Road Trip v.2 (Part 5): Big Sur and the California Coast

"Door to Nowhere"

The next morning we set sail for our excessively long drive from San Francisco down to Laguna Niguel, south of L.A., to Kim's house, in order for her to do a luggage swap and for me to do some laundry. There were some stops along the way--some planned, some unplanned. First, we hit up the early morning tour of the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose. The house is a winding, nonsensical labyrinth designed by a crazy old rich dame named Sarah Winchester (wife and widow of the Winchester gun dude) to appease spirits that were telling her to start building a house and never stop building it. She had no idea what she was doing, but she had tons of money. So nobody called her out for continuing to design and build onto an already giant house. Everyone involved was either scared of her, her money, or the spirits. Imagine doors that open to the wall and stairwells that double back on themselves. That's pretty much it. Other than our painfully annoying teenage tour guide who had memorized an even more painfully annoying script, the house was pretty cool to explore and I'm sure it's haunted as all get-out.

We headed down the 101 to Highway 1 along the coast through Big Sur. We passed through Monterey and its lovely industrial farmland before approaching amazing coastal and cliff views. Kim drove this leg of the trip, so I mostly just hung out of the window, taking pictures and screaming "woah" as we turned the bend on each S-curve in the road.

As close as we could get to the
Hearst castle.

At the south end of Highway 1, we approached the Hearst castle, which we hoped to tour. We were running a bit behind schedule, but thought we shouldn't pass up the opportunity to tour the painfully gaudy "castle" of a crazy, ego-maniacal magnate. As a former journalism major, you would think I would approach the dwelling of a newspaper giant with some intellectual awe. Really, I think Hearst was kind of a tool and I just like gawking at big houses. The "castle"--seriously what jerk builds a giant house in California and has the balls to make it sound like a royal palace--was perched on top of a huge hill that you could only approach via a scheduled bus and guided tour. We had no choice in the matter of whether we would take the tour and get further behind schedule. The tours for the day were sold out. Oh well, "next time," I said, which would become a common refrain on the trip. There were a lot of "next times." I have no idea how I'm going to find enough free time (i.e. unemployment) for the number of "next times" I scheduled each time I didn't have the chance to do something interesting. Outside of the visitors center, we refueled ourselves with the cheese we had bought in Oregon that was lasting a shockingly long time...the remaining few pieces of sausage were showing signs of distress.

More Big Sur beauty

Pismo Beach

As we continued south, we approached a sign for sand dunes at Pismo Beach. Being newly self-appointed "#1 Fans of Sand Dunes," we chose to make a quick stop to play on some dunes. I don't know much about Pismo Beach. I believe it is a geriatric-heavy population. Or maybe it just sounds like a place I heard mentioned a lot on Golden Girls. In any event, their sand dunes are lovely.

Enjoying the Santa Barbara harbor

Our night more or less ended with dinner in Santa Barbara at Brophy Brothers on the water. It was dark, so we couldn't take in much of a view, but the lights on the harbor were pleasant. The food was pretty awesome; great clam chowder and fantastic garlic breaded clams. I hate to admit the food was good because of the unpleasant people at the bar downstairs where we had to order to avoid a two hour wait in the main room upstairs. I discovered later that we could have eaten standing on the outdoor balcony at the bar window upstairs. To compensate for my godawful bloody mary, which I had left untouched downstairs, we enjoyed the friendlier upstairs bar area with an after-dinner drink. Then, we trolled up and down State Street, the main street in Santa Barbara. Kim lives in Orange County, so she had already seen much of the day's stops (except Pismo Beach). So to indulge me, she drove the whole day so that I could hang out the window taking pictures (which I also did on State Street) and admire the scenery of Big Sur and the cuteness of Santa Barbara.

While I watched Blade Trinity on her Ipod, Kim drove the remaining few hours to her house in Laguna Niguel. We were up late doing laundry and gathering ourselves after a week and a half of living out of my car. We didn't get quite the rest we probably needed for our big day of adventures in LA the next day...though I suppose that could be said of any night on the trip. So many adventures.

