All Times are Interesting Times

Robert Bronsdon (Hollywood Rob) August 2019

The appointed hour of 9am arrives and we all pile into the rented Escalade for the run up the coast to Monterey.  Six people on six different trips, all in the same car.

The music plays from a thumb drive stuffed into the dash.  The teens in the back I am quite sure hated it, but the four adults loved it.  The temperature inside the car is controlled by the car system which is actually really helpful because at any given time we might be driving alongside the ocean where the temperature is in the 50’s or we might be more inland where it is well over 90F.

We pounded up the 101 through Thousand Oaks, up over the grade into Oxnard and Ventura and on to Santa Barbara where the voters kept the freeway from coming through their town for many years.  The old traffic lights are now finally gone and you can blow through Santa Barbara at 70 or 80 mph depending on how the Prius’ manage to array themselves across the four lanes of freeway (in both directions.)  Once out the other side of Santa Barbara I kept to the coast for the view of the ocean until we got to the big curve at Gaviota and headed up the mountain range that hugs the coast in that area.  Straight up the road climbs, first through a tunnel, and then just up for miles.  The coolness of the coast transitions quickly into the heat of the central coast.  The cooler difficult terrain of the coast, dominated by cattle ranches, is replaced by the truck farms and wineries.  Mile after mile of cows standing on hillsides is replaced by miles after miles of grape vines and California Oaks.  Traffic is light, and speeds are high.  My plan to keep the speed at 70 quickly goes right out the window as at 70 you will get run over by trucks full of cabbages or gravel.

Three hours of driving brings us finally to Paso Robles.  This is a place that has grown over the past thirty years from a town that you wouldn’t stop in even if you needed to gas up, to a place that you definitely want to stop in whether you need gas or not.  Today, our start time has been set by the need to be in Paso at lunch time so we can eat at Thomas Hill Organics.  It is a tiny place that doesn’t even have any frontage on the street, but it is always packed because the food is fabulous.  Those of you who have recently suffered under the heat wave on the east coast might find this strange, but out here in California we can comfortably sit in 95F in the shade of a tent structure for an entire lunch and never feel uncomfortable.  It’s a dry heat you know.  The evolution of this town has been driven by wineries and tourism.  It has undergone a transformation from what you would probably describe as a cow town, into a tourist trap with all of the silly little stores that implies, but the upside is that all of those stores are now freshly painted, not boarded up.  The central park has huge trees and lovely grass as opposed to hard packed dirt, and now it has become a destination, not a stop for gas.  You can spend days visiting wineries like Justin, or Cronic Cellars or if beer is your thing, Firestone Walker is right on the south side of town.  And yes, it is actually that Firestone.

After lunch we got back onto the 101 to continue up to Salinas.  Salinas is one of the larger towns in a major truck farm region of California.  Almost everyone that you see is going to be involved in agriculture, on a grand scale.  Even the 101 makes concessions to farming.  While the speeds remain high, there are trucks making left hand turns onto side roads for miles coming into Salinas.  Most of the traffic is diverted to the south of the town to link you up with route 68 that takes you to the Monterey Peninsula.  After passing Laguna Sega raceway, the site of Indycar, MotoGP, and an endless stream of antique racing and track days, you once again climb that ridge that separates the coast from the valley, and then descend into Monterey.  The colors quickly transition from golds and browns to greens and the sky goes from deep blue without a cloud to fog.

We made our way to our hotel, a few blocks off the main drag, and got settled in before walking down to Cannery Row, the main street of this tiny town.  We stayed on Foam Street, Wave Street was next and then all of the touristy things start.  The real work in Monterey is the military schools there but the big draw is the Aquarium.  Cannery Row is packed with people from all over the world.  You are just as likely to hear any other language as you are to hear English.  There are hijabs and Tshirts.  There are Danes, Germans, French, Blacks and Whites and Browns and Yellows from every corner of the globe.  And they are all wandering around having a great time.  I never saw a scowl, I never heard a cross word.  At one point a candy orange metal flake painted Buick low rider launched itself skyward right in the middle of the road and came crashing back down to thunderous applause from all sides of the street.  I only saw one cop car, and never saw a single cop walking the streets.

The next morning, after breakfast at the hotel, we headed to the Aquarium.  I won’t go into much detail about that because they have a great website and you can check it out for yourself.

https://www.montereybayaquarium.org/

I will say this.  The buildings are beautiful.  The exhibits are beautiful.  Everything you have ever heard about the place is true, and if you find yourself even close to Monterey, just do yourself a favor and go see the Aquarium.

We spent all morning in the Aquarium and then went back up to the hotel and got the car.  We drove through Monterey and Pacific Grove until we intersected the 17 mile drive.  This is a series of roads that travel through the community that sits between Monterey and Carmel by the Sea.  This is the road that takes you to Pebble Beach Golf Club and in fact it takes you through many golf clubs and past many beaches.  There are parking lots along the way so you can stop and see the seals at Bird Rock, and the birds at Seal Rock.  I have never seen it anything but cloudy and windy along this road and that is exactly how you should expect to find it.  The surf is always pounding.  The birds are always calling.  The seals are always barking.  And it is frequently foggy.  Eventually one finds oneself at the Lone Cypress and finally Pebble beach, but that is not what makes this drive fun.  The mansions that call 17 mile drive as their address are remarkable.  Beautiful homes perched on cliffs over the sea, or tucked up into the cypress groves.  The narrow road snakes its way through the trees barely two lanes wide; definitely too narrow for an Escalade.

