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!

Day 10 - Destination: Santa Barbara, CA

once again, we were hittin' the road. i got up early, hoping to meet megan, who works as a nurse and keeps nurse hours (as in, she goes to work at 9pm and gets home at 7:30am, thereafter promptly going to bed. i don't know how nurses do it). i changed up the back window while i waited eagerly to catch her on her way in. and i was successful. :) we had a great chat (turns out, she, too, is a laura ingalls wilder fan) and then sara and i said goodbye to our little apartment. just want to say, i loved the decor:

we locked up, left our little hostess gifts for ted & megan and rich & melissa, and restuffed our little bug. here again, we were headed into uncharted territory for me as well as sara. i was excited for the drive ahead, and still giddy from our adventure into mexico.
obviously, we had to stop at the local starbucks (where we'd already spent a good deal of time during our stay). for once, i was more alert than sara, i think just from getting up earlier. we hung out in the shade for a little bit before getting on the road. i wanted sara to have a little time to get some caffeine in her system so she wouldn't miss anything.

about an hour into our drive, we got onto "the 1", the pacific coast highway, with visions of grandeur and oceanside driving filling our heads. it really was a beautiful drive. entering california from the west, like we had on day 8, you wonder at all those people back in the 1840's who thought of california as a new eden. everything was brown, dried up, and hot. unbearably hot. the desert seemed to stretch on forever--not a sahara type desert, with miles and miles of sand dunes and camels--but a dry, dusty, barren, mountainous desert, with brittle, vaguely green shrubs dotting sandy dirt. but somehow, you come out on the other side, to the coast, and life and beauty spring forth. southern california is still very dry and has plenty of brown. but all through it brilliant colors and unique foliage are woven through. it overflows with wild oleander in brilliant pinks, virgin whites, orange touched reds. palm trees and strange green shrub-like trees that shoot up straight, tall, and narrow interrupt the brown hillsides. beautiful. and the coast itself is even greener and abounding in flowers and trees and the ocean--deep blue--so different from the atlantic. you begin to understand californians better, just by being here and seeing what they see. at the same time, you can't help wonder: "do they still see the lovely corner of the world in which they live?" as i absorbed the culture around me, i couldn't help thinking that the atmosphere and weather, the landscape, even people's clothes, felt like carefree saturdays.








we weren't exactly sure what our plans were for the drive. we planned to take our time and if we saw somewhere we felt like stopping, we would. the first place that caught our attention long enough to make us stop was newport beach, where christy miller first experienced california. you know, christy miller, who moved with her family from wisconsin to escondido after visiting her aunt and uncle who lived in newport beach. of course we had to stop! we followed the signs for the actual beach and, lucky for us,
found parking (free) in a residential area near a public entrance to the beach. excited at touching and tasting the pacific for the first time in our very long lives (i mean, 25 is OLD), we slipped out of our sandals and walked down the sand to the shore. there were a lot of people on the beach, which, at least to me, was a little new, since i'm so used to the beaches of the outer banks. it looked like you imagine beaches are supposed to look when you're a kid. brightly striped beach umbrellas filling up the sandscape, kids running and screaming and splashing, dads lifting their little ones over waves at the very last minute, scantily clad teen girls self-consciously lying in the warmth and tanning powers of the sun...then we saw the jetty. the one where christy's friend shawn died when he decided to surf off of it while high on something. i made sara pose, although she was pretending she didn't really know who shawn and christy were. we all know better.

wading in the water wet our appetite for some real ocean swimming, but we were holding out for santa barbara. so we continued on the road. we'd been advised to get off the 1 through L.A., but disregarded this well-given advice. it wasn't awful or anything. it just was in no way a feast for the eyes. it was more of a fast for the eyes. or an offense to the eyes. run down outskirts, factory smokestacks looming in the skyline. and lots of lights. it did allow us to hit up a starbucks and nab an L.A. bearista bear. since i was driving through stop and go traffic, it was very impractical and often impossible for me to feed myself anything. so when i got hungry, sara kindly fed me large stacks of salt and pepper kettle chips. mmmmmm. yummy. we arrived at our motel around 4ish and found that we were both exhausted. without even unpacking our stuff for the night, we crashed in our respective beds and quickly drifted off to sleep. i woke up around 8. it didn't look that late outside, so i was a bit surprised we'd slept so long. i decided i'd make a pot of presspot coffee and bring in our stuff from the car before i woke sara up. i had to go across the parking lot to the motel lobby for hot water, and there i had a nice little chat about good coffee and tea with the chick at the front desk.

