I planned, I researched and I searched the net. Then I went and it was ten times better than I thought it would have. I spent two weeks moving up and down the coastal highway. The sights were to be loved and remembered, the videos to always look at, new details to find with each viewing. I met a man in Jenna who lived in Sacramento who hadn't been to the coast since he was a boy. We were about the same age and I thought of all the places I had been since I began to drive and I thought what could have anchored someone in one spot for so long must have been very absorbing and consuming. The first place on the schedule was St. Helena and that was a hard place to find from Sacramento without any local maps and ended up driving in the wrong direction the first two or three hours and then found the direction and still ended up driving over the mountains on 128 to 29 and that was an experience. The next day I drove over the mountains again, this time to Glen Ellen where Jack London State Park was. That was another headache finding even with detailed driving directions. On the way back I decided to stay on the main highway and found out I should have taken the mountain road back and cut my travel time to a third. After that my next destination was Clearlake. That was the most winding road of the whole trip from Calistoga to Clearlake and probably the biggest elevation change too. I looked at property in Clearlake and all around it. I blew into town late on the first day I was there most of the next and I toured a couple of houses and tracked down several that were in the MLS listings. I was definitely not impressed with the character of the old commence center except for one restaurant that looked like it had something happening.
California dreaming, final chapter
Posted 12-04-2010 at 11:06 PM by Profiler
Decided to go to Santa Rosa that evening and down to San Francisco across the Golden Gate Bridge the next day. After a day in that great place I drove across the Oakland Bay Bridge to the city of Oakland. I drove the length of San Pablo Blvd thru Berkeley which had a certain urban charm and was my favorite in the area. Across the Bay Bridge I marveled the engineering of it. When I got to the other side it was like a clone of where I live. I'm starting to call it Corp. Modern homogeneity and maybe this is the future because I found a lot of it in Manhattan also even with all the effort for preservation of the local culture that corporatism paves over and makes more efficient and profitable. I digress, it's back up the 101 to Santa Rosa which I'm glad I decided to stay a second night and had a great dinner at the Cattlemen’s restaurant. The food and preparation was excellent and the decor was unique and had reinvented the old steak house restaurants. This was another location I wasn't able to find the first try even with badly written driving instructions. The next day it's off to Ft. Bragg. Driving across the mountains again on 12 thru the most intriguing town of the entire trip was Napolitano. That is a place I would like to go back to again for a longer look around. The trip was interrupted for many stops of the beautiful vistas that were a hallmark of the whole trip. I slept in my first hotel room without ac since I was seven or eight and with an open window overnight when I was eighteen. Had an impasse on where to go next and decided to drive back down to Sonoma and take the Compiche-Ukia Rd. and that was a experience all its own. There were stretches where there was barley a road at all, it was so narrow in places and a lot of frost damage to the asphalt. Some guys I was talking to said it was the good road to the coast instead of a alternate I could have taken the day before. I got the impression that there were a lot of gorilla homesteads on that road. Made it to Ukiah in one piece and Ukiah was very urban even though it wasn't a large town. Ate at the Organic Brew House, the ale was good the food didn't do it justice. After a night there I decided to stay another night in Santa Rosa after a side trip to Booneville and then a trip to Point Reyes and North Beach. On the way back I decided to take 12 back to Santa Rosa so I could see that town again, Napolitano: but it was like a completely different place going the other way and I think I may have been on an alternate route. The next day we began working our way around the mountains to Sacramento and saw the Capitol buildings and electric busses and Old Sacramento and its tackiness that was also packed with tourists. I went to a couple of outlet malls along the way to the airport and ended up spending about six hours at the airport after I returned the rental car. Dallas International was designed by robots, it was a sterile conduit for travelers to pass through. The final landing was a roller coaster ride and the humidity hits you like a warm wet blanket settling on you as soon as you leave the terminal and I was already "California dreaming".
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