After weeks of driving and getting places, we just spent almost a month laying low in Southern California and the Bay Area. Combining work with friends and cool places has been totally chill and glorious, but we have been so busy that I have had practically no writing time (and what little time I did have, I spent talking instead). We’ve walked (including much of downtown LA and an afternoon stroll across the Golden Gate Bridge), visited the AMAZING new Broad Museum in downtown LA, hung with a raft of good friends — and with Mike and Allie for a weekend when they happened to be visiting from Ann Arbor — eaten scrumptious food, brunched in what-may-be the most beautiful house I’ve ever been in in the mountains above Malibu, seen no shortage of soaring bald eagles, and gawked childishly at the magnificence of California’s Central Coast. I’ve also worked a bunch, including time with two new clients. (That work-stuff really gets in the way of blogging and staying totally spontaneous. Oh well.)
We spent our first week or so in Orange County in a perfect living situation. Arlis and I have worked together for her employer for a few years, and now we are embarking on a team teaching adventure. (Having a wicked smart mechanical engineer at my side who also happens to be a great writer is a new … and welcome … experience!) She lives with her dog Zoe in a nifty neighborhood in a really cute house next door to her parents in Costa Mesa, in coastal Orange County. We hung together, taught together, cooked together, and ate together … including Dad, an enthusiastic high school physics/chemistry teacher and robotics coach, and Mom, a really creative and thoughtful elementary teacher. While there, we also had a chance to spend a great-fun evening with my fraternity Big Brother from Tulane and his wife. He’s a lawyer/business guy who has also managed to collect same fantastic art.
LA: America’s #1 Walking City
I have been traveling to LA for work on an almost monthly basis for 27 years. For many of those years, I thought I hated LA. Then I realized the truth: I hate the Freeways and driving in LA! About 10 years ago, I found a funky little downtown hotel: the Metro Plaza tucked on a hill between Chinatown, Olvera Street, and Phillipe’s (home of the French Dip and some of the world’s best mustard). My work friends expressed deep concern; they thought it was a really sketchy whorehouse. Really, it is just a clean, safe, quiet, affordable downtown hotel with few staff and fewer residents who speak English. The rooms are perfectly adequate. Most importantly, staying there requires little to no driving, and there is great food within a block! Contrary to much public sentiment, over time I discovered a delightfully walkable city with excellent public transportation!
A 20-minute walk from our hotel, the new Broad Museum is masterful. Its collection is up there with the Tate Modern and MOMA. Eli and Edythe Broad have collected multiple pieces from an amazing number of 20th-Century artists that span a lifetime of creativity, built an architectural masterpiece directly across the street from the Disney Center and one block from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, and opened it to the public for free. Rebecca and I share a favorite artist with paintings in the Broad: Mark Tansey. He is a contemporary of ours, born in 1949. Rebecca introduced me to his work at about the same moment that we met, well over 20 years ago. We were elated to see three of his works at the Broad … except for one minor detail. Because of parking limitations and abject fear of LA traffic, we only had about 2.5 – 3 hours to spend at the museum. It is not enough … by a long shot. We could have spent that much time with the Tansey paintings alone. There was just too much to take in. We can’t wait to go back.
Our lodging and dining stayed as memorable in LA as they have been throughout this adventure. Following our time downtown, we spent a long weekend at a friend’s house in the Rustic Canyon section of Santa Monica. We fed them a fine New Orleans meal, had a delightful evening of conversation and laughter, and then bade them farewell as they went off to Palm Springs and left us tending the house and pooch. Ahhh. Delicious quiet surrounded by a canyon-load of 1950’s modern architecture that had once been home to the likes of Will Rogers and Charlie Chaplin.
From Santa Monica, we completed the LA experience in Pasadena, staying at another of my favorite haunts, the Guest House of the Fuller Theological Seminary. It puts all of Pasadena within walking distance. Although I had to interrupt the relaxation with a few days of work , I never had to touch the car since the Gold Line light rail takes me directly from point to point for all of 75¢ (thanks to my Senior Tap Card!!).
