Two weeks on the road -- a quick-and-dirty summary

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  San Luis Obispo, California, United States
Sunday, July 5, 2009

Life seems to get in the way of posting, on the road just like it does when you're at home.  So I'll try and briefly (can I do that?) catch ya'll up on what we've been doing in California.

We zigzagged back and forth across northern CA after landing in Redding.  Drove over to the coast on Hwy 299, a REALLY zig-zaggy road with lots of extreme hills as well.  All because I wanted to see the beginning of Hwy 1, the road that runs all the way down the California coast.  We camped about a mile from the beginning of 1, then the next daty drove the coast road down to below Mendocino, which I'd also wanted to see for a long time.  It's a really pretty, sort of quaint little town with lots of artists and it has amazing views of the Pacific and the coastline.  After Mendocino, we decided to go back inland so we drove another of those zig-zaggy roads (I swear they were originally logging roads or Indian trails!) back inland to Santa Rosa.

It was in Santa Rosa that Happy Camper became unhappy: she had no get-up-and-go.  Had the mountain roads worn her out?  We took her to a VW dealer in Santa Rosa, who diagnosed the problem as a failed ignition coil, replaced it (sorry, John, we just couldn't make it to your colleague in Van Nuys), and got us on the road again to our visit with Lee Walker and her family in.  Happy Camper has been happy ever since, and C. will have a little additional story about that when he gets around to posting it.

Five days staying in Oakland, visiting with Lee and Jorge and playing with Alexander, sightseeing like maniacs in SF and Berkeley, driving over to Concord to see Charles' aunt Neva and her husband John.  Here's the list: 

* Walking the labyrinth at Grace Cathedral (Episcopal) in San Francisco.  What an amazing experience!

* Jorge's amazing driving tour of the city--we saw more in one day than C and I could have seen on our own in two weeks!

*Twin Peaks on the morning of my birthday: a beautifully clear day with a 360-degree view of everything: the city, the Bay, the GG bridge (with fog/clouds under it), the Marin headlands, everything.  Amazing!

* Showing C around Berkeley.  The scene at the top of Telegraph Avenue, just below the University, is sad: it's the sixties but everyone is grey and worb.  But other parts of Berkeley were fun: Article Pract (one of my favorite knit shops), Bake Sale Betty's, great pizza and bruschetta at Filippo's, a marvelous stationery store on College Avenue (you didn't know we are office-supply addicts?), and of course all the lush gardens and the light.  The California light.

* Riding BART into the city.  Oh, how I wish we had good public transportation in Birmingham.

And more, more, more.  But it was a lovely restorative five days, and visiting with such dear friends was a real highlight of this experience.  Thanks for everything, L/J/A!!

Then it was on to Yosemite.  Amazing Yosemite.  The place we stayed, Evergreen Lodge (in a tiny little cabin) was just outside the west side of the park but close enough to drive to the Valley easily.  Jane the Hotel Inspector didn't give Evergreen very high marks, but we were there to see the park, not the Lodge.  Valley was crowded and, one day very smoky because of a "management fire" (controlled burn) in process, but the first view of El Capital and Half-Dome still took my breath away and amazed C. as I'd hoped it would.  We walked, hiked, walked till we were bushed and then walked some more.  Took a million pictures -- I'll include only a few here . . . .

Our next target after Yosemite was "GoWesty" in Los Osos.  It's the place we'd ordered the "lift kit" from for Happy Camper, with the bigger wheels and new shocks and all the things that have helped make her such a joy to drive these thousands of miles (about 6500 so far).  We've talked with these folks on the phone and C decided he wanted to actually go see the shop, so off we went: on CA 41 out the south entrance to Yosemite, down the mountains through wine country that we didn't even know existed, through Fresno and the hot central valley (with more vineyards on either side of the road for miles, but these grown to become raisins rather than wines), across I-5 and through more wine country, finally to San Luis Obispo.  With which we have fallen in love!  A beautiful medium-sized town, not right on the coast but close enough to be cooled by morning and evening onshore breezes, with a college and, this very day, a bicycle race right through downtown.

Buy back to GoWesty: we drove over to Los Osos, about 10 miles from SLO, and knew we'd arrived when we saw VW campers everywhere: Vanagons, Synchros, EVCs like ours.  What a trip!  We bought a few things for Happy that had been on our wish list, then wistfully drove away wishing we lived closer.