PATAGONIA, CHILE

 

Torres del Paine

“I climbed a path and from the top looked up-stream towards Chile. I could see the river, glinting and sliding through the bone-white cliffs with strips of emerald cultivation either side. Away from the cliffs was the desert. There was no sound but the wind, whirring through thorns and whistling through dead grass, and no other sign of life but a hawk, and a black beetle easing over white stones.”
― Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia

“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.”

-John Muir

“He who does not know the Chilean forests, does not know the planet.”

– Pablo Neruda

Lago Nordenskjold

Lago Nordenskjold

Lago Pehoe

“The wind chased me everywhere I went in Patagonia. It clogged my sinuses and sent the Jeep slithering across the gravel roads as though on ice. Birds flew backward. Trees grew horizontally. The wind was a living thing. It could be violent, punching holes in glass windows or sending spirals of dust rising above the flat, dry steppe like miniature tornadoes.”

– From “Land of the Living Wind” , by Simon Worral

Balmaceda Glacier

We reached the great face of Balmaceda’s hanging glacier, and docked at Bernardo O’Higgins National Park – at 13,614 square miles, some 18 times larger than neighbouring Torres del Paine National Park.

Serrano Glacier

Magellanic Penguins

“Felix believed that the answer to every problem involved penguins; but it wasn’t fair to birds, and I was getting tired of teleporting them back home. Somewhere in Antarctica, a whole flock of Magellanic penguins were undergoing psychotherapy.”
― Rick Riordan, The Throne of Fire

 

Cordillera Paine

Glacier del Frances

“Nature is man’s teacher. She unfolds her treasures to his search, unseals his eye, illumes his mind, and purifies his heart; an influence breathes from all the sights and sounds of her existence.”

-Alfred Bernhard Nobel

 

 

 

 

Alta, Utah

“In the presence of eternity, the mountains are as transient as the clouds.”

– Robert Green Ingersoll

“It’s hard to give tips to skiers if I don’t know how they ski, but I think the most important thing in skiing is you have to be having fun. If you’re having fun, then everything else will come easy to you.”

– Lindsey Vonn

“You walk in to Alta, and it’s just homey. There is no pretension. No judgment. There is a vibe that everyone wants to be there.”

– Walt Brown

“Alta is what skiing is supposed to be like. It is supposed to be family, affordable, a joy.”

– Walt Brown

Road Trip 2018 – Part 1

So, I basically decided to take a leave of absence from work for an indefinite period of time. Most people call it retirement. In order to appear conventional, I kind of went along with that definition. Ok. I’m retiring. Whatever that means. For me, it’s just an extended vacation without a particular schedule or expiration date.

To get the ball rolling, I just took off on a ski bum vacation. My wife and I hit the road, and took the long way around to Utah, via the Trans Canada Highway from Toronto. We took our time, along the way,  getting off the road before dark each day (after all, I’m not in a rush), stopping along the route in Sault Ste Marie, Thunder Bay, Winnipeg, Regina, and Calgary.

We relaxed for a few days in Calgary (visiting with our son who currently lives there), before heading south and crossing the US border at Montana. We stopped in Whitefish, Montana for a couple of nights (a great little ski town with a lot of charm), relaxed, and then hit the road again for Utah, where we’ll be staying for a week. I’ll be skiing Alta and Snowbird.

Here are a few “snapshots” from the road so far.

Pittsburgh, PA

“Pittsburgh. I’d been there. One of the most underrated cities in North America. People who’d never been there thought of it as a graveyard of abandoned steel mills, but it was a beautiful city, and it would be good to have it back.”

–  Steven Brust, Lord of the Fantastic: Stories in Honor of Roger Zelazny

“A city built on rivers and bituminous coal, Pittsburgh in the ’90s has survived the boom and bust years.”

–  Bill Dedman

“Pittsburgh entered the core of my heart when I was a boy and cannot be torn out.”

― Andrew Carnegie

“Pittsburgh felt like the perfect size of a city to me. There’s enough to do, but it’s not like living in a circus. I also really loved how sports-enthusiastic Pittsburgh people are: how proud of their sports they are.”

 – Joel Edgerton

“The road to the Super Bowl runs through Pittsburgh, sooner or later you’ve got to go to Pittsburgh.”

— Bum Phillips

“Like most people, I have this sort of love-hate relationship with Pittsburgh. This is my home, and at times I miss it and find it tremendously exciting, and other times I want to catch the first thing out that has wheels.”

–  August Wilson

“There’s so much that I like about Pittsburgh, actually. The cultural district and museums are wonderful, and I encourage everyone to check them out. And the food is excellent, too!”

