It will be a two or three hour drive to Bodega Bay (where Hitchcock filmed The Birds).
Six squeeze in the soccer van - mother, father, son, daughter, grandmother, grandfather -- with a month's worth of travel food (it's a Chinese thing).
And changes of clothes: no telling what the weather will be. Up at Tahoe it snowed this week, we are in the nineties, and the coast is predicted at sixty.
30 minutes down the foothills to Sacramento: just in time for morning rush hour. I don't get out much, so I always feel assaulted by cities.
About 1 hour to cross the Great Central Valley: rice & corn & hay & almond orchards.
Flaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat. They use lasers to mark the rows, GPS to drive the tractors.
I-80 is a narrow black ribbon that cuts through the vast farms.
"No, we won't tour the Jelly Belly factory." Every trip this way, the same plaint.
Then it's the hills of the Pacific Range. This is my favorite part of the drive west. Our own Sierra foothills look something like this, but not quite as mellow and cartoon-like. It resembles a pneumatic Grant Wood / Thomas Hart Benton landscape
Close to Oakland/San Francisco, we veer north through Marin and Sonoma counties, traveling the back country roads.
Cattle farms and dairy farms and vineyards, bucolic and slow. Small crossroad towns, the storefronts and churches 100 years old. Farmers working their fields.
This is supposed to be Limousine Liberal Mecca, "Home of the Hot Tub" -- where the last Republican was chased out decades ago. True, I see no Tea Party signs like back in El Dorado, but I also see no limousines -- just tractors.
Where Central Valley agriculture is hi-tech and gargantuan, here are small (1000 acre) traditional family farms.
Clouds in the distance mean "ocean." Now we pass through fishing villages perched on the edge of estuaries and bays. "Bar-B-Q Oysters" must be a local specialty. These ramshackled joints are for locals, not rich tourists.
Again and again we pass through stands of eucalyptus and the smell is overpowering.
What would it be like to live here and smell Vicks Vapor Rub perpetually?
And finally we intersect Route 1, the Coastal Highway -- a two laner that hugs the cliffside.
In my youth, this was the highway that movies stars driving sport convertibles sailed off of.
Portuguese Beach
There's no one on the beaches this Thursday morning. The air temperature is maybe 65 with a sea breeze.
As you can see, it's quite unlike the Gulf Coast. The sand is dark and coarse, the water is painfully cold, the rocks and plants are strange & marvelous. There's no teeming life of crabs and darting fish and biting insects. Much more austere.
Goat Rock Beach
Lining up for the obligatory Chinese "picture with famous thing" -- there were lots of these.
We had a blast.
However... there was one disturbing incident at the beach.
"Undocumented workers" making landfall right where we stood.
And a disturbing billboard roadside.
Octogenarian playing the casinos. "Caps" mean "bald". Not shown are walkers.
Finally, on the trip home, we were caught in traffic north of San Francisco Bay -- the afternoon rush hour overflow from the city? -- and sat for an hour in the middle of a marsh. It happened again as we approached Sacramento. Ughh, we wanted to be home.
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