Road Trip!
What is it about some people that they have wanderlust? I think it must go back to the Hunter/Gatherer psyche that arrayed early man. Some people settled and were happiest when they were putting down roots that bound them to a place on the earth as though to not do so would leave them free to spin off the planet into the ozone. Other people would sooner spin out into space than be stuck to one place and unable to seek adventure in new surroundings. The former were likely more the gathering and farming type and the later were more the hunting and exploring type. Some fear the unknown around the corner and others fear never getting the opportunity to find out what exactly is out there around that corner. I am not sure this related to Type A and Type B personalities, but I’ll bet there is a high overlap in the hunters and the Type A and the gatherers and Type B. I also suspect that while the ability to change one’s stars is an important tenet and extension of the free will of man, I feel it may extend only to certain limits and may be confined to the fundamental personality type innate in that person. People who like to stay put generally hate long car trips. Truth be told, they generally hate to travel in any manner, but the worst kind of travel is usually considered a long car trip. The other half of the world can’t wait for a reason to take a road trip. There is something special and liberating about dropping what you are doing, leaving all the problems of the world behind and just hitting the road. I am definitely the road trip kinda guy.
I have always liked long road trips. When I was a kid I remember several types of road trips. For two years in Turrialba, Costa Rica, we lived a three hour drive from the big city of San Jose. The best way to describe the road we had to drive was to harken back to that Michael Douglass and Kathleen Turner classic Romancing the Stone, when she gets on the wrong bus to Cartagena, Colombia. As she heads into the hills, the bus breaks down after hitting Douglass’ Jeep on a particularly treacherous curve on the mountainside-clinging road. That was the tropical road to Turrialba. I loved every inch of the ride. Then, when we moved from the tropics to the frozen tundra of Wisconsin, we used to drive our 1956 teal and white Oldsmobile 88 down along the Illinois, Indiana and Ohio Turnpikes heading to Ithaca to visit family. That was about a ten hour drive (assuming you “drove like 60!”) and we would stop halfway to overnight in a highway HoJo. I usually got the shotgun seat (both sisters would complain about it, but nothing a little brother fart couldn’t solve). That was the death seat in the days before seatbelts, but who knew? What we did know was that if we squabbled enough and annoyed our mother, who had to do all the driving, she was very good at taking swings at us from the driver seat. She also threatened to stop on the highway to sort us out, but that was the really scary one…those signs advising you to NOT stop except for emergencies were very intimidating to us. But then we also thought the police would come if we tore the labels off pillows and mattresses. By the way, if you wondered how we rolled, HoJo rooms had two full-sized beds (some with quarter vibrators) so I always got to share with Mom as the sisters got the other. That’s was the story of my life in those days, but I STILL loved the road trip and the rest stops with the men’s room machines with onion gum and X-ray Specs.
So today we are heading from Escondido up past Camp Pendleton on the #5 looking out at the Pacific, past San Clemente and up the spine of the OC to the City of Angels. I took a wrong Freeway turn and continued on the #5 into the belly of the beast instead of up the #405, but I self-corrected when I got to the #10. We always try to head to Santa Monica on the #10 so we can spend the next fifty miles commenting to one another about how silly it is that Malibu and the PCH is so Ricky-ticky and STILL so damn expensive. I estimate that we will say at least twenty times that we can’t understand who would want to live there. Then we will immediately ask again which house do we think is Barbara Streisand’s. That is how we roll now a days.
Once past Malibu and into Ventura County, things get better and more scenic. We stopped for a take-out patio lunch of some great salads and shoestring onion rings with Sharon and Woo. The sea breezes and agricultural/Mountain View’s in Camarillo are sweet. On the road again, Kim drove us into Santa Barbara along that most golden of coastlines while I conferenced called with Scotland over a wonderful $900k grant we have been awarded for our little high-tech ceramics venture. By the time we had resolved all our details, Kim had detoured us up into the Paso Robles highlands to continue our trek north as the #101 was under construction. What a great detour it was. I would go so far as to say it made our trip. There is nothing that says California to me more than vast rolling hills of golden grasslands with dark green solitary live oak trees scattered here and there. It is a scene that screams of the old world of the California of the mid-Nineteenth Century. Daniel Day Lewis May say that There Will Be Blood, but I just think of Calistoga wagons and the four Cartwrights riding over the hill on the Ponderosa looking for their next Bonanza, or Barbara Stanwick with her Big Valley and equally big sky.
By the time we headed back West to the crashing waves of the Pacific Central Coast, the sun was bright and the #1 was wide open from Morro Bay to Moonstone Beach in Cambria. We pulled into the familiar Fireside Inn and were promptly and COVID-correctly checked into the same beach-View room #131 that we had for Kim’s 60th Birthday Hearst Castle Extravaganza (2018). The comfort and memory of a cozy seaside inn is hard to beat on any Road Trip.