– Troy Polamalu

“When I grew up in Pittsburgh in my parents’ restaurant, I was almost like a country bumpkin.”

–  Ming-Na Wen

“I would always reserve a special place in my heart for Pittsburgh.”

–  Willie Stargell

“I don’t ever remember having any bad times here in Pittsburgh.”

— Barry Bonds

“I love Pittsburgh because it’s a humble city. It’s really grounded in its rich history and culture.”

–  Kyle Abraham

Andy Warhol was an artist, a celebrity, a cultural icon, an eccentric, and, at heart, a Pittsburgher. While most people associate Warhol with the jet set and locations like New York City and Hollywood, most fail to realize how much of a Pittsburgher he was.

Warhol on the surface may have appeared to be glitzy and glamorous, but beneath the persona, some deep Pittsburgh values remained.

Pittsburgh never forgot that Warhol was a native son. The city remembered him by renaming the Seventh Street Bridge the “Andy Warhol Bridge” in celebration of the museum’s 10th anniversary.

Pittsburgh is a blue collar, football loving town. But it is also home to one of pop culture’s most famous artists, Andy Warhol. The Andy Warhol Museum is fantastic. Whether or not you are a fan of the artist or his art, this museum is a great place to visit.

 

 

Colorado National Monument

Colorado National Monument (locally referred to as “The Monument“) is a National Park Service unit near the city of Grand Junction, Colorado. Spectacular canyons cut deep into sandstone, and even granite–gneiss–schist, rock formations.

When John Otto first saw the rugged red rock canyons south of Grand Junction in 1906, it was love at first sight. The following year he wrote:

“I came here last year and found these canyons, and they feel like the heart of the world to me. I’m going to stay and build trails and promote this place, because it should be a national park.”

The area was established as Colorado National Monument on May 24, 1911. Otto was hired as the first park ranger, drawing a salary of $1 per month. For the next 16 years, he continued building and maintaining trails while living in a tent in the park.

Otto spearheaded fundraising campaigns, collected signatures for petitions, and penned newspaper editorials and endless letters to Washington politicians in support of national recognition for the ancient canyons and towering monoliths of his adopted home.

This is an area of desert land high on the Colorado Plateau, with pinion and juniper forests on the plateau.

There are magnificent views from trails and the Rim Rock Drive, which winds along the plateau.

Nearby are the Book Cliffs and the largest flat-topped mountain in the world, the Grand Mesa.

The park became more well known in the 1980s partly due to its inclusion as a stage of the major international bicycle race, the Coors Classic. The race through the park became known as “The Tour of the Moon”, due to the spectacular landscapes the race passed through on Rim Rock Drive.

Just another Dharma Bum day at the office!

San Francisco, California

If California is one grand, sweeping gesture, a long arm cradling the Pacific, then San Francisco, that seven-by-seven-mile peninsula, is a forefinger pointing upwards. Take this as a hint to look up: you’ll notice San Francisco’s crooked Victorian rooflines, wind-sculpted treetops and fog tumbling over the Golden Gate Bridge.

Heads are perpetually in the clouds atop San Francisco’s 43 hills. Cable cars provide easy access to Russian and Nob Hills, and splendid panoramas reward the slog up to Coit Tower – but the most exhilarating highs are earned on Telegraph Hill’s garden-lined stairway walks and windswept hikes around Land’s End.

Consider permission permanently granted to be outlandish: other towns may surprise you, but in San Francisco you will surprise yourself. Good times and social revolutions tend to start here, from manic gold rushes to blissful hippie be-ins. If there’s a skateboard move yet to be busted, a technology still unimagined, a poem left unspoken or a green scheme untested, chances are it’s about to happen here. Yes, right now. This town has lost almost everything in earthquakes and dot-com gambles, but never its nerve.

– Lonely Planet

San Francisco is one of the most beloved cities in the entire world, and has been written about and commented on innumerable times by from the most profound literary geniuses to the shallowest of pop culture celebrities. There is hardly anything one can add to the thoughts that have already been so eloquently expressed by the world at large about this unique city.