Road Trip v.2 (Part 4): San Francisco

The next morning we woke up early to drive down for a day full of tourist-type activities in San Francisco. We did some Wharf roaming, took an 11am ferry ride to Alcatraz, followed that with a trip to the Walt Disney Museum because I'm a child. It was all capped off with some trinket shopping in Chinatown. We had also planned to pull off to the Golden Gate Bridge parking area on the way into town and walk up on the bridge. We didn't read the signs quickly enough and the tollbooth operator, who simply mumbled directions like someone who hated the world, didn't seem too willing to help. We were too lazy to figure it out, so we just went on our merry way. It was just as well; there was a lot to do in the city.

We wandered around the entirety of the touristy area on the Wharf all the way to Ghirardelli square.  I wasn't too impressed with the Wharf. There was a lot of shopping to be had and overpriced boat excursions. The food at the seafood stands was pretty good and we found some awesome fuzzy animal hats. But that was about it. It was, however, the most perfect day for a ferry ride to Alcatraz: 80 degrees and sunny, which is bizarrely unusual for Fall in San Francisco, I'm told. The weather made for postcard-perfect views of the city from the water and Alcatraz island.

I don't think either of us expected much from Alcatraz. Yet, we both left really impressed with it. The guided audio tour led us through each cell block with narration, on the history, the prison breaks and the big riot. Being in the prison brought back a lot of nostalgic feelings of walking into work every day at the firm bent over at the waist.  I also recently started watching the television show Oz, so I feel like I'm kind of an expert in prison culture now.

Uh-oh, looks like someone found
their Alpha in the prison yard.

After Alcatraz, we made a frantic failed effort to find a cheap afternoon snack, which is unsurprisingly impossible in touristy city when you have a small amount of time. Instead we just made our way to the Walt Disney Museum and ate some Cave Junction sausage in the car. I felt like I had mildly coerced Kim into going to the Disney Museum. We both like cartoons. Yet, admittedly, I'm the one with the bizarre childlike fascination with amusement parks and Disney movies. The museum was actually a hit with the both of us (I think). There were a lot of audio-visual components and running film clips about Walt Disney's life and the growth of animation. The main gallery was a multi-level spiral showroom of exhibits, looped clips, narrations, and some sort of giant floating eyeball-like projection screen. We laughed at the woman who took our tickets and walked us through the map for pointing out where, as she said completely straight-faced, we could "clear our heads and take a breather."  Turns the comment wasn't completely idiotic. The museum was, in fact, a sensory smorgasbord.

We hit up Chinatown afterwards and literally walked for miles through trinket stores that all started to look the same. I intended to buy a few Asian-inspired items, but walked away with nothing, completely annoyed with the unceasing glut of identical stores. We shuffled our sore feet back to the car and headed towards the west end of the city near the ocean where we would be staying with another one of my good college friends, Mikey. Upon our arrival to his house, the three of us walked through the salty-fishy smelling mist to a nearby Chinese food dive, which was delicious and deeply satisfying after a day of beleaguered attempts to find nourishment.

Playtime in the office parks

They all look the same.

All the touristy crap was out of the way, the next day was strictly for city adventures, of which there were plenty. We met up with Mikey and one of his friends near the government square of the city. I'm careful to note the location because San Francisco, and most California cities for that matter, have nicer city halls than many state capitols I've seen (and strangely enough, I've seen a lot). After that we went for a stroll through downtown. On the way to our lunch spot we stopped at a gallery-slash-bar with an awesome space for gallery parties. But we didn't know what to think about the artist on display, who seemed to project a lot of disturbing erotic assault fantasies in his cartoonish drawings. At the very least, we decided we didn't want to meet the guy (or possibly girl). We hit up some Mexican food, played on some office-park sculptures, and then....there was the ice cream.

Best. Ice Cream. Ever.

Originally, I had intended to do the Kitchen Sink Challenge at a San Francisco ice cream shop featured on Man vs. Food. Being an ice cream fiend, that was the only food challenge I've seen where I thought to myself "you know that's not that much food." In reality, I believe it's about eight pints worth of ice cream and toppings. The shop was pretty far from where we were. With such a short time in the city, I didn't want to kill a whole day to stuff myself with ice cream and then wallow in the the misery of said fat-assery. Instead, we had a reasonable helping (three scoops for me, two scoops for everyone else) of the best ice cream I've ever had at Bi-Rite. Not only was the ice cream itself amazing but they combined it with bold topping options like bergamot olive oil. I had some some maple, chocolate, sea salt, caramel, olive oil concoction, which I had mostly destroyed by the time we got to the park to sit and eat.