finally, it came time to waking up sleeping beauty, or we'd never get to downtown santa barbara for dinner. it took grumpypants a good while to manage coherent sentences, even after coffee on the front steps. naturally, i wanted to take some pictures to commemorate our evening and motel. grumpypants proved to be rather unruly and difficult, which never produces flattering pictures, but this one is the most flattering of the three i managed to take before grumpypants threw the camera in the toilet. haha. just kidding. but close. she threatened to throw it out the window, but i deftly maneuvered and muscled for rank, fuel running fast on an empty tank. finally, we pulled ourselves together and headed to state street, deciding we'd walk up and down the street until we found a nice little restaurant with character that tickled our fancy. well, when we actually started walking around it was about 9:30pm. on a monday night. the later it got, the more we realized that if we didn't just pick something soon, there'd be nowhere to pick, apart from some clubs and bars, serving alcohol and loud beats that reverberated half a block down the street. we picked a cute little italian place that looked promising. however, when we asked if they were still serving the response was a disappointing "no." this kind of became the theme of the evening, as our poor stomachs began arguing vehemently with us for real sustenance of some kind. we did come across some cool parts of the town on our search, though:




on our way back down the street towards the water, still searching for a wholesome meal, we made a quick stop at one of the two starbucks, figuring we nab the other one in the morning on our way out of town. we decided any purchase counts, and i didn't have to attempt further consumption of coffee (of which i had already consumed massive quantities), settling for a nice bottle of san pelle. and sara inspected the bathroom. it was fine. from what she told me.





finally, we found the santa barbara brewing company, which had the most important thing to us at this point: an open kitchen. we realized this might be our last opportunity to eat before the morning, so we got ourselves seated and were pleasantly surprised by a nice menu that wasn't horribly expensive. we both gleefully ordered fresh tuna: sara in wrap form, i in steak shape. i also got their raspberry cider which was as delicious as the wholesome food we'd been craving. i'm sure the waitress thought we were a bit loopy, because more than once we told her how much we loved them for having their kitchen open and having food. after that, we headed back to our room for some R&R. i really liked santa barbara. it's a very pretty, rich town. you get the feeling the worst crime they have is rambunctious and spoiled highschool kids, who are so bored they have to make something happen. but it also reminded me of a west coast georgetown. very cool. we spotted a java jones coffeehouse in our wanderings, and decided to stop there for some blog updating before we headed out of town on the morrow. as far as our ocean swimming, the area was having very strange, misty, COOL weather. no sunshine and warmth, not even when we arrived. i know at least i thought we might fit that in the next day. oh, how wrong i was...

--susi&sara

Detour: Vamos a Mexico!

Well, from a safety and security standpoint, this was probably the most worrisome day of our trip. Yet, at the the same time, for me in particular, but also Susi, it was the most monumental and eye-opening. For all the time I spent in Western New York and the Northwoods of Wisconsin during college, (even the UP of Michigan for goodness sakes!) I had yet to travel outside of the country. We did all our research (you don't need a passport until 2008) and talked to all sorts of people about where to go, what to do, what to expect, and yet still felt unprepared.