Here are just a few of the thousands of quotations that capture the essence of the effect of the San Francisco vibe:

One day if I go to heaven…..I’ll look around and say “It ain’t bad, but it ain’t San Francisco”. (Herb Caen)

San Francisco has only one drawback – ’tis hard to leave. (Rudyard Kipling)

You know what it is? (It) is a golden handcuff with the key thrown away. (John Steinbeck)

East is East, and West is San Francisco. (O. Henry)

San Franciscans are very proud of their city, and they should be.  It’s the most beautiful place in the world.  (Robert Redford)

If you’re alive, you can’t be bored in San Francisco.  If you’re not alive, San Francisco will bring you to life……San Francisco is a world to explore. It is a place where the heart can go on a delightful adventure. It is a city in which the spirit can know refreshment every day.  (William Saroyan)

Every man should be allowed to love two cities, his own and San Francisco.  (Gene Fowler)

Of all cities in the United States I have seen, San Francisco is the most beautiful.  (Nikita Kruschev)

I prefer a wet San Francisco to a dry Manhattan. (Larry Geraldi)

The cool, grey city of love. (George Sterling)

I never dreamed I’d like any city as well as London.  San Francisco is exciting, moody, exhilarating.  I even love the muted fogs.  (Julie Christie)

I don’t know of any other city where you can walk through so many culturally diverse neighbourhoods, and you’re never out of sight of the wild hills.  Nature is very close here.  (Gary Snyder)

I’m proud to have been a Yankee. But I have found more happiness and contentment, since I came back home to San Francisco than any man has a rigo deserve. This is the friendliest city in the world. (Joe di Maggio)

San Francisco is 49 square miles surrounded by reality.  (Paul Kantner)

The ultimate (travel destination) for me would be one perfect day in San Francisco.  It’s a perfect 72 degrees, clear, the sky bright blue.  I’d start down at Fisherman’s Wharf with someone I really like and end with a romantic dinner and a ride over the Golden Gate Bridge.  There’s no city like it anywhere.  And, if I could be there with the girl of my dreams, that would be the ultimate.  (Larry King)

The port of San Francisco……is a marvel of nature, and might well be called the harbor of harbors….And I think if it could be well settled like Europe there would not be anything more beautiful in all the world” (Juan Bautista de Anza)

Leaving San Francisco is like saying goodbye to an old sweetheart.  You want to linger as long as possible.  (Walter Kronkite)

The Bay Area is so beautiful, I hesitate to preach about heaven while I’m here. (Billy Graham)

San Francisco can start right now to become number one. We can set examples so that others will follow. We can start overnight. We don’t have to wait for budgets to be passed, surveys to be made, political wheelings and dealings…….for it takes no money……it takes no compromising to give the people their rights……it takes no money to respect the individual. It takes no political deal to give people freedom. It takes no survey to remove repression. (Harvey Milk)

There’s no question this is where I want to live.  Never has been.  (Robin Williams)

San Francisco is one of my favourite cities in the world…I would probably rank it at the top or near the top.  It’s small but photogenic and has layers…You never have problems finding great angles that people have never done.  (Ang Lee)

When you get tired of walking around in San Francisco, you can always lean against it.  (unknown)

It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time. (Jack Kerouac)

There may not be a Heaven, but there is San Francisco. (Ashleigh Brilliant)

I have done more for San Francisco than any of its old residents. Since I left there it has increased in population fully 300,000. I could have done more – I could have gone earlier – it was suggested. (Mark Twain)

I find no objection to turning Hollywood into a suburb of San Francisco, the most photogenic city in the world. (Mayor Joseph Alioto)

The City that knows how. (William Howard Taft)

San Francisco is the only city I can think of that can survive all the things you people are doing to it and still look beautiful. (Frank Lloyd Wright)

You wouldn’t think such a place as San Francisco could exist.  The wonderful sunlight here, the hills, the great bridges, the Pacific at your shoes.  Beautiful Chinatown.  Every race in the world.  The sardine fleets sailing out.  The little cable-cars whizzing down The City hills….And all the people are open and friendly.  (Dylan Thomas)

(San Francisco) is a rich, lusty city, rippling with people, with movement, with girls in summer dresses, with flowers, with color; one of the great and wonderful cities of the world….the great seaport of the Pacific now, one of the great naval bases. Through it have poured a million men…..And the sea is always just on the other side of those hills. (James Marlow)

I certainly was surprised to be named Poet Laureate of this far-out city on the left side of the world, and I gratefully accept, for as I told the Mayor, “How could I refuse?” I’d rather be Poet Laureate of San Francisco than anywhere because this city has always been a poetic center, a frontier for free poetic life, with perhaps more poets and more poetry readers than any city in the world. (Lawrence Ferlinghetti)

In all my travels I have never seen the hospitality of San Francisco equalled anywhere in the world.  (Conrad Hilton)

San Francisco! Is there a land where the magic of that name has not been felt? (Clarence F. Edwards)