The rest of the afternoon felt like blurry details: I got stung by some hornet which caused one bicep to swell up like that episode of the Simpsons when Homer gets jacked in just one arm; a fidgety purported glass blower, who I'm fairly certain hasn't blown any glass in his life, tried to sell us his gear; we walked up and down hippie-tastic--now hipster-tastic--Haight Street; and then we took a nap. We woke up woosy, but ready for a delicious dinner that Mikey had cooked for us. We feasted, fell asleep again, and woke up the next morning for a stupid long drive down the California coast all the way to Orange County.

Road Trip v.2 (Part 3): Redwoods and Wine Country

Alarmed at what's going to crawl out
onto me from this massive
Redwood root structure (Best viewed
if you click on thumbnail)

I'm ashamed to admit it. I had never been to California before. It was the only state on the trip that I had never set foot in (airports don't count). Cave Junction, Oregon was only 40 minutes to the border, and when we reached the welcome to California sign, I was exceptionally excited. By the end of our stay in California it blew my mind to think we had started at the tippy top of highway 101 somewhere around exit 600-something for the redwoods, and by the end of the week we were down by San Diego where I believe I took exit 27 to get to the zoo. My first visit to California was total domination of the state. Now I only have six more states to knock off the list (Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Wisconsin, South Carolina, and Alaska).

We almost immediately hit some fairly impressive redwoods on the windy, aptly named Redwood Highway. Being a pair of fools, and only able to research so much when planning a three-week-long road trip, we had no idea where to stop. We sort of figured there was one centralized Redwood Forest park. So we mostly oohed and ahhed at all the redwood from the car, bypassing all the state parks. Finally we got to the national visitor center for the Redwood Forest past Orick. Like a couple of children, we were confused why there had not been any obvious signs that said "Yo! Redwoods this way!" So we asked the kind park ranger, hey, where do we go to pull off and see some sweet redwoods? He assumed we were coming from the south because what idiots would drive down through almost the entirety of the redwoods and stop to ask such a harebrained question. We ended up having to backtrack a few miles to take some customary small-person-in-front-of-a-big-tree pictures. First, we hit up the redwoods north of Orick near a scenic byway. The best stop was the second pull off when we went through part of the Avenue of the Giants south of Eureka. We pulled off at an area called Founders Grove where several of the large trees had actually fallen over. Seeing a giant tree up in the air is impressive. Seeing the same giant tree on the ground stretched out in front of you with its massive root structure exposed as if someone had stuffed a powerful grenade up into its business made us scream in awe like 10-year-old-boys at a Spiderman convention. (Actually, we'd probably scream in awe at that too.) We took several pictures in front of fallen trees, crudely compared the root structures to body orifices, and killed way too much time at Founders Grove. All worth it.

From there we made it down to California's wine country. We were staying in Santa Rosa but had created an ambitious loop of wineries through Napa, Sonoma, and back up to Santa Rosa. Most of the wine stops would happen the next day. Our only plan that night was to hit up the Francis Ford Coppola winery on the way to our hotel, primarily because I'm a sucker for alcohol in hilarious packaging and they have champagne in juice cans with straws. The Apocalypse Now memorabilia was also a plus. Kim's not much of a wine drinker unless it's the type that is full of residual sugar, so I was prepared to carry most of the weight with the winery activities. We both did a tasting at Coppola though, and after the following days wineries, I can say it was in my top two favorite wineries. I didn't expect much, but the staff was incredibly friendly, the prices were reasonable, and they loaded us up with way more wine than we paid for.

That night we had a delicious dinner at an Italian restaurant in Healdsburg called Scopa (which would pale in comparison to the following night's food). We hit up the bar next door afterwards to get some local flavor (assuming local flavor existed). If local flavor is what we saw, it was a lackluster spectacle of really annoying girls with questionably tight shirts--possibly pregnant, possibly fat--all of whom were hogging the shuffle board table.