Carmel is my favorite place on earth.  Clint Eastwood was mayor for a while and his ghost is all over the town, and he isn’t even dead yet.  All of the buildings are quaint and the shops are expensive.  The houses in the town are mostly quite small, cottages actually, but they are all, no matter the condition, very expensive.  We stopped for drinks at the Hogs Breath just because it is the thing to do.  It was originally built by Clint but he hasn’t been involved for years, and still, there are the same benches around the same fireplaces and the same little tiny shack of a bar sitting quietly below a three story high mural of the Carmel Valley.  The service isn’t as good.  The waiters are not as friendly, but the atmosphere is still there.  After drinks by the fire, we headed back to the hotel for pizza and beer and an early night.

The next morning we took off for home heading south on Route 1, the West Coast Highway. You may well have your favorite stretch of road.  It may be very pretty.  But the stretch of Rt 1 from Carmel by the Sea to Cambria is acclaimed to be the best in the world.  It contains the beauty of Big Sur, mile after mile of wild coast and a road that almost never stops turning.  This is not a road that you can relax on.  All summer long the fog sits either just off the coast, or all the way up the mountainside that the road is carved into.  Sometimes you can see the ocean.  Sometimes the sun comes out.  Sometimes it gets so foggy that inexperienced drivers almost come to a stop.  But that’s in the summer.  In the winter rain and wind whip the coast so hard that frequent landslides come down on the road.  That is bad enough, you don’t want to come around a corner and find a pile of rocks in your lane, but on one occasion the whole side of the mountain came down.  This happened just over a year ago and started a building program of epic proportions.  The landslide didn’t just come down onto the road; it took the road and the whole mountainside and moved it into the sea.  A quarter mile of new land was created in one big crash.

Access to Big Sur was cut off for about one year.  Some of the hotels and stores south of Big Sur couldn’t be reached at all and almost everyone had to drive 140 miles out of their way just to get to work.  Of course, their work was most likely closed so there was little need to drive around the slides.  But after a lot of around the clock construction new roads have been built and the cliffs that came down have been cut back with huge earthen dams to absorb any new falls.  But still, there are endless semi trucks hauling tons of boulders to the site to be carefully placed into the sea to ensure that the shoreline doesn’t erode any further into the hillside.  They are hoping to not have to do this again anytime soon.  The end result of all this is that there is a lot of waiting for your turn to snake through the single lane roads that have been laid around the slides.  Sometimes the two lane road is open but on a Monday morning, for sure they are going to be working on the good road so you get to use the one lane bypass.

But as you snake your way south, you can smell the fennel and the rosemary that grow wild along the side of the road.  You can see the fog streaming up from the ocean below to the mountains above.  It is truly an awesome road to travel down, and you pay the price for all of this beauty in travel time.  The speeds are much slower and you can’t avoid stopping over and over again to take pictures or wander along the paths in the towering redwoods.  It is a magical place.  But while it takes two hours to get to Monterey from Paso Robles, it takes over four hours to drive from Carmel to Cambria.  But we left just before 8am so we could get to Robin’s in Cambria for lunch.  And this included a stop to see the elephant seals.  Depending on how much time you have you can also take the tour of the Hearst Castle, San Simeon.  We didn’t this time but it really is worth the effort and the expense.

After lunch in Cambria we drove down to San Luis Obispo, or SLO.  This tiny town is the home of Cow Poly (Cal Poly if you went there) and little else.  But it is the place where Rt 1 meets the 101 again and started us on the mad dash back to home.  It took the better part of 12 hours to accomplish what we had done two days before in five, but it was worth every minute.

So why take the time to tell you all of this?  It is, after all, just a drive up the coast and back down again.  It isn’t some grand adventure in a foreign land.  I just stepped out my door and drove away to see some of the beauty of this land.  And there is great beauty in this land.  Of course, there are mean little houses in the towns along the 101.  But there are large tracts of new apartments too.  There are small houses tucked in between the hotels on Foam Street in Monterey and they look like the last time they were painted was when they were built, fifty years ago.  There are nice restaurants and there are people working in the fields picking the vegetables that you will no doubt be eating for dinner tonight.  There are truckers driving those vegetables to the markets and there are real-estate brokers selling houses worth 100 million dollars.  All of those things are there for you to see, and you will see them if you get out and travel.  But the things that you bring back with you from your travels, the memories and the photographs and the videos, those things are the things that you chose to see.  You can see the tired pickers in the fields being oppressed if you want to.  Or you can see people earning an honest living doing hard work.  You can see the magnificent houses that wealthy people built for themselves, or you can see monuments to oppression.  You can enjoy the fog for its beauty, or you can curse the fog because you didn’t get sunshine.  The choice is yours.  Both realities are there for you to see.  The one that you chose is the one that you will bring home with you and the one that will color your world view.

So what do you chose to see; the great evil or the great beauty?  You see, every single person who has ever lived on this earth has lived in interesting times.  There is not one moment of one day in any year where things haven’t been changing.  Sometimes slowly, sometimes more rapidly, but changing none the less.  You most likely think of yourself as a conservative, perhaps a libertarian.  But what is it that you wish to conserve?  How will you work to conserve that thing?  No matter what it is that you hope to conserve, it is most assuredly a certainty that it will be more likely to be conserved if you can see the beauty in it and express that beauty to others.  Your efforts at conservation can only be successful if you bring a positive image to those who seek to oppose you.  In a sea of negativity the small ray of light that is the hope for a brighter future is what attracts the most.

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