“Hiking is not for everyone. Notice the wilderness is mostly empty.” – Sonja Yoerg
It seems counterintuitive that an otherwise social being would be so quick to seek out solitude and empty spaces. But that’s generally where you’ll find me when the opportunity arises. Let the record show that I love interacting with people. I just don’t want to have them encroaching on me all the time. And so it is that you’ll find me in places others might think of as desolate and wild.
My favorite destinations have the fewest people in them. You can have your hippest restaurants and trendy neighborhoods, I’ll stick with wide open places, thank you. I’m happy to visit the world’s big cities, I just don’t want to live in them.
I think nothing of it when I lose cellular coverage. In fact, I celebrate it! To be off the grid is increasingly difficult, and it may one day be impossible. But for now, I dance with my zero bars when I get ‘em.
If all of this seems like a diatribe against population growth or humanity in general, well, that’s not the point at all. No, this is a celebration of elbow room and quiet hikes in hard to reach places. May we always have them, for I surely can’t be the only one seeking them out.
With a respectful nod to the beautiful interior of California, particularly Yosemite, Lake Tahoe and Death Valley, there are few drives that offer the best of California like the stretch of Highway 1 from the Sonoma Coast to San Diego. My own road trip began in San Francisco, north to Bodega Bay and Jenner, over to the vineyards of the Russian River Valley before turning south to the Pacific Coast Highway through Marin, Monterey, Big Sur, Moonstone Beach, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, Oceanside and finally San Diego before heading back up to Los Angeles for a finale at the Hollywood sign. That trip was roughly 1000 miles and some loose change worth of driving. That’s a lot of windshield time, but it was broken up by 30 miles of walking and some incredible experiences along the way.
The trip can be thought of as three distinct segments: San Francisco Bay and Sonoma, The Pacific Coast Highway, and the southern tier. Each segment could be a full vacation on their own, in my case, it was ten very full days of travel and adventure. But life is short, you’ve got to pack as much in to your days as possible while still feeling like you relaxed a bit during your time off. Here was the itinerary by segment:
Day 1: San Francisco coastal walk from Lands End to the Golden Gate Bridge, Irish coffee at the Buena Vista and dinner in Tiburon. There are some nice ferry options from Tiburon that afford great views in good weather but the schedule is limited.
Day 2: Alcatraz, Fisherman’s Wharf, cable car rides out and back to top of Lombard Street, walk down the zig-zagging Lombard and then walked to the Palace of Fine Arts.
Day 3: Muir Woods, Bodega Bay to Fort Ross drive along the spectacular Sonoma Coast.
Day 4: Vineyard tours and tastings in Healdsburg and the Russian River Valley.
Day 5: Travel day to Marin, beach walk between the crashing surf and the dunes and a visit to the Monterey Aquarium.
Day 6: The gorgeous 17-Mile Drive with crashing surf from the offshore storms, then down the Pacific Coast Highway through Big Sur to Moonstone Beach. Multiple stops along the way to take in the coastal views and visit a couple of waterfalls.
Day 7: Drive-by through central coast vineyards, beachside dining in Santa Barbara, Ventura to Los Angeles through miles of orange trees.
Day 8: Los Angeles!
Day 9: Oceanside and San Diego Zoo and friends and family time.
Day 10: Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and a visit to the Chinese Theater and the gritty and touristy Hollywood Boulevard.
Day 11: Warner Brothers Studio tour and a visit to see the Hollywood sign up close at Lake Hollywood Park.
Whew! Drove more than 1000 miles and walked almost 30 miles in 11 action-packed days through ancient redwood trees, coastal dunes, spectacular cliffs, iconic city streets, legendary bridges and highways, past famous cultural attractions with a splash of California’s best wines. If you’re looking for an adventurous drive this is one you should plug into your own GPS. Here are a few favorite places found along the way:
Golden Gate BridgeBixby Creek BridgeRussian River VineyardAlcatrazKoala at San Diego ZooR2D2 at The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures Sea nettles at Monterey Aquarium Sunset at Moonstone Beach
“We do not associate the idea of antiquity with the ocean, nor wonder how it looked a thousand years ago, as we do of the land, for it was equally wild and unfathomable always.” – Henry David Thoreau
I’m an East Coast guy. California is another world when you live with ice and snow and sunrises as your standards. You imagine what a place might be like when you’ve never been to it but hear of it often. It becomes the stuff of legend. Driving the Pacific Coast Highway and visiting Monterey and Big Sur became such a legend for me. And the experience lived up to its billing.