The next day our fun, pal-erific, good buddy road trip got uncomfortably romantic. I suppose that is to be expected in wine country, one of the most romantic vacation spots in America. First, we had mud baths on tap for the morning at a spa in Calistoga. Instead of booking individual mud baths we got the "couples" package to save money as well as have company. We didn't realize the set-up was awkwardly ideal for loving couples. We had to strategize a lot of averting of the eyes and ignore the soothing, romantic music. Whatever. Thankfully, we had our own tub of mud. We dipped our entire body into the tub and were covered with hot steamy, sulfuric mud for fifteen minutes. The smell wasn't pleasant, but I did enjoy playing with the mud between my fingers. I'm not much for spa treatments as I think they're mostly a gimmick. I gotta say, this really did leave my skin feeling incredibly soft. Afterwards we had some time in a mineral bath. That was followed by as much time in the spa's swimming pool as we wanted, where I had a grand ole time splashing about with a swimming noodle in the shallow end (I can't swim....Yeah. I know).

Lackluster tasting and questionable art

After our uncomfortably romantic spa date, we headed to our first wineries. I wasn't incredibly impressed by a lot of them. Most were not that welcoming and seemed kind of bland, commercial and over-priced. Other than Coppola, I was a fan of the last one we visited near Sonoma called Gundlach Bundschu (for more than its funny name; the wine and the people were really great too). The other one I liked was Domaine Carneros, which was primarily great for it's beautiful setting. It was the sight of our uncomfortably romantic champagne flight, which we shared on their massive patio with an amazing view. We ate lunch at the Basque Boulangerie, which had some awesome pastries and hot sandwiches. We kept it classy: We stuffed our faces in about ten minutes, left Kim in the restaurant fiending on pickles and panini scraps, while I went to the parking lot to groom a hangnail off my finger. Then, we hit up the rest of the wineries. After the wineries, we went back to the hotel to get dressed for our uncomfortably romantic fancy dinner.

Oh hai, deliciously pretty vegetables!

A good friend of mine from VIAC classes, Clark, is a recent graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in California. I had scoped out this restaurant called Solbar for our one fancy delicious meal on the trip. Solbar had recently received a Michelin star and had great reviews. I figured while we were in the center of delicious fine dining we could increase our foodie budget for one night. It turns out that Clark worked at Solbar. Kitchen hookups at delicious restaurants are the best! He made sure to steer us towards the best items and even forced amazing pork belly on us despite our attempts to stay modest with our gluttony. Oh my god, we at like such fatties; I could have been sick. It was all amazing: roasted vegetables that looked too pretty to eat, a hen of the woods mushroom dish (easily my favorite fungus), pork belly, badass duck, and short ribs. Our uncomfortably romantic day ended in the restaurant's lounge, both of us reclining, stuffed to the brim, and me asking Kim for a belly rub. She declined. We waited for Clark to get off work and hit up some Calistoga nightlife with him at one of their local dive bars. Yes! There are dive bars in wine country; I was so happy. It was great catching up with my fellow cheese buddy and eating the hell out of some unforgettable food.

After some good conversation, we had another night nursing distended food bellies, The next morning we would hit up the main big-city-portion of our adventures.

We're just friends!

Calistoga: winner of the contest for
most hilariously frightening mannequins

Road Trip v.2 (Part 2): Oregon, Thanks Yous and Apologies

Alright, so for those of you aching for a new post (all two of you), I'm really really sorry I got so utterly behind in updating my happenings on the trip. Same thing happened last road trip, so I should have anticipated it, especially with the added epic activity schedule of this one. You may have guessed after three weeks, the road trip is over. I will now proceed to try to recall everything that happened and recreate the stops for you.

First things first, I have to really really thank my friends I saw along the way (Ty, Clark, Mikey, Will, Myke, Krista, Troy, and Chris) for doing me a solid with good times, good food, good conversation, and often a place to crash. Kim also did me a huge solid by coming along and being great company on the road (and navigating me with her smart phone). Unfortunately, a family emergency pulled her away from the trip once we got to Phoenix. So until we get to that chapter, this was a team adventure. Road tripping is way better when you have great friends to go with or to meet up with. When I started out, I most looked forward to seeing and hanging out with friends. Now it's a close tie on whether seeing my friends was my favorite part of the trip or playing with a baby leopard (keep reading on that below). Sorry guys, but surely you can share the spot with a cute baby leopard.

