J&S in North America 8

We got the ferry onto Vancouver Island, British Columbia last Friday and passed into our fifth country since leaving the UK: Canada. I wanted to call this blog ‘From BC to BC’ but it’s a bit obscure, plus we’re ending up in Alberta so it wouldn’t have made sense. Alberta is AB so it couldn’t even be ‘From BC to AD’ which would have been a great title.

It’s now Saturday the 26th of Feb. We dropped off the camper van on Friday seventeen days ago. While we were in the hellhole of LA we picked up our penultimate car, a little Kia Soul crossover. The car hire company mixed up the reservation and tried to give me a decked-out muscle car, but I asked to swap it and got something with better fuel economy, more than an inch of ground clearance and with windows you can see scenery from. We left LA on Highway 1, the coast highway, and tried to keep to it all the way up the coast insofar as we could. The nice thing about visiting LA three times is that you get to leave it three times and we both got a huge sense of relief as we started the last section of our journey.

We drove past the Santa Monica mountains, past Santa Barbara and inland (to avoid a US Space Base on the coast) to a weird town called Solvang which masquerades as Danish but comes across as a theme park.

Further north still, our first night of this journey was in Morro Bay. The town is named after the huge rock (morro is Spanish for a nose-like protuberance) on the beach. The next morning we went to the marina and saw sea otters. The otters have no fear of humans and drift around on their backs in groups of 10-15 individuals within metres of the shore. These are a rejuvenated population descended from sea otters in Baja California – the original population was almost completely wiped out by fur traders in the 19th Century. There was also a small museum on fishing and whaling.

Further up the coast we visited a huge colony of elephant seals. There are thousands of them on one long beach. At this time of year they all haul out and live on the beach for weeks during the breeding season. The young (‘weanlings’) stay closest inland, then there’s a layer of females and on the sea edge are the males, who occasionally have violent fights for the right to mate – we saw one draw blood when we were there.

Heading north again and we entered Big Sur, the stretch of highway made famous by Jack Kerouac. It’s a fairly rustic road, a bit like those where the mountain meets the sea in parts of France and Spain. Unfortunately it was closed due to subsidence and mudslides, and might be indefinitely – there was talk of it never again being drivable from one end to the other due to the cost of maintenance. We saw lots of evidence of collapse driving along it as far as we could, but ultimately we had to turn around and drive the long inland route to join the coast again further north.

Our next stop was the town of Monterey, and the adjoining town of Carmel, where Clint Eastwood was mayor in the 1980s. It’s an affluent area with a lot of big houses and golf courses. We did the ’17 Mile Drive’, which is a coastal drive past huge mansions and Monterey cypresses, including the famous one in the picture below. On our way north we visited a butterfly sanctuary and Cannery Row, another famous novel (which Sarah was reading while we were there).

North again and we were heading towards San Francisco. After our experience of Los Angeles, we weren’t planning to spend too long in another big city. We had a couple of places to see but by this time we were both looking forward to making progress northwards and leaving California behind. We’d booked a motel which was part of a chain called Motel 6. These seem to be everywhere in the USA, and are cheap but generally alright. When we arrived at the San Francisco Motel 6, there were four police cars parked outside with eight police officers investigating an incident whereby someone staying at the motel had drawn a gun on someone else there. The motel was opposite a stretch of road full of tents and RVs inhabited by homeless people, and apparently car break-ins are very common. On top of this we were put in a room next to someone with severe mental issues, again apparently drug related, who shouted, screamed and laughed all night. We got no sleep in San Francisco and were very happy to head north over the Golden Gate Bridge (with lots of morning fog and no view) and into coast redwood country.

Next time – the last bit of the USA and the ferry to Vancouver Island.