As for LA dining, the food was fine; the company was superb! Joan was a favorite student of Rebecca’s and mine in Leadership for Change at Boston College. She is now a full-blown medical pro working on surgical technology at USC. We spent a few evenings together, meeting for drinks in the Arts District, eating barbecue near City Hall, and chowing down on Chinese food in Chinatown. The list of dining partners is just too long: Joan, Robyn, Deven, Brian, Sue, Ed, Tim, Michael, Ilene, Alan, Laurel, Suresh, Manju, Melissa, Dave, Eva, Brandon, Ryan, Laura, Ivan, Ashley, Don, Marcie, Steve, Jackie, Jeannette, John, Jon, Seth, Laura, Janice, Walter, Iliana, Rosanna, Adam, and on and on and on. But the most memorable was at our friend Lilly and Tarek’s house high in the hills of Malibu Canyon. Lilly and Tarek are both engineers, she at the water district where I frequently work (and where we became friends) and he (formerly) at Cal State Northridge. These days, his heart and soul go into high school robotics competitions. On the morning of our brunch at their house, he had just returned on a redeye from a two-day competition in Hawaii. What a trooper!
Lilly and I not only share a love for preparing large meals, we also share a fair number of good friends. Eight of us shared brunch that morning. With the exception of Europe, much of the world was represented: the US, Ecuador, Syria, India, and China. Lilly fixed a feast; the samosas and coconuts simply appeared … and I have never witnessed a case of coconuts get prepared and consumed so quickly.
The best part of the meal, though, was their home itself. Tarek’s brother is an architect who helped with the design. Lilly and Tarek are both ridiculously creative engineers. Their house is modest and simple yet utterly spectacular. When I walked in, I said it might be the most beautiful house I have ever been in. Now that a few weeks have passed, that sentiment remains unchanged.
From LA, we headed north. I had a day of work at the north end of the San Fernando Valley, so our first stop was Thousand Oaks. In addition to a fine day of teaching, Rebecca took advantage of the time to get a new set of tires for Barney, our trusty Ford Escape that has been the picture of comfort and reliability on this journey. Anything we can do to make Barney happy makes us happy. He seems very pleased with his new shoes.
From SoCal, north on California Route 1
Even though we sort-of followed the coast all the way from the Mexican border, we didn’t get really serious about hugging the coast until Santa Barbara.
Our walk through San Luis Obispo triggered memories of one of my all-
time favorite poems, “The Symbol” by Richard Brautigan, a long-dead hippie poet from the ’60s and ’70s. “When I was hitch-hiking down to Big Sur, Moby Dick stopped and picked me up. / He was driving a truckload of sea gulls to San Luis Obispo. / “Do you like being a truckdriver better than you do a whale?” I asked. / “Yeah,” Moby Dick said. “Hoffa is a lot better to us whales than Captain Ahab ever was. / The old fart.”
And what a driving adventure it was! California Route 1 and US 101 up the coast are everything they are stacked up to be. It’s hard to imagine a more beautiful stretch of many hundreds of miles! The photos tell so much more than words. There are too many vistas, waves crashing across rocks, switchbacks, mountains, redwoods, and basic breathtaking beauty to try to write about. Big Sur lives up to its reputation … complete with a hippie chick in a hippie van ecstatically building a rock cairn toward the sun for no particular reason.
Our favorite spot was Gorda, California. There we were on a sunny, cloudless day, driving north on a desolate ocean-side highway seeing little except the road, occasional other cars, and stupefying natural beauty. Cloudless days sound nice, but by 2:00 in the afternoon, I realized how unprepared I was. The glare of the westerly setting sun was bad enough; the glare off the ocean was many times worse. My eyes hurt. We had hoped to get to Big Sur, but no way. I hoped a lodge of some sort would reveal itself soon.