Your city is remarkable not only for its beauty.  It is also, of all the cities in the United States, the one whose name, the world over, conjures up the most visions and more than any other city incites one to dream.  (Georges Pompidou)

It’s a mad city, inhabited by insane people whose women are of remarkable beauty (Rudyard Kipling)

Somehow the great cities of America have taken their places in a jythology that shapes their destiny: money live sin New York. Power sits in Washington. Freedom sips cappuccino in a sidewalk café in San Francisco. (Joe Flower)

I was married once – in San Francisco. I haven’t seen her for many years. The great earthquake and fire in 1906 destroyed the marriage certificate. There’s no legal proof. Which means that earthquakes aren’t always bad. (W.C. Fields)

It is a good thing the early settlers landed on the East Coast; if they’d landed in San Francisco first, the rest of the country would still be uninhabited.  (Herbert Mye)

What fetched me instantly (and thousands of other newcomers with me) was the subtle but unmistakeable sense of escape from the United States.  (H.L. Mencken)

The City of San Francisco (the metropolis of the State) considering its age, is by long odds the most wonderful city on the face of the earth.  (G.W. Sullivan)

Any one who doesn’t have a great time in San Francisco is pretty much dead to me. (Anthony Bourdain)

There are just three big cities in the United States that are “story cities” – New York, of course, New Orleans, and, best of the lot, San Francisco. (Frank Norris)

You have in San Francisco this magnificent Civic Center crowned by a City Hall which I have never seen anywhere equalled.  (Joseph Strauss)

A city is where you can sign a petition, boo the chief justice, fish off a pier, gape at a hippopotamus, buy a flower at the corner, or get a good hamburger or a bad girl at 4 A.M. A city is where sirens make white streaks of sound in the sky and foghorns speak dark grays – San Francisco is such a city. (Herb Caen)

Caen’s San Francisco may not be the city we remember, but it is the city we want to remember. (Mayor Willie Brown)

Of all American cities of whatever size the most friendly on preliminary inspection, and on further acquaintance the most likable. The happiest-hearted, the gayest, the most care-free city on this continent.  (Irwin S. Cobb)

No city invites the heart to come to life as San Francisco does.  Arrival in San Francisco is an experience in living.  (William Saroyan)

God took the beauty of the Bay of Naples, the Valley of the Nile, the Swiss Alps, the Hudson River Valley, rolled them into one and made San Francisco Bay.  (Fiorello La Guardia)

I always see about six scuffles a night when I come to San Francisco.  That’s one of the town’s charms.  (Erroll Flynn)

San Francisco is a complex town that lets you be yourself, that accepts you even if your family doesn’t. No matter how uncomfortable your own skin feels, you can move to this city, discover who you really are, and plant your feet on the ground.  (Jack Boulware)

San Francisco, open your Golden Gate, you’ll let nobody wait outside your door, San Francisco, here is your wanderin’ one, saying I’ll wander no more. (Gus Khan, Bronislaw Kaper, Walter Jurrman)

San Francisco! – one of my two favorite cities.  There is more grace per square foot in San Francisco than any place on earth!  (Bishop Fulton J. Sheen)

I don’t think San Francisco needs defending.  I never meet anyone who doesn’t love the place, Americans or others.  (Doris Lessing)

There are a thousand viewpoints in the viewtiful city. (Herb Caen)

San Francisco has always been a haven for misfits and weirdos. I’m both of these, which is why I came here. (Michael Franti)

I think San Francisco is the best place in the whole world for an easy life. (Imogen Cunningham)

San Francisco is perhaps the most European of all American cities. (Cecil Beaton)

San Francisco is Beautiful People wearing a bracelet of bridges.  (Hal Lipset)

I have always been rather better treated in San Francisco than I actually deserved (Mark Twain)

It’s an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco. It must be a delightful city and possess all the attraction of the next world. (Oscar Wilde)

Every city on earth has its special sink of vice, crime and degradation, its running ulcer or moral cancer, which it would fain hide from the gaze of mankind…..San Franciscans will not yield the palm of superiority to anything to be found elsewhere in the world. Speak of the deeper depth, the lower hell, the maelstrom of vice and iniquity – from whence those who once fairly enter escape no more forever – and they will point triumphantly to the Barbary Coast, strewn from end to end with the wrecks of humanity, and challenge you to match it anywhere outside of he lake of fire and brimstone. (Colonel Evans)

If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair, if you’re going to San Francisco, you’re gonna meet some gentle people there. (John Phillips)

San Francisco is the greatest…the hills…fabulous food…most beautiful and civilised people.  (Duke and Duchess of Bedford)