We last left our road warrior tale after a Pine State Biscuit fail in Portland. We drove down to Eugene where we stayed the night and nursed our distended food bellies. Not much went down in Eugene after the Portland fun and fat-assery. We drove through their cute downtown in search of a noodle joint...yeah, more food.

The next day we woke up bright and early to head to the Oregon coast en route to Klamath Falls. The first time I'd been to the coast in Oregon it was a rainy, windy disaster. This time it was a great day for carnivorous plants, sea lions, and sand dunes. First stop was carnivorous plants we found on a roadside oddities website. The plants were basically a large patch of bulbous venus fly-trap-like stalks. They were cool to view. But I really wanted see a fly or spider get devoured. There was no plant noming to speak of. Onward to the Sea Lion caves, which we paid ten dollars to enter and see exactly zero sea lions. I take that back. We saw one in the far far distance through my telephoto lens, and thought our entry fee had paid off. Score! Three sea lions swimming in the distance! As we drove down the road to get closer to a nearby lighthouse, we heard odd noises from the waves. What's that cacophonous barking noise? Maybe a couple more sea lions to zoom in on. We pull off onto an overlook and gaze from a cliff at the sandy shore below. Oh great, a sea lion party...there were hundreds, which we could much closer than in the caves and for free. Later as we drove through California we saw another sea lion beach just off the road. I wanted to punch some throats at the Sea Lion Caves operation and get ten dollars and twenty minutes of my trip back.

We kept moving down the coast, and briefly considered stopping for a dune buggy ride on the sand dunes. We thought better of it, knowing we had to make it to the Oregon Vortex in Gold Hill before closing time. Instead, we just stopped at a few dune locations and ran around like five-year-olds. We are sand dunes' biggest fans now. I'd like more sand dunes in my life. We saw a few spots in California too, and I know Colorado and Texas have some. I'm a particular fan of the Oregon dunes because they are so uncharacteristic of the Northwest. Out of the pine trees and forest rises this arid rolling canvas of golden sand. Where the hell did all that sand come from? You're walking through a typical wet tree trail in the Pacific Northwest, and BOOM sand. Everywhere.  It was magical.

Speaking of magical, a few hours later we make it to Gold Hill near Medford, Oregon, just barely in time to make the last tour of the season at the Oregon Vortex. It was meant to be our freaky Halloween activity. We were literally the last people of the season and got our own personal tour (it's open from March until October 31st). I don't really know how to describe what the vortex is. My best summary is this: a location where the earth's magnetic feels do some freaky business to throw off your sense of balance, depth, and height perception. It's been an object of scientific study, but the tour guides couldn't tell us much more than that. I swear to you, it's not a gimmick. They demonstrated the levels of all the planes with standard Home Depot levelers. Still, depending on what side you were standing on, one person would grow in height when you switched. I can be pretty gullible. Still, I don't know how they would create the headache and dizziness you get standing perfectly still and straight on that land.

We left Gold Hill and drove a couple hours over the mountains into Klamath Falls to stay with my college friend Ty. Klamath Falls seemed like a pretty and idyllic town. And for the most part it is. Yet, as we were sitting there watching Psycho with Ty and his friends who all work for the local newspaper, we were regaled with stories of backwoods freaks, roving gangs of small town rapists, and gun-toting jerks who will shoot without warning. It was so very unintentionally Halloween. Those were all largely legends of the past, and the town has become far more normal. The next morning we went with Ty to a delicious and totally non-violent bakery. Then, we headed to Crater Lake. The trails at Crater Lake were covered in a couple feet of snow. Even to get to an overlook spot, we had to trudge through a some serious snow and ice. The lake was incredibly blue, still, and quiet. The perfect whiteness of the snow was only disrupted by a freshly laid turd someone had so kindly left right by the overlook spot. We stayed just long enough to take a couple pictures.