Gorda Lodges did the trick: A comfy room with a balcony overlooking the ocean, a general store beneath us, and a fine little restaurant next door attached to a two-pump gas station. Little did I realize at the time, but that assortment of buildings and businesses was 100% of Gorda, Population: 8. The photographs show the entrance to Gorda from the south and from the north. The only difference is that the same buildings are in reverse order, and in the photo from the south, the buildings are on the right, and they are on the left when entering from the north. The entire town is visible from the two signs — including the Falls at Gorda Springs.
After Gorda and an amazing morning at Pfeiffer Beach, we started getting citified again. Since Rebecca had never seen Carmel’s 17-Mile Drive, with its wind-blown Cypress trees and stupidly beautiful ocean views, I thought it might be fun. Nope! Fortunately, we were driving north. We happened to cross paths with the PGA tournament at Pebble Beach … on the Monterey Peninsula and in Carmel. We must’ve passed 20 miles of southbound tournament traffic. We encountered nary a delay!
Instead of Carmel, we moseyed through Castroville and Gilroy on our way to the Bay Area: the Artichoke Capital of the World and the Garlic Capital of the world, respectively. February, it turns out, is lousy time for artichokes and garlic, and we wasted almost two hours looking for good produce or a farmer’s market.
Then we hit the Bay Area — Mountain View and Sunnyvale — where we started eating again: mid-afternoon grilled chicken and vegetables (coupled with fantastic single-malt scotch) with good friends Marcie and Steve and daughter Jackie, followed immediately by a long, high-energy feast with Rebecca’s niece, nephew, their SO’s, and grand-nephew Seth. (We really missed you, Eric!) We topped it off with two of the world’s best Farmer’s Markets, Mountain View and Palo Alto, where we picked up fresh makings for a killer Greek salad that night at Brandon and Eva’s, who hosted us in San Francisco.
Eva was a college roommate of Allie’s. I successfully pulled off a Louisiana shrimp boil for her and Brandon’s wedding in New Hampshire a summer or two ago. We became really good friends, and what a ball we had in the City by the Bay! We walked the beach, cooked some meals, walked across the Golden Gate on what must’ve been the prettiest day in a decade. We also got to hang out a lot with Rebecca’s grand niece Ashley and best pals Leela (in Berkeley Hills) and Rosanna (on the Peninsula).
Our time in the Bay Area ended on a high note: a meal with my client/friend Walter and his wife Iliana, a day of successful teaching in San Jose, and then a reunion with Brother Joe, who flew in from Oregon so we could all drive back to his place on the coast together. Friday morning, we waited for traffic to subside, waved goodbye to one of the best cities in the world (albeit too crowded and too expensive) as we crossed the Golden Gate, then made our first stop shortly thereafter to take a hike in Muir Woods among the Redwoods.
The day set the pace for the journey north. Five hours on the road; 75 miles covered; average speed: 25 mph. We did much better toward the end of the trip, covering the 400 miles way more quickly than a wagon train ever could: four solid days of driving.
Garberville, in Humboldt County, is one damn cool town with great Cajun cooking (Go figure!) and superb local music. I’m ready to move there. The Avenue of the Giants in Humboldt State Park is as beautiful a drive as exists in the world. We learned on our hike in the redwoods that we were walking through the largest cache of biomass in the world, larger even than the Amazon jungle! A virgin Redwood forest with a forest floor of fallen 12-foot-diameter trees crashed on top of one another and splintered can do that. That’s a mess of biomass!
On average, we probably stopped every 5 miles or so on the entire trip to photograph one breathtaking vista after another. The last two stops had nothing to do with scenery: a world-famous hotdog from the Langlois Market and a few dozen oysters from the Umpqua Aquaculture store in Winchester Bay. From there to Joe’s, where we ate like kings (smoked salmon, fresh salmon, fresh-caught Dungeness crabs, fresh oysters, fresh-dug Oregon black truffles, gumbo, Oregon cheese, etc.), enjoyed the majesty of his little piece of heaven in the woods, and I actually had time to get some computer work done, bring our bills up to date, and get this damn blog entry out!
From here to Portland for a few more days of work while Rebecca prowls Powell’s and the rest of Portland, then off onto our 3,500-mile trek (with detours) back home.
myinnersociologist 