The old San Francisco is dead. The gayest, lightest hearted, and most pleasure-loving city of the western continent, and in many ways the most interesting and romantic, is a horde of refugees living among ruins. It may rebuild; it probably will; but those who have known that peculiar city by the Golden Gate, have caught its flavour of the Arabian Nights, feel it can never be the same. It is as though a pretty, frivolous woman has passed through a great tragedy. She survives, but she is sobered and different. If it rises out of the ashes it must be a modern city, much like other cities without its old atmosphere. (Will Irwin)

I love San Francisco.  It would be a perfect place for a honeymoon.  (Kim Novak)

San Francisco is a breathtakingly beautiful city, with lots of great contrasts between dark and light, often overlapping each other. It’s a great setting for a horror story. (Christopher Moore)

Now there’s a grown-up swinging town.  (Frank Sinatra)

Whoever after due and proper warning shall be heard to utter the abominable word “Frisco”, which has no linguistic or other warrant, shall be deemed guilty of High Misdemeanour, and shall pay into the Imperial Treasury as penalty the sum of twenty-five dollars. (Emperor Norton)

If civil disobedience is the way to go about change, than I think a lot of people will be going to San Francisco (Rosie O’Donnell)

I don’t like San Francisco.  I love it!  (Dorothy Lamour)

“Queen of the Pacific Coast! Fair city whose changing skies for half the year shower down mist and rain, and the other half sunbeams of molten brass! Metropolis of alternate sticky mud and blinding dust! In spite of these and more thou art a city of my heart,  O Ciudad de San Francisco!” (T.S. Kenderdine)

Two days in this city is worth two months in New York.  (Robert Menzies)

I’m just mad for San Francisco.  It is like London and Paris stacked on top of each other.  (Twiggy)

I fell in love with the most cordial and sociable city in the Union. After the sagebrush and alkali deserts of Wahoe, San Francisco was Paradise to me. (Mark Twain)

San Francisco is poetry.  Even the hills rhyme.  (Pat Montandon)

San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every house a poem, every dweller within immortal. This is the whole truth. (William Saroyan)

I love this city.  If I am elected, I’ll move the White House to San Francisco. Everybody’s so friendly.  (Robert Kennedy)

I like the fog that creeps over the whole city every night about five, and the warm protective feeling it gives…and lights of San Francisco at night, the fog horn, the bay at dusk and the little flower stands where spring flowers appear before anywhere else in the country…But, most of all, I like the view of the ocean from the Cliff House.  (Irene Dunne)

San Francisco is really fun and liberal, and it’s my kind of politics. It’s like being Jewish in front of Jewish people. (Elayne Bossier)

I love San Francisco and Brighton has something of San Francisco about it. It’s by the sea, there’s a big gay community, a feeling of people being there because they enjoy their life there. (Brian Eno)

We’re crazy about this city.  First time we came here, we walked the streets all day – all over town – and nobody hassled us.  People smiled, friendly-like, and we knew we could live here……Los Angeles? That’s just a big parking lot where you buy a hamburger for a trip to San Francisco……And the beautiful old houses and the strange light.  We’ve never been in a city with light like this.  We sit in our hotel room for hours, watching the fog come in, the light change.  (John Lennon and Yoko Ono)

The extreme geniality of San Francisco’s economic, intellectual and political climate makes it the most varied and challenging city in the United States (James Michener)

But I would rather be with you, somewhere in San Francisco on a back porch in July, just looking up to Heaven, at this crescent in the sky (Robert Hunter)

I have seen few things as beautiful as a 6.30 am lift-off from San Francisco International Airport in the autumn. From above, the rippled fog layer laps against the shores of the foothills like a voluminous cotton ocean (Eric Chang)

San Francisco is a city with the assets of a metropolis without the disadvantages of size and industry.  (Jack Kenny)

Isn’t it nice that people who prefer Los Angeles to San Francisco live there? (Herb Caen)

San Francisco is one of the great cultural plateaus in the world….one of the really urbane communities in the United States…one of the truly cosmopolitan places – and for many, many years, it has always had a warm welcome for human beings from all over the world.  (Duke Ellington)

The Golden Gate Bridge’s daily strip tease from enveloping stoles of mist to full frontal glory is still the most provocative show in town (Mary Moore Mason)

No visit to the United States would be complete without San Francisco – this beautiful city, center of the West, very well known for its beauty and the place where the United Nations was born.  (Queen Sirikit of Thailand)

To a traveler paying his first visit, it has the interest of a new planet.  It ignores the meteorological laws which govern the rest of the world.  (Fitz Hugh Ludlow)