But first, a sad story.
We had been recommended the Sovereign Grace Church in San Diego, and had checked their website to get the service time (although I hardly needed to ask - after all, it IS a SG church!) and directions and stuff, and had managed to get ourselves ready to go and stop by Starbucks and were still almost on time. Well, we pulled into the parking lot of the school that the church meets in, and there were lots of people, but they were all following signs for this suspiciously California-sounding other church. We walked up to the location the SG church meets in, and were commenting on how strange it was that no one was outside - I mean, we weren't really late at all! So it turns out that church was cancelled that morning, because the entire congregation was attending some event called "Together '06". Sadness. Susi called her brother to check if he could give us the location of his church, and when he didn't pick up, she called the people who let us into the place we were staying, but since they didn't pick up either, we figured church had already begun. We eschewed the California-sounding church, and went and had our own church at Starbucks. OK, not actually church. Just quiet times, but it was good to sit in God's presence again.

After caffienating fully, we were reading for our Mexican Adventure. Back down the road, to "the 5" (don't you dare call it just "5" or worse yet, "I-5" in California!) southbound towards Tijuana. We stopped at one of the last US exits for "$20 piece of mind" as my friend Josh called it, Mexican car insurance for the day, and then proceeded across the border. Apparently, Mexico has none of the concerns of the US and Canada (that story later!) about who it lets in. We just drove across, no stops, no questions, no inspections. We noticed that there was a considerable line on the opposite side, but figured we'd find out all about that later in the day. I haltingly used my high school Spanish to translate the road signs for Susi ("no something on the left") and was grateful for the dual speedometer readings that allowed me to drive the correct speed in kilometers per hour. (Hooray for the metric system!) We paid our tolls ("cuotas") on the highway down the coast easily - that portion of Mexico takes US dollars and pesos with equal ease, as long as you don't try to mix the two! This was our first viewing of the Pacific this trip, and it was fun to see the bright colors and smell the aromas and hear the noises of the towns we drove through. Despite Catholicism being alive and well, we saw "Jesus on the hillside" instead of Butte, Montana's "Mary on the Mountain". And made it to the Puerto Nuevo (New Port) exit. We had a little map from the insurance company, but Mexican roads are a little different from those in the US, namely that paving is rare and any indication of the road name (in any language) rarer still. So we fussed and fuddled our way down some bumpy dirt roads until we found what looked like a downtown area. As I was becoming nervous about parking, a man waved us into a spot on the street. There were no signs about meters or anything, but a man from across the street shouted to us to park over by him because his spot was free, whereas the nice man giving us a parking spot was going to charge us $5 or some such absurdity. I asked (in halting Spanish) if it cost - expect I couldn't think of the word for parking, so I just asked if it cost. He responded in English (What, two blond girls? Were we that obviously out of place?) that it was free, and he'd tell us why - he wanted us to eat at the restaurant we'd parked right in front of, and said something about margaritas and tequila. Ha. Well, we didn't have a better plan, so why not? I could see the car from our table, and most of the time we were eating, this same gentleman was sitting in a plastic lawn chair, so I wasn't too worried about anything (uncovered by the Mexican insurance policy) happening to the car. We ordered margaritas (yum!) and I got all brave and had lobster (which I don't remember ever having before, at least not where I got to pick mine before it was cooked! We started with some delicious tortilla soup and chips and salsa. Really good chips and salsa. Then my lobster arrived with Susi's carne asada and I sheepishly looked over at her and asked, "How do I eat this?" The tail meat has a great fishy flavor that's good on it's own, but even better when it's dipped in melted butter. I'd gotten the pequeno one, so I didn't even worry about the rest of it. Susi's meat was a little tough (susi: "a LITTLE?? i couldn't even cut it with a serrated steak knife!!"), but when our waitress noticed her struggling with it, she brought a new one and little baby margaritas (how cute!) and then we figured out how to ask for the bathrooms and the check (Visa... it's everywhere you want to be!) and thus ended our Mexican lunch.

