Welcome to the Californian Freeways ….

On a wet coastal highway, cool wind in our hair.

Left the coast for the redwoods, rising up through the air,

Up ahead in the distance, a shimmering light,

We were both travel weary, so we stopped for the night.

We spent our first night in California in a small cabin nestled amongst the giant redwoods near Crescent Bay, the first town we reached after crossing from Oregon. . It was one of the most beautiful settings for a camp we had discovered and we spent the evening walking among these giants, spellbound by their grandeur.

Welcome to roads of California! Such a lovely place…

… and I was thinking to myself, this could be heaven or this could be hell!

Next morning the rain had eased and we headed south again along the coastal highway. We had a leisurely drive ahead of us, with 2 days to reach Santa Cruz, around 300 miles away. My memory of the Californian roads was of broad, sweeping highways, but I hadn’t traveled Highway 101 before and we soon discovered how perilous it could be. Thick fog blanketed the highway as it wound its way around the coastal cliffs and through the redwood forests. In places the road was a broad four laned speedway, but periodically it would suddenly change abruptly and almost without warning into a narrow twisting two laned byway flanked by towering trees or a precipitous drop into the ocean. The scenery we had been promised was lost to us as threaded our way through the fog which often reduced visibility to less than a few car lengths. The changing road conditions and the persistent fog made this one of the most arduous drives of our journey. Jules drove most of the way as my tremor surfaced when I was anxious and made driving difficult.

After several hours of nail biting driving the road left the coastal forests and fog behind. The highway widened and we emerged onto a broad coastal plain and we stopped and walked on a Californian beach for the first time.

The coastline, as in Oregon, was was fringed by towering cliffs and rock formations. On one incursion inland the road passed through a lightly forested grassland where we encountered a herd of elk.

The worst of the weather and road conditions behind us, we decided to leave highway 101 where it turned inland at a small town called Leggett, and to follow the coast road to Fort Bragg to enjoy the scenery without the fog.

Big mistake!

The road to Fort Bragg was the most treacherous we had encountered, with hairpin bends and precipitous drops for all 40 miles. There were stretches of the road so tortuous that Dodgy was looking up his own exhaust pipe! To add to our woes, patchy coastal fog descended again as we gained altitude, reducing visibility to 10 – 15 metres. The locals in their pick up trucks showed no fear of the the road or conditions and we were soon being either hunted up the road by impatient locals or avoiding head on collisions as they swept out of the mist on hairpin bends. Jules stuck grimly to the task of staying on the road and it was with great relief that we reached the outskirts of Fort Bragg, exhausted after two hours of torture. The road straightened as we continued down the coast to our overnight stop (another cabin) at Manchester.

Next morning we left the coastal road and rejoined highway 101, now a sweeping 6 lane highway, to San Francisco and beyond to Santa Cruz, undaunted by anything the Californian road system could throw at us. As we went further south stands of eucalypts became common. They grow into magnificent trees in California with none of the natural parasites or diseases which stunt their growth in Oz and are spread widely through the landscape. They also fuel the wildfires that ravage California each summer, a terror that we were soon to witness during our stay near Los Angeles.

In Santa Cruz we caught up with old friend, John Carr and his mother Pat,a remarkably fit 79 year old. John is a graduate of the Vet course at Murdoch in the early years of the school. He has just sold a practice he owned in Santa Cruz and has retired to a farm in Bend, Oregon. He hasn’t changed, still witty, relaxed and fond of his memories of Oz.