California Dreaming

Good bye California. You will be missed. I've spent more time in your sweet embrace than almost the every other state combined, but I must leave you now and officially begin my trip home...even though it is going to take a month to get there.

A few milestones today.

1) We broke the 7,000 mile mark for miles driven.

2) We broke the 22,000 mile mark for distance traveled.

3) We drove on yet another type of surface...sand! So far, we've driven on dirt, asphalt, rock, corn, mud, manure, grass, salt and now beach sand!!!

I will upload the video of the beach driving as part of a complete California video compilation post that I am putting together. But I basically popped the car up onto Pismo beach this morning for a little drive.

So I've now driven the entire pacific coast highway from San Francisco to Los Angeles...sort of.

The reason for the "sort of" is two fold.
1) I stopped short of LA and made a beeline for Route 15 to Vegas. I have absolutely no desire to see anything in LA and my two Friends that live there aren't even in town this summer so I crossed the city off my list entirely. I still got sucked into LA traffic for 2 hours though...ugh!

And

2) I ventured off of Highway 1 for a bit after I left Pismo Beach. The highway started cutting inland and I was like "hey, What happened to driving the coast. This is bullshit." So I pointed my car west and just started driving till I hit water...yeah...bad idea. Apparently, Highway 1 cuts inland to go around Vandenberg Air Force Base. This is where NASA cooks up all their cool stuff and is very much hidden away from the rest of civilization. Note: They don't like people driving around the air force base. Within 5 minutes I got pulled over by military police. They asked what I was doing and where I was going...to which I responded, "Yeah, I'm looking for the gift shop...you guys have a gift shop?" I expect the encounter to be front page news on Obama's military briefing tomorrow. "Sir, we don't know who this guy is, but we have intelligence placing him in Zurich and Frankfurt days before our officers picked him up outside Vandenberg."

Along the way getting back to Highway 1 I drove through "flower country" where they grow a bunch of flowers for sale all over the country. The photos don't do it justice at ALL. It was amazing to just see fields an fields of color as far as the eye could see...It also smelled like a Parisian Brothel.

Afterwords, I passed through a few cool little towns that are pretty much inhabited only by the workers of the fields (See Guadalupe).

I made it to Santa Barbara by around 1pm. I walked around the city a bit...it's absolutely lovely. I also hit another Diner's Drive-ins and Dives location, "Mac's Fish and Chips." It was excellent and I'm not even that big of a fan of fish and chips!

I really took my time driving around and making my way down this last leg of the California Coast.

I arrived in Vegas late last night and now I'm just relaxing a bit before I start my next string of mountain climbs. I'll post another update sometime tonight or tomorrow to get some more photos and video out there.

Stay thirsty my friends.