March 27 to April 12, 2017—Carmel by the Sea, Pinnacles NP, some place forgotten, Sonoma Valley, northern Cali coast, to Portland OR
From Jalama Beach outside Lompoc we drove up the coast, through the artichoke –growing district around Castroville and the garlic capital Gilroy, through the mists and fogs reaching in from the sea, to Carmel, below Monterey. (Would have driven up the coast but the bridge below Big Sur had washed away turning forty miles of Highway 1 into a dead end road.) We camped in a county park high on a bluff near the Presidio military base. We arrived without a reservation and found a nice spot to park the trailer, hiked up some steep hills for a couple hours while the camp filled up with small trailers and truck campers. Some people living in tents occupied a handful of the sites, gaming the camp residency restrictions by changing the reservation name every 14 days. They made the bathrooms a tad overused and unsavory, but we were only here for the night. We had contacted a couple living in Carmel who used to live in the Bushwood area. We didn’t know them well, had been out with them a couple of times with mutual friends, but they were good people and we looked forward to dinner or drinks together, but circumstances on both sides prevented it—we advanced our schedule by a day so we could get to Healdsburg for Alan’s, our friend from Mexico, birthday.
Drove across the Salinas Valley and into the beautiful, isolated mountains east. Arrived at Pinnacles National Park in time to hike into the gorgeous landscape—mountain meadows, crystal streams, the pinnacles of stone that erupt out of the steep, grassy hillsides. Built a decent fire as the cold came on. Saw condors the next morning. Sighting them is exciting as there are so few and their extinction was almost accomplished in recent years. As a bird, at the distance we saw them, they are little more than glorified vultures. The condor is the largest bird, but at any given moment there are condors smaller than turkey vultures, and these we saw. Not awe-inspiring in person, necessarily, but their backstory makes them superstars of the bird world.
Came back west into the Salinas Valley to a nondescript camp in a nondescript town. Talked with an Australian family at the tail end of their two week trip in a rented RV. We had been seeing quite a few of these rental campers since entering California; quite popular here.
Like the Imperial Valley south, the Salinas Valley is wall to wall vegetables. Impossible to calculate but I believe we were looking, at various times, at fields containing a half million servings of spinach or broccoli. Mind-boggling, what people make this land do year after year. And we hadn’t even seen the Central Valley which surpasses Imperial and Salinas in production.
Healdsburg
We had met Alan and Betsi soon after arriving in Mexico, when we were camped next to one another in San Felipe and stranded there for five days during the gas crisis. As Brenda says, we started talking with them as soon as they got out of their camper and didn’t stop talking for six weeks. We arrived at Betsi’s house in Healdsburg, an hour or so north of San Francisco, on the 30th and took up residence in her guest cottage. And there we stayed, quite comfortably, for eleven days.
Brenda and I had spent a night in Healdsburg seventeen years ago and it stuck in my memory as being inexplicably expensive. A simple breakfast downtown was fourteen dollars. A few hours nursing drinks at an open mic set us back almost as much as dinner at Café des Artistes. The town square was lined with chichi clothing shops. I had always been perplexed as to how this attractive but otherwise undistinguished town managed to exist in an economic stratosphere. Betsi, a resident since the 1970s and former member of the planning board, explained in a word—wine.
Healdsburg is in Sonoma county and is the motherland of California wine-making. There had always been winemaking here but in the 1980s the market exploded. It became a status symbol to own a winery and every dot-com billionaire and Hollywood royalty wanted a piece. Every square inch of land is now covered in grape vines and every winemaker or wine-snob wants a piece of Healdsburg real estate. The most unassuming house here can easily sell for $750,000, and the nouveau riche of San Francisco who buy them don’t want to live here but only come up for the occasional weekend in wine country. The town has many craftsman style houses built in the early 20th century and many have been expensively restored, making for a very attractive town, but the underlying economy is exotic and a weird vibe permeates the place. We went into a small bar that served only grilled cheese sandwiches, baked potatoes and wine. The wine started at $50/bottle and the baked potato was $15. The potato came with sour cream and bacon bits.
We had fun in Healdsburg with Alan and Betsie. Went to an old time fiddlers contest in nearby Cloverdale (where I won a Hohner guitar on a $5 raffle ticket). We visited wineries (Francis Coppola’s, Simi, and Acorn/Alegria which is owned by a friend of my sister’s.) Took day trips to the shore and local sites, railed at the nightly news, compared different strains of weed. I don’t think I’d ever fallen in with new friends so quickly and after eleven days we were still carrying on the conversation we had started in Baja.
Fort Bragg and Trinidad, California
I had intended to take a week to get to Portland OR, traveling up the coast to the Colombia and then across. But the rains came on and the forecast was for continued rain into the foreseeable future. So after ten months of travel we were finally inconvenienced by the rain. Believe it or not, we had not encountered anything but brief periods of rain since May of last year. But we were in it now and persistent rain makes for miserable camping. If we had encountered this kind of weather at the beginning of the trip I think we would have turned homeward after a week. Rain makes for a boring, messy existence. So we made tracks for Zach’s without delay.
Stayed near MacKerricher State Park in Fort Bragg, CA. The park is on the ocean and is a great place to see the gray whales returning from Baja to the north in the spring, and, indeed, we saw them spouting and breaching in the near distance. I think I recognized one that we had seen in Baja weeks before.
I made a navigation error leaving Fort Bragg—there were notices saying that a section of rte. 101 had washed away forty miles ahead. By my calculation we would be able to get off 101 just before the washout. In fact we drove right to the washout and had to retrace a beautiful but tortuous path back over the mountains. Wasted almost two hours.
We turned inland for a ways then back to the coast so I could visit an old friend who had moved from Garberville CA to Trinidad CA since he and I had last talked in 2000. Was taken aback to find him in a wheelchair. Some 18 months before he had acquired Guillame-Barre disease while hospitalized with pneumonia. This insidious disease manifests in various ways but in some people it has the effect of paralysis. Greg hadn’t walked in 18 months; most cases substantially remit over time and he is improving slowly. His recovery will depend on getting access to a state program that provides rehab therapy with transportation; he finds out if he qualifies in the next few weeks. Greg said our visit cheered him a great deal, and I hope it’s true.
Spent our last night on the Pacific in Charleston, OR, near Coos Bay. The rain fell and the wind blasted the Scamp through the night..
Left the Pacific to head inland through the dunes area of southwestern Oregon and along the Dean River. With all the rain the valley was bursting with spring life—buds, blooms, lambs, calves; rushing streams, curling mists, lush grasses and mosses and new-sprung leaves; postcard pretty for fifty miles.