Some Damn Good Life Experience(through the eyes of Stephanie): Out of Salinas, into the Wild!

We finally got out of Salinas!!!

And I am putting it firmly behind me, that vast land of taco stands (las taquerias) and auto dealerships.

On Wednesday, we set off from the Motel 6 with a new cargo trailer that is much smaller than the 25-footer. I like to think that everything works out in the end – it’s much less scary towing that small trailer. Bill rode about 40 miles from Salinas to the Big Sur Lodge, which was where we stayed. Big Sur, which is a 90-mile stretch along Highway One with only about 1200 residents, is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. The ocean is on one side, and the Santa Lucia Mountains are on the other side. Around 1770, Monterey became capital of Spanish California, and the Spanish colonists referred to the Big Sur region as “el país grande del sur”, the Big South Country, because it was largely unexplored. Over the years it became called, simply, Big Sur. We went hiking on a few trails through the coastal redwood trees, and they were both dominant and hauntingly lovely. I know before I begin that any description that I can offer of the beauty of the forest will fall very short of doing it justice. I will say that it was a quiet place, sacred, untouched by graffiti or pollution or cigarette butts. I can tell of the reverence I felt for these trees that have lived for over a thousand years before me, and will live on long after I am gone. There is evidence of long-ago forest fires throughout the trails; trees with large scarring black marks discoloring one side of their massive trunks. These trees are very fire-resistant and often they can sprout out of even badly burned bark, which earns them even more respect in my eyes.

We stayed at the Treebones Resort on our second night in Big Sur, and we stayed in yurts. (I’d never heard of one either.) A yurt is a small circular building on stilts, which is a modern adaptation of structures that have been used by Central Asian nomads for centuries. The walls were made of some sort of insulated, heavy nylon attached to vertical wooden beams, and the ceiling had a bubble skylight in the center. It was extremely windy the night we were there, and the yurt walls and ceiling flapped so loudly it sounded like birds beating gigantic wings onto it. There is no cell phone service, no TVs and only one radio station comes in, which seemed to be some variation of polka from the 1950s. All the people at Treebones were extremely nice, except all the other guests were all clearly on romantic, wine-sipping, hand-holding yurting getaways, and then there’s Bill, the middle-aged guy hanging out with two very attractive young females. Most people we meet think that Sarah and I are Bill’s kids. (Of course, there was that comedy show we went to at The Green Room in San Francisco, when the comic looked out at us in the audience and said, “Hey, what is this guy doing with two hot chicks? Oh, I get it – he’s got the money and the coke, right?”)

The next day, before Bill started riding, we pulled off on the side of the coast highway to watch the hundreds of elephant seals that lie on the shore on a certain section of beach. Of course, the three of us ducked under the fence, crouched down right above them and got some amazing pictures. Elephant seals are like gigantic brown slugs with flippers and mermaid tails. The females have cute seal faces but the males have enormous, hideous elephantine snouts that droop down in front of their mouths. They were very close to extinction in the 1880s, when they were hunted for their blubber, but they have been a protected species since then and now the population is about 150,000. It was amazing to watch them and see the interactions: males fighting, shuffling their 1500-pound bodies around in the sand, and females snuggling and communicating with their pups. They ignored our presence completely, which was humbling, but that’s a good thing.

It ended up raining later that day so we backtracked to pick up Bill, so he didn’t get wet. He does have a raincoat, but the rainclouds were swirling gray all over the place and the water came and went in brief pouring ministorms, so Sarah and I took pity on him and picked him up. We were right near the Hearst Castle, so we went on a tour. The castle, which sits on the “enchanted hill”, was built by famed publisher William Randolph Hearst in the 1930s. He was an extremely accomplished man, and I will accredit this to the fact that in 1879, when he was 16, he attended St. Paul’s Preparatory School in Concord, NH before attending Harvard. (It all comes back to New Hampshire, doesn’t it!) In 1887, Hearst’s father acquired the San Francisco Examiner as payment for a gambling debt. (I wonder what I would have given to settle a gambling debt in the 1800s – my corset and knitting needles, perhaps?) Hearst begged his father to let him take over the paper, and he ended up at one time owning four dozen newspapers across the country - as well as being a New York Congressman at one time and involving himself in television in the 1940s. The Castle was his dream; he spent 28 years building and building the castle, up in the hills without any towns anywhere near him, with no paved roads leading to it, and, sadly, he never finished it. Many famous people used to visit the castle; Charlie Chaplin was a very close friend, and other guests were Howard Hughes, the Marx brothers, Calvin Coolidge, Winston Churchill, Charles Lindbergh, George Bernard Shaw, Cary Grant, Joan Crawford, and Clark Gable, to name a few. I do love celebrities, and they were living it up back then – the place is enormous, with multiple swimming pools and ancient, priceless pieces of art from Egypt and Italy.

