Real (“The Royal Road”), a route early missionaries used to visit their mission outposts between San Diego and San Francisco since the 1700s. This highway, just east of the Pacific coastal range, was more scenic and as fast as the previous two roads we were on. We continued on Route 101 north of Monterey where we headed west to the iconic Route 1 coastal highway. This proved to be a very scenic, somewhat twisty, and occasionally touristy-slow ride that was worth every minute of it. The road had non-stop views of the Pacific Ocean and was studded by state beaches all along its shoreline.

Along the "Royal Road"

 

Sea Cliff State Beach

We decided lunch would be a “surprise adventure” at one of the parks. We randomly picked Sea Cliff State Beach, south of Santa Cruz, grabbed our backpack of hiking lunch food and drinks, and headed to the beach. It was mid-day and crowded, the lower beach parking lot full, so we parked on the cliff and walked the hundreds of steps down to the beach. The beach had an RV camping area, a large pier and what looked like a tanker, crashed and sunk at the end of the pier. The tanker was covered with sea birds of all kinds, using the ship as a taking off place to go diving for lunch in the ocean. Some research on Wikipedia would later reveal that the tanker, the SS Palo Alto, was deliberately brought and sunk there in 1929, the pier built to access the ship as an entertainment venue with a swimming pool, a cafe, and a dance floor. People danced for two years on the ocean before the company running the facility went bankrupt, and the tanker was given over to the birds and fish as an artificial reef. The pier to the ship was still in part accessible, so we ate our lunch there, watching the pelicans dive in the water, watching people fishing from the pier and watching others swimming in the ocean. We walked down the beach and one of us stood bare-foot in the water so that person could say they had stood in both the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. (The other person did not want to get their feet sandy...) We climbed up the stairs back to the car and continued north on the coastal highway.

SS Palo Alto, sunk at the end of the pier...

...now covered with birds

Which one of these people is standing barefoot in the Pacific?

Wind surfers along the coastal highway

We stopped several times along the way at overlooks, drinking in the rocky coastline along the ocean, watching windsurfers, until it was time to head inland to our hotel to get ready for the dinner. The distance between the coast and the main highway that would take us to Cupertino was short, about 30 miles. I choose a straightforward route between the two that turned out to be anything but straight. On the map it appeared as two straight roads meeting at a right angle in the tiny village of La Honda. In reality, it was an extreme roller coaster ride through a dense, dark redwood forest with non-stop up and down and 10 mph S-curves the entire way. My husband, who had cut his driving teeth on the notoriously twisty Route 6 along the side of a Hudson highland cliff overlooking the Hudson River near where he grew up, pronounced this present route he was driving as the worst road – EVER! Even the fact that we had passed – unintentionally - within a mile or so of Neil Young's Broken Arrow Ranch did nothing to make the ride more attractive to him.

We finally arrived at the hotel, changed for the rehearsal dinner, and set out for a large California ranch home nestled in a neighborhood between suburban San Jose and the wooded hills we had been winding our way through earlier. It was good to see familiar faces, family of the wedding couple we already knew and family we met for the first time that night. The dinner was outdoors, the night was perfect in weather, temperature and lack of bugs, a combination I would learn, though rare in the midwest, is not uncommon in the central California area. A good ending to a long day...

Difficult roads often lead to beautiful destinations - Unknown

Next:

A Redwood Wedding

The Trip – Day 11

The Wedding, Sanborn County Park, Saratoga, California

20 miles

and

The Trip – Day 12

Cupertino, California – Mariposa, California

159 miles