Cities are like gentlemen, they are born, not made.  You are either a city, or you are not, size has nothing to do with it.  I bet San Francisco was a city from the very first time it had a dozen settlers.  New York is “Yokel”, but San Francisco is “City at Heart”.  (Will Rogers)

God! I love this city! (Herb Caen)

This is the first place in the United States where I sang, and I like San Francisco better than any other city in the world.  I love no city more than this one.  Where else could I sing outdoors on Christmas Eve?  (Luisa Tetrazzini)

The San Francisco Bay Area is the playpen of countercultures (RZ Sheppard)

I have seen purer liqors, better segars, finer tobacco, truer guns and pistols, larger dirks and bowie knives, and prettier women courtesans here in San Francisco than in any other place I have ever visited. (Hinton Helper)

San Francisco is gone. Nothing remains of it but memories. (Jack London)

San Francisco may soon become the first fully gentrified city in America, the urban equivalent of a gated bedroom community…..Now it’s becoming almost impossible for a lot of the people who have made this such a world-class city – people who have been the heart and soul of the city for decades – from the fishers and pasta makers and blue-collar workers to the jazz musicians to the beat poets to the hippies to the punks and so many others –to exist here anymore. And when you’ve lost that part of the city, you’ve lost San Francisco. (Daniel Zoll)

San Francisco is a city where people are never more abroad than when they are at home.  (Benjamin F. Taylor)

It’s the grandest city I saw in America.  If everyone acted as the San Franciscans did, there would be hope for settlement of the world’s difficulties.  (Frol Zozlov)

To this day the city of San Francisco remains to the Chinese the Great City of the Golden Mountains.  (Kai Fu Shah)

PACIFIC COAST HIGHWAY – CALIFORNIA

Stretching 650 curve-hugging, jaw-dropping miles along the ruggedly beautiful central coast of California, Highway 1 is one of the most scenic roads in the country.

This is the road driving was invented for-the road where car commercials are filmed. On the Pacific Coast Highway, you don’t crack your window for a bit of air, you roll it down all the way to feel the wind blast through your hair like a lighthearted tornado.

You can get a taste of what makes the road so famous on a short trip from San Francisco.

From the City by the Bay, it’s a 30-mile drive through redwood groves and past sandy beaches to your first stop, Half Moon Bay. The small town is home to some of the best surfing in the world and the international Mavericks competition, held when winter waves get big enough.

An exhilarating driving experience, this twisting, cliff-hugging route along the central California coast takes about five hours to complete at a leisurely pace. Designated an All-American Road—among the nation’s most scenic—the drive encompasses both the Big Sur Coast Highway and the San Luis Obispo North Coast Byway.

Also known as California State Route 1, the PCH was built in 1934 and took 15 years to complete. 

For the most dramatic scenery packed into less than half the mileage, set your sights on the Central Coast and a journey of about 240 miles from Monterey south to Santa Barbara.

Driving the route from north to south is ideal, as you’ll be on the ocean side of the road the entire way, allowing unobstructed views of the jagged coastline below.

The road winds high on the cliffs, with the crashing surf below. Many of the beaches you’ll see are inaccessible or require serious hikes in, making them all the more enchanting.

South of Carmel is where the route really reels you into its splendor. And while you never know when that ubiquitous coastal fog is going to lower a curtain over the views, when it lifts it’s as if Oz is being revealed.

One of the most famous photo-ops along the way is the Bixby Creek Bridge, one of the tallest and longest single-span concrete bridges in the world.

If I’m in Malibu driving up and down Pacific Coast Highway, my ‘2000 Heritage Softail Harley Davidson is what I usually like to ride.

“Sixty three sunsets I saw revolve on that perpendicular hill – mad raging sunsets pouring in sea foams of cloud through unimaginable crags like the crags you grayly drew in pencil as a child, with every rose-tint of hope beyond, making you feel just like them, brilliant and bleak beyond words.”
― Jack Kerouac, Lonesome Traveler

SANTA CRUZ – CALIFORNIA

Santa Cruz County is located on California’s Central Coast, 65 miles south of San Francisco and 35 miles north of Monterey. Situated on the northern side of the Monterey Bay and rimmed by redwood forested mountains, Santa Cruz County has 29 miles of beaches and 14 state parks.

“In Santa Cruz everything is a little bit different. To start with, the town is near the San Andreas Fault, which the locals will tell you at the first opportunity. This surely explains why everything here is a little bit topsy-turvy, right? San Jose, half an hour’s drive away on the mainland, is full of average Joes preoccupied with everyday problems like mortgages, traffic, the price of petrol and the San Francisco Giants’ umpteenth defeat. Hop over the mountain ridge and you’re in an enclave, a sanctuary for the weird and wonderful. It even has its own special “Mediterranean” climate.”