From there we headed to our only cheesy stops for the trip: Rogue Creamery to buy some cheese, and a visit to Pholia Farm, where Gianaclis kindly gave us a tour of her cheesemaking operation. The cheese we purchased here as well as the sausage from Taylor's sausage store in Cave Junction would serve for the best road trip car sandwiches in the history of man.

We drove an hour or so down to Cave Junction where we would be staying the night in a tree house. Really. It was lodge that had built cabins up in the trees so guests could have a very Swiss Family Robison-esque visit to the Northwest. We pledged to never pass up the opportunity to sleep in a tree house on this trip. On the way to the tree house we had planned to stop at the Great Cats World Park to ogle some sweet tigers. When we checked the website on the way we realized that the park was only open seasonally or by appointment. Dejected, we made a last ditch effort to leave them a voicemail and schedule a visit for the next morning. We got very lucky. Someone picked up on the second attempt and told us to head over. Kim squealed with delight on the phone before hanging up. Because we were the only people visiting, we got a very one-on-one visit with the folks who own the place and work there, and with the tigers, lions, panthers and other cats. It was so one-on-one, in fact, that they let us play with their new baby leopard, Dexter. A baby freaking leopard. We played with him, petted him, held him, let him jump on our leg and claw us through our jeans. They let us hang out with Dexter for an amazingly generous amount of time. The guy who runs the place (I wish I could remember his name), had worked with wild cats for 26 years. He was incredibly welcoming, despite initially coming off as a little gruff. I suppose you are instinctively a little distant from humans when your life's work makes you best friends with some of the coolest wild animals on the planet. In comparison, I'm sure humans seem like boring tools. He admitted to being a little crazy. You kind of have to be when you play kissy face with lions and sleep with full grown panthers in your house. That's the kind of crazy I'd like to be if I could choose.

This isn't the exact cabin we stayed in.
But this is one of the higher
tree house cabins. 

Sharing secrets with horses
in Cave Junction.

We finally pried ourselves away from Dexter and headed to Taylor's Sausage, the world's greatest meat store. Seriously. I love Cave Junction. We bought some sausage for dinner; checked into the Tree House;  played with their friendly dog, hung out with their horses in the horse stable; ate a delicious sausage and cheese sandwich; packed into our tree house for bedtime. Oregon rocks.

The next day we would wake up and drive into California.

Road Trip v.2 (Part 1): Portland

It's inevitable that I'm going to be woefully behind on updating my road trip adventures. I'm actually sitting in San Francisco right now, a full week into the trip. I also have a gagillion pictures to go through on my camera to add to the posts, so bear with me.

Doughnut Massacre

The trip started in Portland where I picked up Kim from the airport. Living only an hour from the city and having done several farmers markets there, I was familiar with Portland. But there was still room for lots of new adventures. We did the usual: Voodoo Doughnuts and tramped about in a few brew pubs (including one that was housed in an old school that looked eerily like our old high school inside). We ate at Old Towne Pizza, which is reportedly in a haunted building, and got our Halloween fix. We even classed it up and visited Pittock Mansion and Powell's Bookstore the second day. The best thing of the visit...and perhaps the best thing I ever did...was the walking food tour we did on Saturday. 

The mascot of our trip.
Fatty monster has an owwie
in his belly. We can relate.

I'd seen walking food tours in Seattle and other cities before and was a bit nervous that they would be an embarrassing event, following a flag-bearing tour guide and annoyingly clogging up the sidewalks for locals. It was actually an authentic visit with a small-ish group to a normal Portland neighborhood that I'd visited before. Little did I know how many food gems were hidden there. The stops included a coffee shop, a salt store, a food cart, a coffee brewing store, a brew pub, a bakery, and a taqueria. It was intense. Every time we thought it was our last stop, there was one more. We stuffed our faces and it was glorious. Not a single item was bad, and some were melt-your-face-off amazing. After the food tour had ended, we went and ate more at the Ruby Jewel ice cream shop (home of the best ice cream sandwich ever). Then, we made an attempt to eat more at Pine State Biscuits, but unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately for our bellies), it was closed. Disappointed and relieved, we commenced our trip to Eugene where we would rest up before hitting the Oregon coast.