When you look out at the Pacific Ocean for a few hours, and the rugged, mountainous terrain this highway snakes through, you feel the truth in Thoreau’s words. But for the highway itself and a few scattered houses and ranches this view hasn’t changed much in millennia. And unless it all tumbles into the sea it ought to look the same for another millennium. We’re just rolling footnotes passing through the eternal. The Pacific Coast Highway sets you straight about such things.
Starting our drive from the dunes of Marin, we drove Ocean View Boulevard to Sunset Drive, making our way to pay the $10.75 entry fee for access to 17 Mile Drive. It was worth the price of admission, particularly with the big waves rolling in as remnants of a stormy ocean. Officially, 17 Mile Drive has 17 landmarks to view (all mapped for you when you pay to enter). Unofficially, the glimpses of the homes of the ultra-wealthy and a drive by Pebble Beach Golf Links are a big part of the draw.
A quick visit (checking of the box) in Carmel and we were off to Big Sur. This is where cellular coverage all but disappeared and you put your trust in fate. There are hundreds of turn-offs you can pull over into and several larger scenic vista parking areas. The toughest places to find elbow room were Bixby Bridge and McWay Falls. Each offer that postcard or Instagram worthy image. The trick is to find an image that’s unique without putting yourself in peril. Sometimes the perfect picture is the one everyone else took too.
The rest was simply breathtaking views and an appropriate focus on keeping the car on the road. Every turn brought another stunning view, and at some point you stop taking pictures of waves crashing onto massive boulders and cliffs and simply enjoy the drive. The Pacific Coast Highway is an embarrassment of riches in its beauty and a national treasure. Make sure you have a full tank and the time to enjoy this experience.
Autumn in Sonoma is a lovely mix of fall color and a mellower vibe as the hard work and hustle of making the wine gives way to letting time work its magic on it. After a long drought California braced for heavy rains as we wrapped up our time in the region, and talk with locals ranged from gratitude for the coming rains to trepidation at the prospect of mudslides and debris flows where the fire scars were. Northern Californians are stoic about this place they live in, a place that is so generous most of the time yet brutally cruel at other times. Vacationing in a place you’ve wanted to explore as a massive wall of water converges on it mandated stoicism for us too. We must work with whatever fate brings us.
Fall foliage in the vineyards
If the Scots utilize previously-used American oak for their liquid gold Scotch, Californians use French oak for their liquid gold, wine. The smell of these barrels of wine biding their time is uniquely wonderful. Scheduling a tour in a vineyard that brings you access to the cellars is a must to better understand the process, and to bring all the senses into your Sonoma experience. Add generous pours of wine to sample and stories of the history of the family who started the vineyard and you’ve securely locked your senses in the amber of the moment. You’ll remember these moments most of all.
24 hours later, it was time to move on to our next destination, and, it turns out, make another memory. In stormy weather you make calculations about the timing of the worst of it. Do you cut your trip short or hunker down and ride it out where you are a bit longer? Timing makes all the difference, doesn’t it? Leaving Sonoma on our normal schedule but before the worst of the wind and rain we left the region behind.
As we reached the Richmond Bridge to cross the bay we anticipated extreme wind gusts on the exposed drive across, but didn’t expect a camper trailer to blow over on its side ahead of us, closing a lane and stopping all traffic for 15 minutes as the tow trucks and emergency vehicles positioned themselves for a wrestling match in a wind tunnel 185 feet above the angry waves below. Stopped there for awhile to contemplate the violent wind, we were lifted up and shifted side-to-side with the bridge. It was thrilling or terrifying, depending on your perspective on bridge construction.
Just a couple of memories on opposite ends of the heart rate spectrum during an all-too-brief visit to Sonoma. Sure, perfectly glorious weather would have left its mark on us too, but there’s something to the unexpected drama of a massive storm that forever imprints itself on your memory. Travel offers up these amber moments. Remember that time we…. moments. And changes us in the process. Isn’t that why we go in the first place?
Looking for an adrenaline-filled, twisting and turning cliffside drive with amazing coastal views? Get yourself to Bodega Bay, California on a dry, sunny day and head north on the Pacific Coast Highway. This route is not for those who imagine the worst-case scenario on every turn, but it’s a thrill for the rest of us!