On Saturday night we stayed at the Courtesy Inn in San Simeon, and the three of us watched the Pats game at the bar next to our motel. It was an odd situation, because not only did the Patriots lose, but most of the people at the bar were rooting for Denver. I asked the people sitting behind us if they were Patriots fans, (very enthusiastically, and I probably had my fist in the air) and they gave me an eye-narrowing, wrinkled-nose expression. “Um, no,” they said. O-kay then, so much for polite east coast sports talk in southern California. After watching our sports teams in bars back home and feeling the energy there, it just didn’t feel right to not have everyone in the place be pulling for New England. Our only saving grace was that the loud, drunk, Harley-riding couple next to us were originally from Massachusetts, so they were our allies.

From San Simeon, Bill rode 30 miles to San Luis Obispo, where we stayed at another breathtakingly lovely Motel 6. I had to do laundry there, so I grabbed my pile of underwear, jeans, and dirty tourist sweatshirts (somehow, Sarah and I usually both end up wearing identical sweatshirts in different colors that say SAN FRANCISCO on them on the same day, which makes us doubly cool) and made my way around the side of the cement building, where the laundry room was. It was dark outside, and there was a sketchy man in a white suit on a bicycle that was riding in circles around the parking lot, which freaked me out. I spied on him from inside the safe haven of the coin-operated laundry room, with my motel room key card clenched between my fingers, ready to slash him if he attacked. Luckily, he rode off somewhere before I crept out of the laundry room. Nope, I have learned that doing laundry on the road is not an ideal situation. I am reminded of the EconoLodge in Monterey, where the washer and dryer were sitting under some sort of tin roof out in the open on the far side of the parking lot - and when the clothes were in the dryer, it rattled so loudly that sounded like there were some full cans of Budweiser in there, enjoying the dryer cycle.

It’s going to get hard to find places to stay, I fear, at times when we are in the middle of NOWHERE. That’s where are today, Monday, January 16. As I write this, Bill is riding 42 miles from Pismo Beach to a town called Lompoc. The land flattened out quite a bit after San Simeon, so the bike riding should get a bit easier, though the ocean isn’t visible through this part of the highway. We are currently at the White Oaks Hotel, which is nicer than Motel 6. Not much to do in Lompoc; it was the first place we found that we could stay after a long drive through hills, past some pickup trucks, and rows of brown crops. We’ve been listening to country music, because it’s either that or Mexican music, (that’s what comes in here) and it’s pretty good. I’ve heard some good Garth Brooks and George Strait tunes, and my appreciation for Dolly Parton’s vocals has certainly increased. I think that I’d better get used to it – maybe I’ll come home wearing a cowboy hat and some cute little spurs or something. Sarah and I saw some excellent tree-climbing trees in the backyard of the hotel, so we went and climbed them. That’s the kind of thing you do around here. Another fun activity is spying on Bill, waiting until he’s standing near the Suburban, and pressing the panic button on the keychain so the alarm goes off.

This lifestyle we are living right now makes me feel like a transient, a perpetual tourist, a person who is often oblivious as to what day of the week it is. It’s an adjustment after my job back home as a letter carrier, when I always knew exactly what day it was (Thursday is the dreaded flyer day, Friday is Dover Community News day, etc) and now, thankfully, I don’t have much of a clue. Although, there is something very refreshing about that as well, having no place that we have to be at any certain time. We wake up in the morning, and we go. We get there when we get there, and ‘there’ could be anywhere. Today it’s Lompoc; tomorrow, who knows! We’re a bit under 200 miles north of Los Angeles; we’ll be there in less than a week unless we get detained by some incident such as a trailer-Suburban accident - but that would never happen to us!

I know, this one was long too. Stick with me, stick with me…

-steph

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Some Damn Good Life Experience(through the eyes of Stephanie)

What will certainly in the future become legend: my attempt to capture true adventure - the drama, pain, and hilarity of our largely unplanned six-month trip across the country. It's like reality TV, except you're going to read it!

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Out of Salinas, into the Wild!

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