As we approached our car, I was trying to figure out how to ask our parking attendant if we could leave the car parked there and walk around the town, but, of course could remember neither the word for parking (estacionamento) nor that for leave (devolver, I believe). Thankfully, he anticipated the question and asked if we wanted to walk around for a bit. Puerto Nuevo is basically a glorified city block. There're the four streets around the square, and one more, closer to the highway, but in that tiny space are packed easily 20 restaurants - all advertising lobster and margaritas. At this point, we started to see what purpose our parking attendant played for his place of employment. He essentially guards the limited street parking for use by customers of his restaurant. Nearly every place in town had a similar employee - all of whom were tasked with getting customers into the restaurant. Half a dozen of them shouted to us about their specials as we walked down the streets, and when we responded that we had already eaten, they would say, "Next time, then!" So we have our restaurant choices picked for the next 6 or 8 trips to Mexico! I really liked Benny's restaurant though! "Pretty ladies, come eat here!" comments aside. We stopped in a few stores to pick up trinkets for ourselves and friends - cool spotted shot glasses, a new ring for Susi and a silver bracelet for me (we haggled and got a pretty good deal!) We stopped for street mango, served sliced in a plastic cup with salt, lime juice and chili powder -- possibly the best fruit I've ever had! -- and fresh churros (so different from Price Club!) then headed back north towards the border.

When we got back to our car, our "guardian angel" (as we'd taken to calling him by now) was still sitting in his plastic chair, and we tipped him and asked if he would pose for a picture with us in front of our car. He got one of his buddies from a competing restaurant to snap the picture and then stopped traffic for us(!) so that I could back out and head back to the highway.

As we got closer, the traffic got denser, and with it, the number of people in the roadway. It started harmlessly enough, with churros vendors and a family selling bottled water. We moved farther into the backup and found Mexican newspapers, and people tying to wash our car for us. I was grateful for the exceptionally dirty state of our car, as it deterred most of them from even trying. We watched one guy wash a window of an SUV unasked, then, when the occupants refused to tip him, he squirted their window with his water bottle and stormed away. We rolled up our windows, tried not to make eye contact and shook our heads "no" when that failed. As we turned from the beach road onto the main highway they multiplied. There were no lane markings, but is was easy enough to tell where the lanes where from the pushcarts and people walking between. "Unreal" is a pretty good descriptor. The junk they were hawking intensified, from moderately useful (bottled water, gum, fruit ice) to inane (Mexican ponchos decorated with the insignia of US football teams, large tacky paintings, piggy banks or statues of every imaginable cartoon or TV character). We kept trying to snap pictures without seeming like we were trying to buy anything. Part of me knows it's calculating to capitalize on the pity of American tourists, but another part of me found it so eminately pitiable and heartbreaking. Watching families try to earn their daily bread, dads and sons selling whatever trinkets they've obtained, moms sitting on the barricade at the side of the road, nursing the youngest and overseeing the family operation, dirty-faced daughters looking into passing cars, holding their perpetually empty (and worn) paper coffee cups out to drivers and passengers alike and doing better impersonations of puppydog eyes than any child I've ever babysat, younger sons juggling fruit (for sale or for cash) that occassionally hits a windshield, or drops and rolls underneath a stopped car. It's sad, and it begs for something. Something I don't have in me. How do you hold out the love of Jesus in an hour-long line of cars to someone who doesn't speak your language and is only interested in your money? How do you have compassion when something inside you keeps saying, "They've made a choice to live this way. It's a calculated charade, an act designed to elicit the response you're so close to giving in to." Our windows stayed up. We drank the water we had brought with us and stifled our "desire" for a Spiderman piggy bank or a hammock for one.

The window went down again when we reached the border station, answered the questions asked of us (nope, no weapons of mass destruction in this little car!) and crossed back onto US soil. Susi got an A+ in Border Crossing 101 (according the agent at the head of our long line of cars) and I got a C- for relying on the license/birth certificate combo, but we both passed, and they let us back in. Of course, I missed the signs for "the 5" and instead tried to exit through the "secondary inspection" station, so a somewhat less cordial border agent "asked" us to back up and go either left or right. (Yes, we saw the sign that said secondary inspections, but we didn't see any other signs, so figured we had to drive through there to get to the actual exit!) Stopped at McD's for a restroom, called the folks to say, "We went to Mexico and we're back safely," and made it back to our place in Escondido. Ted (downstairs) had heard from Megan that we were going to Mexico and she asked him to check and make sure we came back!

What a detour! What a day!

love, -sara&susi