• Kolia Sulima,  A new beginning in Santa Cruz, America’s Last Hippie Holdout

Santa Cruz is one of America’s surfing capitals, complete with its own museum devoted to the sport, and a beach whose waves are known all over the world.

 

“I was born and raised in Santa Cruz, California, and the whole lifestyle revolves around the beach. My parents met surfing, and the beach was a major part of our daily lives.”

– Marisa Miller

“I went to UC Santa Cruz, overlooking the Bay of Monterey and Santa Cruz, in 1969. Back then, the city was part-hippie, part-surfer, but mostly retired chicken farmer.”

– Clive Sinclair

“The weekly farmers’ market is also quite the scene. An amateur orchestra of 15 drummers have installed themselves under a giant sycamore tree and play an assortment of bongos, barrels, plastic buckets and maracas. There isn’t a sober face among them. They drum away from 3pm till 8pm, a smog of marijuana hanging over them like a cloud of cotton wool. A young woman, stark naked, weaves her way through the fruit stalls. Her gaze is out of focus but her nimble feet carry her beautifully.”

“Santa Cruz is arguably the last hippie stronghold in the US. It’s almost impossible to earn any money and so, paradoxically, in Santa Cruz it’s fashionable to be poor. The city’s full of hobos but no-one moves them on. The tramps I’m accustomed to are dirty, covered in scabs and usually not long for this world. Those in Santa Cruz are of a different breed entirely. They hover in lines along Pacific Avenue, one of the main downtown drags, and sit around the libraries frightening the readers. They wash themselves and their clothes in the public toilets, and they busk with guitars and laugh their booming laughs like out-of-tune organs. The polite Santa Cruz police put on latex gloves and engage them in leisurely conversation.”

“I think you’re kind of seeing the real me as far as seeing what I post on social media, because I am very much into cooking, and my dogs, and obviously my son, and my lifestyle in Santa Cruz is very laid-back.”

– Marisa Miller

“My own zigzag path through life led me back to Santa Cruz in the early Eighties, and I have revisited regularly since. The place hasn’t changed: head in the clouds, backside on the hills and feet in the ocean – one of the most decent and beautiful places on earth.”

– Clive Sinclair

Flea market, Santa Cruz. Photograph: Nicole Corpuz under a CC licence

“I live in Santa Cruz. I moved here in 1974 and couldn’t leave.”

– Ellen Bass

“Santa Cruz is blessed not only with natural wonders, but also with gifted souls who can fashion nature’s bounty into man-made treasures.”

– Clive Sinclair

“When I wander through the city, I search in vain for its secret. Finding a place to rent here is a Herculean labour. With the money it would cost to rent a kennel or a birdhouse in Santa Cruz you could rent a house with a pool in North Carolina. People wear tattered Converse trainers held together with sticky tape but ride bikes with $500-frames. There are as many organic food stores for the 60,000 inhabitants as for the 10 million residents of New York. It is as if no one thinks about the future at all. Budget? Savings? No, haven’t heard of either of those things. For the first time in my life I have met people capable of discussing nutrition, metabolism and digestion for hours at a time.”

“Of course, if we were lucky, we wouldn’t be getting chased by an army of zombies through the quarantine area that used to be downtown Santa Cruz. We’d be somewhere safer, like Bikini Atoll just before the bomb testing kicked off.”
Author: Mira Grant

“There are no jobs here, especially for immigrants. The main hives of industry are old people’s homes, cafes and a theme park full of candyfloss and holidaymakers with clothes smeared in ketchup. The staff at these theme parks — hunched over and exhausted in their synthetic trousers and shirts — make the prospect of working at an old people’s home seem positively appealing.”

Just up the coast from Santa Cruz lies Half Moon Bay, a coastal city in San Mateo County, California. It’s an idyllic enclave and truly the perfect place to spend some time away from the big city.

 

 

“Growing up in northern California has had a big influence on my love and respect for the outdoors. When I lived in Oakland, we would think nothing of driving to Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz one day and then driving to the foothills of the Sierras the next day.”

– Tom Hanks

Just off the Half Moon Bay coast of California, winter storms and underwater geography combine to create some the world’s biggest and most dangerous waves. The Mavericks Surf Contest gives the world’s best surfers a chance to pit their skills against the big ones that can rise over 50 feet high, but this contest has an interesting twist.  No one knows when it will be held until just 24 hours before it starts.