Hairpin turns and switchbacks are a big part of the menu here. Foggy or rainy days would be pretty scary. Don’t bring your RV for this stretch of road, ideally bring or rent a sports car. Utilize the turnoffs to enjoy the views or to let faster drivers pass.
One perfect out-and-back drive is Bodega Bay to Fort Ross. Plenty of places to stop and see the rocky coastline and crashing surf, and just long enough that you don’t tighten up from the technical driving that you’ll do on this road. The show continues further north, but Fort Ross offers a quiet place to stretch your legs before a fun drive back to celebrate the day at your hotel or B&B with your favorite Russian River Pinot Noir or Zinfandel.
Taking a long, slow walk amongst the Redwoods in Muir Woods, I deliberately slowed down, lingered, and sometimes stood still to feel the forest. Looking straight up I watched water drops formed in the tree tops from the light mist fall a few hundred feet. There are trees here that have stood here for more than a thousand years, my visit was just one blip in their lifespan. And here I found what I’d been looking for, what I’d hoped I’d find on this twisting drive through the hills. Here were the ancient forests of my imagination.
Seeking quiet, reverent space amongst the giants is tricky business if you only stay on the main path. No matter how much signage they put up, tourists chat like they’re at the mall, oblivious to the glorious silence. You must go there expecting this careless chatter, but you don’t have to participate in it. The best option for silence is to take the paths less taken, and Muir Woods offers these opportunities. Take any trail that scares the masses – be it mud or the promise of exertion or even a dead end sign and you quickly find yourself in relative quiet.
There are other old growth redwood forests, not enough of them we might agree, but they’re out there as state and national parks throughout the region. These offer more opportunities for isolation. Muir Woods is both the most famous and the most crowded. The trees won’t ever disappoint you, but your fellow man might.
If we lost all the money we have and saved these trees, it would be worthwhile, wouldn’t it?” – William Kent
William Kent purchased this land and fended off those who planned to log the redwoods to rebuild San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake and then flood the valley as a reservoir. He might have named it after himself but chose to honor John Muir. Modest? No doubt, but there’s an element of brand recognition at work here too. Since 1908, the Muir Woods National Monument has stood as protected land, surely thrilling Kent and those who worked so hard to save the trees, and capturing the imagination of reverent pilgrims ever since.
If you visit, make a parking reservation well in advance. Go as early as possible to avoid the worst of the crowds. Wear appropriate footwear for hiking the side trails. And save the casual conversation for later. For you’ll have plenty to talk about.
San Francisco is known for many things, but the Golden Gate Bridge has to be near the top of that list we make in our heads. Without being a tourist checking boxes, shouldn’t you try to see the sites that make a place unique? But seeing doesn’t have to mean doing what everybody else does.
So how do you see something as famous as the Golden Gate Bridge in a different way? You let it come to you gradually. The perfect way to do that is with a walk from Lands End to the bridge. This walk takes you along a diverse landscape of rocky cliffs, spectacular beaches with crashing surf, high end neighborhoods, past defensive fortifications dating from the world wars and finally to the bridge itself.
You can Google the route and map it out neatly, but maps only offer a one-dimensional view. Even Street View, for all its delights, can’t convey everything. You don’t experience the clumpy clay in the sand after a light rain, or the shear cliffs that claim the lives of the careless adventurers looking for that perfect vantage point, or the spa-like aromas emanating from the wet flora, or the cheap plastic Halloween decorations adorning multi-million dollar homes. No, you’ve got to walk it to experience these things.
The walk itself is a good workout, with a lot of climbing and long stretches on soft sand, but it’s not the Appalachian Trail, you can get by with a moderate fitness level and good walking shoes. The bridge and the roar of crashing waves will be your constant companion. Were it not for the bridge you might think you were in another place.
The bridge comes at you from different vantage points. One of those vantage points is mental. We can all visualize the Golden Gate Bridge in our minds. So it can be invigorating when you see the real thing. It was thought impossible to build by many, but 84 years after opening she looks as good as you imagine she would.
