Checking in to the HI Hostel in Monterey turned out to be a masterstroke.
I was tossing up the ideas of either Greyhound busing it to Los Angeles, or hitchhiking there out of Monterey.
Come breakfast the following morning, my decision was essentially made for me. While taking advantage of the free pancakes and jam and cream, I got talking to a group of four young, early 20’s, lads with very hard to pick accents. They were from Norway. I wish I could remember their names now – I know two of them were typically Scandinavian – Bjorn and Pieter.
Anyway, these lads were on a 3-month road trip around the U.S. and had bought a car on the cheap to do it in. But this wasn’t any ordinary car, this was an old-skool 1978 Lincoln. I’m not a car person, but this car was amazing. It was a typical American car – big, and a helluva gas-guzzler, but man, it was stylin’! It had electric windows, and sunroof, a big ass square-box shaped bonnet with obligatory hood-ornament, cherry-red leather interior, bench seats, and an acre of room inside.
I mean, if you could picture this, my initial impression was that its original 1970’s owner would have been a Stetson hat-wearin’, cigar-chompin’, pot-bellied oil-rich tycoon with big-ass aviator sunglasses, driving his portly wife and two chubby, bratty kids with ice-cream and chocolate smeared lips down to the beach on a blazin’ hot summer’s Sunday. It was a Classic. And these Norwegian boys picked it up for a little more than US$2000!!
A polite enquiry as to whether there was room for one more person to Los Angles, to help split the fuel costs, and I was in. Sweet. This was gonna be fun. Cruisin’ down the Cali coast, mid-summer, in style, with the windows down and cool tunes from the old skool stereo…sure as hell beats the Greyhound!….
Highway 1, as I’ve mentioned is spectacular. It is also very, very curvy, winding around bends, hugging the coastline all the way down to L.A. Just as well we weren’t in a hurry. We re-traced the road I’d taken with Cathy the day before, but with the added bonus of the 17-Mile Drive around Pacific Grove, once again stopping a million times for happy snaps. Bjorn had a camera that was the pretty much the same vintage as the Lincoln, which impressed me beyond belief – I love those old cameras.
Along this stretch of highway sits the hilltop mansion of the infamous media magnate William Randolph Hearst, known as Hearst Castle, upon which the incredible Orson Welles movie epic Citizen Kane was based. Unfortunately, by the time we got there, it was late, late afternoon and was closed. I would have loved to have toured thru that house…it is apparently on such an epic and grand scale as to be beyond belief.
On one of our stops, we checked the map, and quickly came to the conclusion that we had a snowflakes-chance-in-hell on making it to L.A. by nightfall, especially if we stuck to the Highway 1 route. The small university town of San Luis Obispo had been recommended to me by Dan, so we opted to stop in there for the night, checking into the HI hostel.
Another fortuitous turn of events was that we arrived on a Thursday, the night of the famous farmers market street party. Not only that but it was the first week after college reconvened, so the streets were absolutely jammers packed with young students and market stalls and musicians. Great atmosphere on a late summers evening here I gotta tell ya.
Most nights of this trip, I’ve been eating out for dinner, and spending accordingly. Tonight, after seeing the awesome hostel kitchen, I decided to cook, and treat the lads to some of my culinary skills. Spaghetti Bolognese was the universal choice, and my personal fave of my own cooking. Damn I can do helluva job on that meal!!
Next day we pushed off early, with our first planned stop being the plush Santa Barbara. The town that’s famous for its soap opera setting and rich, Mediterranean styled houses decked out with red-tiled roofs and gleaming white stucco, nestled on the Pacific Ocean with tall, elegant palm trees lining the boulevards being cruised along by pretty young things in BMW’s paid for by Daddy, and just dripping, literally dripping with money.
A couple of hours was all I spent here. It’s funny, but I feel really uncomfortable being surrounded by such opulence. It’s as if I feel like I don’t deserve to be here or something – not necessarily that I don’t belong, but that I don’t deserve to be here. I feel much more at ease slumming it in 3rd world countries, or at least places where the wealth is not so blatant and obvious. It’s like there is some injustice being committed with me being here when so many others could never dream of seeing a place like this. San Francisco for example, I felt totally comfortable in, because that place has some character and soul, and I caught elements of realism there, that real people with real struggles lived there. Santa Barbara just seemed like a place where everyone had million-dollar bank accounts.
The Norwegian lads had decided that they’d camp here for the night, while I wanted to push on to Los Angeles where my mate Mark was living. Now there’s an irony for you, given the rant I just gave in the last paragraph, that I was headed for L.A., the land of Hollywood, a place where realism has been suspended for the better part of 100 years.
My journey in getting to Los Angeles was a bit of a fantasy ride in itself, and I guess is quite fitting. More on that next entry.
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