Day 11 - Destination: Sacramento, CA

Santa Barbara was still having decidedly "unseasonal" weather when we left the next morning as the town opened again. Susi talked to her Mom (yeah she did) in the other Santa Barbara Starbucks and then we walked down to Java Jones (cool atmosphere, free wireless, good pasteries and decent coffee -- we'd go again!) to try to post a bit. Ha. Ha-ha.

Back on the road, the foggy stuff kept us chilly, but also kept us from seeing the ocean for a good part of our drive. We kept our eyes mostly on the inland side, catching cool glimpses as the clouds cleared of wineries, wildfloweres and hillsides. I noticed that the best views were often the times when you most needed to keep your eyes on the road ahead of you. The road began doing the S-curve thing, and on the > part, right at the base of the curve, you were generally looking directly up a valley.















We listened to our California mix (thank you Stephen!) again, "driving down the 101 - California here we come!" and had a great time - unaware of what was to come. (Is the foreshadowing too heavy?)

One of the highlights of the day was noticing a little road sign on the main highway, for the town of Harmony. When we'd been planning the trip, we'd looked for towns near the midpoint of the drive to Sacramento, and picked this one as "sounding cute and fun". When we looked it up online, there were no motels, which makes a lot more sense, now that there's a road sign telling us 18 people live here! We got off the main road and found that the town of Harmony is a post office, an art glass shop, a pottery shop, a few abandoned buildings and a few houses. The glass shop was closed, but we mailed some postcards, bought some stamps (the post office had an impassioned plea to kind-hearted tourists to help keep it alive), read the town's history, did some shopping and oohing and aahing at the pottery store, and offered our souls as sacrifices to the gods of marriage. Wait. Did I write that last part? Oops. It was a fun little town and it would have been nice to stay there. The call at the post office (who also worked up the road in another town) said maybe next time we come through, there will be more here. No pictures of cool pottery, because I don't want to spoil the surprise of any presents. ;)

Then the drive started to get fun. This is what we were thinking about when we talked about about driving up the coast. The road winds, the sun shines, the music plays loud and the ocean sparkles all around us. We pulled into a couple of the "towns" (barely bigger than Harmony!) in search of gas and seeing that it was a one-pump station, full service only, with a price tag of $4.45 a gallon, decided to pass and keep driving. As we're getting close to desperate enough to stop, we see maybe the best view of the whole trip - and there's a restaurant right there.

As we come down the driveway and see people taking pictures from the rocks, I start to think I'm hungry. We figure, if it's too expensive, we just get drinks and take our pictures. Well, I wouldn't recommend Rocky Point restaurant for dinner for a budget-conscious friend, but it worked out great for us to get some cheesy bread (just thinking about it makes me hungry) and sandwiches and enjoy the patio. It was crazy windy, a little chilly and a much-needed break.













As we left, we found out that the next town up the road had real gas stations and grocery stores and stuff, which was a big relief. When we stopped there, we talked with a guy who travels a lot, who told us about a road closure up ahead, and told us we still had at least three hours to Sacramento. Since it was 6 already, and we weren't planning on taking the freeway type roads, it was looking like our destination wouldn't work out. Susi called our planned host, and we developed a new plan - San Fran! The pressure was off, we'd find a motel somewhere, we were free to keep driving as long as we liked and stop whenever we wanted. Which is how we found a beach above Monterrey to watch the sunset from. The beach to me has always meant miles and miles of sand - I'm not sure I like the rocky cliffs thing. I mean, pretty, yes, but also pretty inhospitable! Most of the time you can pick and scramble your way up or down, but if you forget sunscreen in the car... Well, this beach was a great mixture: bigger rocks of the southern edge, and a nice little sandy cove to the north, with small pebbles that caught the light and the waves beautifully, and made clacking percussion noises as the waves moved them back and forth.










As we loaded these pictures into the computer, each one made us think it needed to be a desktop image. Please. Click them, make them bigger. They like it. They want to be viewed! They're a small sampling of a large family, back on Sara's harddrive.

Back on the road, the detour because of the mudslide was well-marked and publicized, and not as worrisome and warning as it should have been (dum dum dum) and we rolled into San Fran around 9:30. I'm sure it would have been a fun city, but we just stopped a Starbucks in Chinatown and headed north again, excited for the Golden Bridge and all that lay beyond. We had coffee, we had a full tank of gas, we weren't hungry, didn't have to pee and foresaw a fun night drive. We were wrong. But that's another story, and I'll let Susi tell it another day!