Vacation 2012: Blazing up the PCH

Well, here it is three weeks later and of course I've long since concluded my vacation and have returned home to...my life. Yeech! Seems like I need to go on a permanent vacation. Riding busses and planes, thinking little sarcastic things about places and people, writing them down in my blog, and taking pictures of them. How much would something like that pay? Nothing? Oh, ok. Good. Back to the lawyer thing.

But not without wrapping up Vacation 2012. This post-the road to San Francisco. The concluding post-San Francisco.

But before going to San Francisco, I spent the day driving up from Monterey. It started out really cloudy, but cleared up around "Freedom, California." Ugh. Is that a thing? What kind of name is that? Smug much? North of Monterey, Route 1 becomes a full fledged freeway, rather than the winding two lane road south of Monterey and north of San Francisco. And just out of Monterey, it goes through an industrial and agricultural with a horrid smell pretty much like dead fish. In other words, its still prettier than Channelview. But after you get past that area the forest picks up, the fog burns off and it becomes lovely.

My first stop was Santa Cruz. I expected Santa Cruz would be this fun, eclectic seaside town. Which totally would have been true if your idea of fun is scoring a dime bag before lunch and rummaging through trash cans. The good part of Santa Cruz is like Larry Sellers' neighborhood in the Big Lebowski. Every house has a pit bull and an El Camino up on blocks. Its "known" in some respects for the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, a huge beachside structure with a bunch of arcade games. Calling this trashy really doesn't capture the spirit of the thing. I saw some chick and a couple of street dudes negotiating a pot buy just outside the Boardwalk. Various crack motels line the main oceanside drag. Not exactly like the Monopoly Boardwalk. [Sidebar: I want to create an updated version of Monopoly. Call it something like "Mortgage Banking." The object is to bankrupt the Western Economy by making and selling risky mortgage loans. You could pull cards like "IRS Audit" or "Federal Reserve adopts new rules, You Lose $500 million." Game tokens could be like the symbols of all the big banks. I guess there may be some copyright issues.] There's some sort of big "Pier" jutting out into the sea that seemed to draw a bunch of visitors, but I assumed it was just more crackheads and Tyler Junior College alumni and blew it off.

So after driving around a little bit, I quickly decided to stop risking getting carjacked, and instead to check out the University of California-Santa Cruz campus. I'd long heard the campus was really interesting. That hardly describes it. As much as the town of Santa Cruz sucks, the campus was incredible. Its in hills overlooking the town and the ocean. While most college campuses involve a bunch of buildings all plopped down next to one another in a defined spot (except Florida, which could be its own city), the designers seem to have tucked away the few buildings into a huge natural environment. Campus contains vast swaths of undeveloped land. The designers created several building clusters, spread throughout the area, and each building seems inserted into the natural land. Thickly forested corridors separate all the buildings, and students can walk between buildings on scenic gravel trails running through these wooded paths. Its hard to describe the buildings. They struck me as kind of minimalist, without the usual college Gothic or Greek architecture. Lots of box and glass-like structures like those presently decimating Travis Heights. This place is like going to school in the Shire. UC-Santa Cruz also houses the Grateful Dead Archive. Good to know that the kind of music I like qualifies for archival status. Next to the Gregorian Chants and Ragtime ditties, I guess. Who knew those guys were sober enough to think about saving anything to put in an archive? But sure enough, there's lots of photos, documents, and artifacts going all the way back to 1965. The library displays a very tiny bit in a large room on the first floor. Seems like they could expand that into more of a tourist draw or campus attraction. But based on the look of these students, I think they're more concerned with keeping outsiders out than making a buck off them (UT style). Wow. LSU or Ole Miss this is not. These kids look like Abercrombie and Fitch models. Only, exactly the opposite. Rice students look at these kids and think "damn those are some ugly kids." Only, they'd say it all cryptically to where no one could understand, like "the student body exhibits diverse yet scholarly physical characteristics." No frat houses here either. Guess those guys have to go down to the Boardwalk to get their closeted freak on. Buttchugging? Nope, no Pikes around here. Go Banana Slugs!

After leaving Santa Cruz, I barrelled the Red Shark up the freeway toward my next objective, Half Moon Bay. For reasons that seem inexplicable now, I had the expectation that Half Moon Bay was a secret little oasis of delight just south of San Francisco. A Ritz Carlton resort sits right on the bay shore, for example. Though I got close enough to see it, I never found a parking spot so I couldn't walk around and explore. It looked nice but having been to Pebble Beach the day before, it seemed kind of like Camp North Star by comparison. (If you got that reference by the way, you're my new best friend. Enjoy.). Otherwise, Half Moon Bay doesn't have a lot going on. Or else I missed it. There's a little main drag with the usual quaint shops and pretentious local restaurants, and a kind of interesting local grocery store. But I sure didn't come all this way on vacation to see a place that pales in comparison to Fredericksburg, so I quit the town and made the final push toward Gomorrah.

Along the way, the PCH resumed its former two-lane, winding character, rolling through intermittent fog and beachside state parks. Of note, I passed the Point Montara Lighthouse, visible through some thick fog. There's a youth hostel on premises, which I assume means there've been several mass murder incidents through the years. Eager to make San Francisco before nightfall, I sped on.

Next-San Francisco.