The big waves come in winter, and around the end of each year, the official waiting period for the Mavericks Surf Contest begins. When conditions are right, organizers call a field of 24 surfers (who have been pre-selected) to tell them when the Mavericks Surf Contest will begin.

“I like to go for a little drive up the California coast.”
Author: Colin Farrell

 

“In California in the early Spring, There are pale yellow mornings, when the mist burns slowly into day, The air stings like Autumn, clarifies like pain – Well, I have dreamed this coast myself.”
Author: Robert Hass

If you are looking to surf in North America then head on out to California – there is great surf all the way down the coast. It is worth the trip to catch the big wave surfers riding the mountains of Maverick’s during the huge winter swells.

“Soon it got dusk, a grapey dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

 

“The setting sun burned the sky pink and orange in the same bright hues as surfers’ bathing suits. It was beautiful deception, Bosch thought, as he drove north on the Hollywood Freeway to home. Sunsets did that here. Made you forget it was the smog that made their colors so brilliant, that behind every pretty picture there could be an ugly story.”
― Michael Connelly, The Black Echo

With written excerpts by Kolia Sulima taken from: https://www.calvertjournal.com/articles/show/2987/letter-from-santa-cruz-usa-last-hippie-holdout

 

 

San Diego Sunsets

“…time can be slowed if you live deliberately. If you stop and watch sunsets. If you spend time sitting on porches listening to the woods. If you give in to the reality of the seasons.”

― Thomas Christopher Greene, I’ll Never Be Long Gone

“One day,” you said to me, “I saw the sunset forty-four times!”

And a little later you added:

“You know– one loves the sunset, when one is so sad…”

“Were you so sad, then?” I asked, “on the day of the forty-four sunsets?”

But the little prince made no reply.”

― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“Because I can count on my fingers the number of sunsets I have left, and I don’t want to miss any of them.”

― Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire

“Sunsets, like childhood, are viewed with wonder not just because they are beautiful but because they are fleeting.”

― Richard Paul Evans, The Gift

Ahhh, the ocean…the waves….the sunset!! An awesome, must see location. You will not be disappointed. Beautiful views. People out walking, running and bike riding. Enjoyable and relaxing.

“A sunset is the sun’s fiery kiss to the night.”

― Crystal Woods, Write Like No One is Reading 

“And I learned what is obvious to a child. That life is simply a collection of little lives, each lived one day at a time. That each day should be spent finding beauty in flowers and poetry and talking to animals. That a day spent with dreaming and sunsets and refreshing breezes cannot be bettered.”

― Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook

“Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.”

― G.K. Chesterton

“The setting sun burned the sky pink and orange in the same bright hues as surfers’ bathing suits. It was beautiful deception, Bosch thought, as he drove north on the Hollywood Freeway to home. Sunsets did that here. Made you forget it was the smog that made their colors so brilliant, that behind every pretty picture there could be an ugly story.”

― Michael Connelly, The Black Echo

Southern California Coast

California is a road-tripper’s dream destination. If there’s one place in North America to live the Dharma Bum life, it’s California. Undeniably, it has the best weather in the western hemisphere, along with the greatest range of topography, scenery, recreational activity, culture, and lifestyle options of anywhere on the planet! I love California. It is my “go-to” place year after year. Man, I just can’t get enough of it.
I love those transcendent moments on my motorcycle that money can’t buy: the smell of the Pacific coming through the Golden Gate, the rich scent in forests of giant sequoias, and the sweetness of strawberries picked fresh. I’m just constantly in awe of how beautiful it is. The unique cities and towns, the ocean, the forests, the Pacific Coast Highway, the sunsets, the food, the people, the mountains, the desert….I just can’t get enough of it!
So, for the next while, I’ll be re-positing some recent adventures of past California road trips that I’ve taken – a little “California Series”, if you will.

Road Trip Photographs

“To me, everything outside of Los Angeles is the ‘south,’ including places like San Diego. It’s sort of like the saying, ‘Everything is God.’ Indeed it is.”

– Buzz Osborne

“Well, when I was a kid, I grew up in San Diego next to the ocean. The ocean was my friend – my best friend.”

– Robert Ballard

“The San Diego region in many ways is defined by our relationship with the ocean. It’s our front yard and a beautiful playground for families and visitors. It should be clean, safe, and inviting.”

– Scott Peters

“People actually enjoy it when it rains in San Diego because we never get it. It’s a nice change of pace. When you live in Southern California, everybody says, ‘It’s so expensive there.’ I tell them, ‘It’s just a very expensive weather tax.'”

– Steve Finley

Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the…

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