California Coast

We packed up and left Campo on Sunday, after a farewell dinner, we will miss this place and our RR friends.

Grand to be on the road again. As always, it took a little time to readjust my fear level about towing in city traffic, on California Freeways. (Actually, compared to Rte 128, they are not that fearsome, they drive better for one thing). Statistically, there is hardly a more dangerous thing to do than driving, but we all have to do it, so we learn to tolerate the danger.

The Pacific Ocean meets pretty soft rock and sand along much of the southern coast, so where the often spectacular mountains and steep hills meet the sea, it is a battle zone between the waves and gravity. We are taking the Pacific Coast Highway up and turning east to Sacramento, still only a smallish piece of the California coastline. This section runs more nearly east and west, so if we could see it, San Diego is in the distance to the south for much of our route.

This highway is often closed by mud slides, and the houses clinging to the hills above regularly get dumped off. They don’t get the hurricanes that the East Coast does, but a good winter storm will eat more of the road and more houses. I’m used to the more permanent granite that seems to be a match for the Atlantic, and here, with the mudslides and earthquakes I feel a little more at Nature’s mercy.

The ride along the coast is spectacular, the Pacific waves with surfers on them, and the rounded headlands, with the mountains on the right. We get glimpses of the valleys up in canyons, lush ranch lands, rounded soft mountains with grass and only mature live oaks for trees. It might be Tuscany, as there are vineyards, and many tall skinny cypress, just not enough people and buildings and no ancient, terraced olive groves.

Through Malibu, where you can’t see the sea for houses crammed along the shore, I guess it’s neat to have a beach house and have waves for breakfast, but from the road it is pretty dull. Most of the drive, between cities, is open, the waves too near and the hills too steep for building.

Anywhere the mountains leave a large flat place back from the sea, is covered in truck farming fields. Living in the dry mountains, I had forgotten how much of California is devoted to vegetables and flowers on enormous fields. The strawberry fields in Oxnard are full of workers picking as fast as they can, since they are paid by the box. There are so many people that it looks like flocks of giant birds have descended on the fields. I wonder what changes will happen here in these fields, now that the jet fuel to fly produce from far away is expensive, and now that the illegals are fewer. We have been so accustomed to cheap food, and I think it's about to get much more expensive.

First night at Mugu Rock State Park, where we squeeze into a small site, and can walk under a bridge to the ocean, so I get two terrific walks on the beach, waves crashing, seagulls, wind, and seals resting (maybe dead?) on the sand. Mugu Rock is really the small side of the mountain cut for the Pacific Coast highway, it makes a unique silhouette, the name is from the Chumash word for beach.