May 8, 2008.

Travel: DC to Atlanta, Atlanta to San Francisco by plane. Drove 259.7 miles, San Francisco to Richardson Grove State Park on the southern edge of Humboldt County, CA.

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Awoke before dawn. Well before dawn. Cab to airport. Check bags. Security. Shoes off. Shoes on. Pass out for entire flight to Atlanta. Only awake after most of descent is over. Sleep through half of flight to San Francisco. Wait for bags. Find way to rental cars, lugging bags too much due to a preponderance of busted elevators and escalators at the airport. Woman at the counter does a comical double take when she sees where we're returning the car. Keys are handed over, and we find ourselves behind the wheel of a hopelessly ugly, fire engine red Chevy HHR. We don't really care about her appearance, as we are finally on our own, not dependent on flights, baggage handlers, rental care clerks, or anyone else. Besides, we'll learn to love her.

The important thing is, the trip now feels like it begins.

It's 1:30 by the time we drive out, 90 minutes after landing. By east coast time, it's 4:30, and all we've eaten is a bagel in the Atlanta airport and some airplane pretzels. We need food badly. Screw local flavor, we just need a drive-thru, STAT. On the 101, we spy a Jack-in-the-Box, and having never been to one, we get off the highway, which is backing up with Bay Bridge traffic anyway. But the interchange is confusing and we end up circling around run-down industrial parks and settle for McDonald's. We finally find our way back to the 101. Only we get back on behind the backup we'd been sitting in when we got off the highway.

I look at the map and realize that we can bypass all this by going through the city, so we get off at the same exit, and take a short driving tour of the city, through the Mission District, up through the Presidio, and then across the Golden Gate bridge, every bit as impressive as it looks in pictures. We see Alcatraz in the hazy distance.

After one wrong turn and getting lost in the very rich-looking San Francisco suburb of Mill Valley, we found our way to Route 1, the scenic coastal highway we'd been looking forward to driving.

Scenic. Talk about understatements. More like the jaw-dropping coastal highway. We stopped at the Muir Beach overlook first, and lost our breath in the wind whipping in off the Pacific against the cliffs on which we stood. Massive rock formations in the water, waves crashing against them, pooling ans swirling against sheer cliffs dropping hudreds of feet down to the water. We hear a tour guide telling his group how the shoreline used to be miles out, that it's still shallow for miles, as the water we were now looking at used to be a vast flat valley leading to the sea.

Living my life on the east coast, the landscape here is otherworldly. Great grassy hills, often populated by cattle or sheep, to our right, which rambles down to sudden cliffs' edges on our left. The ocean looks exponentially bigger from these heady heights. Endless rolling waves reaching out into a hazy sky. There is almost no horizon; just the blurry and indistince melting of sea into sky. The grasslands and grazing fields covered in thick carpets of green, swaying eastward in the sea wind.

The wind.

The wind is constant. In response to its unceasing force, the trees grow into convoluted shapes beyond the reckoning of the most skillful bonsai sculptor. They are hunched over, old men bent by the years. They are a visual scream, cowering in the face of an always imminent disaster. A disaster that never comes, but which the wind keeps promising anyway.

It's slow going on this road. It twists and turns in response to the coastline, winding our way among the cliffs, climbing steep hills that fall away just as quickly as they rise. But for the views that unveil themselves regularly to our left, it is more than worth it. They reveal themselves so often they'd be routine if they weren't so spectacular.

Near sunset, we see a sign for both food and a sea view, just as we're entering the town of Fort Bragg. We stop and walk down a long trail through a grove of pine trees, the ground soft with needles, until the trees gave way to a clearing along a series of U-shaped cliffs cut into the land. Huge tidal pools filling each indentation, with a long finger of land extending out between them.

The sun was rapidly dropping to meet the now distinct horizon. We walked out toward the end of everything. The plateau around us covered in deep green grasses and wildflowers. We watched the sun dip into the water.


After walking back, we enjoyed one of the best Thai meals we'd ever had at a roadside Thai restaurant near the cliffs. Continuing on, the darkness grew deeper. The road turned away from the sea and we spent an hour or so climbing relentlessly through heavily wooded mountains on wildly snaking and switchbacking roads before coming out just on the edge of Humboldt county, redwood country. A campground presented itself, and we filled out a night registration card, set up our tent in the dark and the chill, and crashed, nearly 24 hours after our day had begun.



Day 1 Pictures