“A man’s ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful—while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly. Which is the best man to deal with—he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all? My desire for knowledge is intermittent, but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence.” – Henry David Thoreau, Walking
We arrive at a deeper understanding and empathy with the world by getting out into it. If there’s been a curse to the pandemic, it’s the distinct lack of getting out there to encounter a different perspective on things than you might have sheltered in place with your favorite sound bites and tweets.
If the last 6-7 years were defined by anything, it’s this growing assurance that your side is right and any other is wrong. The world seemingly spiraled down into an antagonistic cesspool of us versus them. What’s missing is empathy: the putting ourselves in their shoes part. Seek first to understand and then to be understood, as Stephen Covey would have put it. He’d be shaking his head at the world we find ourselves in today.
Getting out to meet the world is the solution to this problem. Seeing things the way they look from the other side offers perspective unavailable to those who don’t venture past the mailbox. The idea of getting out to see the world seems to be the most logical thing in the world to many of us, but fills others with dread. Would you live your life forever in a shell or break out of your limited view of the universe and see what’s really out there?
This week I’m getting back out in the world, not for work, but for pleasure. To see things from a different vantage point, to seek the truth about how things are in a place other than here. To bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet and return with a new perspective on this world. And then, boldly, to do it again.
When illusion spin her net I’m never where I want to be And liberty she pirouette When I think that I am free Watched by empty silhouettes Who close their eyes but still can see No one taught them etiquette I will show another me Today I don’t need a replacement I’ll tell them what the smile on my face meant My heart going boom boom boom “Hey” I said “You can keep my things, They’ve come to take me home.” – Peter Gabriel, Solisbury Hill
Where were you when you really heard this song for the first time? Not tapping your fingers on the steering wheel while you drive hearing it, but listening to the lyrics and absorbing the weight of what Peter Gabriel was saying to the world? We all confront tough choices, and the toughest choice of all is when everything is going well and we follow the call to change anyway.
This decision, I will show another me, is the root of change. It’s what Henry David Thoreau was saying in Walden:
Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate… The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.
I think a person ought to read Walden every year, to gauge the changes happening within themselves. You might say the same about Solisbury Hill; you hear it differently depending on where you are in your life. Closing in on two years since the beginning of the pandemic, I hear it differently than I did a few years ago. Maybe you do too.
The theme mirrors Bob Seger’s Roll Me Away, right down to the bird of prey weighing in on the decision the protagonist is about to make. But Solisbury Hill sneaks up on you differently. Maybe it’s the English versus the American take on life-changing moments. Roll Me Away was always a driving song, pulling you relentlessly to the freedom of the road. Solisbury Hill is about a very distinct moment in Peter Gabriel’s career, when he decided to leave Genesis and begin a solo career. And in writing it he blazed a trail for everyone following him in making their own choices in life.
Should you listen to that voice, trust imagination, and take the leap.
Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn, Come clear of the nets of wrong and right; Laugh, heart, again in the gray twilight; Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn. Thy mother Eire is always young, Dew ever shining and twilight gray, Though hope fall from thee or love decay Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue. Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill, For there the mystical brotherhood Of hollow wood and the hilly wood And the changing moon work out their will. And God stands winding his lonely horn; And Time and World are ever in flight, And love is less kind than the gray twilight, And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn. — WB Yeats, Into the Twilight
The dew of the morn must be reckoned with. It dampens everything, especially your bottom if you should sit down without wiping the surface dry before you land. But I love it for all that it reminds me of; early morning rows, waking up in a tent in some remote place, the first, wet cleats soccer games of the day for the kids when they were cherubs. That damp start is a new beginning, a hope you can cling to until it dries with the rising sun.
My heart belongs to the morning. For all the grief I get about going to bed early, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I listen to the sounds of the woods as the world wakes up around me and honor Sirius as the last holdout stubbornly fading in a brightening sky. I know we all must fade in our time but why not try for brilliance until the end?
My heart also seeks faraway places, if only to see what’s there when I arrive. Yeats has recurring themes of time and mysticism in his work. Mother Eire is alive with faeries and magic, and he stirs a dormant but not distant longing to visit Ireland soon. Come heart, where hill is heaped upon hill… don’t worry, I’m already there!
Wanderlust is nothing new for me, and I often celebrate it here, but you’ll never be happy in this world chasing your dreams elsewhere. Life is right here, where you are. In the dew of the morn, with the world stirring and a cuppa too soon gone. So dry yourself off and get after it. For there’s magic in the air.
