I have spent a non-negligible amount of time in this forum — and possibly a few others –bellyaching about having to drive a rental car through Italy and a heavily laden van through much of the rest of the civilized world.  Someone listened.  It was Jen.

For this trip, she informed me, she would be the one signing for the car.  She’d be the one taking the wheel when we left San Francisco and headed for the Coastal Redwood wilds of central coastal California.  And so it was; and I ate my crow pie.  Because when one whines enough about driving rental cars, one puts one’s self in the position of being in the passenger seat in the southbound lane of the Pacific Coast Highway only a hair’s breadth from being thrown into free-fall, and then into the Pacific.

This is what happens when one fails to keep one’s mouth shut.

I was, therefore, prepared to take my medicine and suffer through the vertiginous twists of the PCH.  It was me, after all, who did the driving during our last trip to these parts.  The fact that we were going northward last time and were thus in the inside lane, a full car’s length – plus the shoulder – from the precipice, does not need to be mentioned here because I am too noble to do so.

Anyway, since spouses are able to share driving duties under Hertz policy, and since Jen didn’t seem to care either way, I wound up driving the last leg south from Tacos Moreno in Santa Cruz, through Monterey and into white knuckle territory.  I could do this with a good conscience because it was full dark by the time we reached Carmel.  Nobody could see the dizzying heights we encountered not far south from there.  It was just a twisty road, like many we have at home in New Hampshire.  The major diifficulty was that I still knew what was out there and I wanted to go slow, and most people in California have a lower regard for their own lives and/or a higher regard for their own driving abilities.  So whenever I saw lights in my rearview, I sought shelter in one of the many pull-off spots provided for just such a purpose.  We eventually made it where we needed to go.

And when we got there, aside from the pleasant experience of seeing huge mountains spring up around us that we had been totally unaware of the night before, I also felt it was my duty to return to the passenger seat for our sorties off the Big Sur Lodge grounds.  I had blogged myself into this, I could suffer though the shotgun seat from hell for a few days.

Outside lane + puffy fog = comfort

How was I to remember that the much of the road between Julia Pfeiffer State Park and the Big Sur lighthouse is inland and relatively close to sea level?  Was it my fault that on the day we travelled farther south it was extremely foggy, and thus the cliff faces seemed to blend into cottony clouds that I could imagine cushioning our fall should we jump the guardrails?  It was hardly medicine at all.  I mean, there were even guardrails this time.  I don’t think there were any last time.  It was terrifying in 1999.  We all must’ve thought the Y2K thing was going to do us in anyway back then and not worried about our mortality.  Jen is remarkably unscathed by the experience.

Someone’s probably holding the wheel.

It was not until our last day in Big Sur – our last day in California – that we got to experience the PCH in all its breathtaking glory.  Travelling north, with me at the wheel, we had wonderfully clear vistas of the coastline to our left  —  often to our left and very far down —  and the brown and olive mountains to our right.  Once more in the safety of the inside lane, we could enjoy the ride in a manner that would in no way suggest that there is anything I’d rather do than drive my family around in a rental car or any other form of vehicle.

Operator and navigator, and vice-versa.

Until we reached Monterrey and I had to find a place to park the damn thing and why are the signs so vague, and they should give you a gps with rental cars, and what’s with there not being any key anyway, and that guy in the white Hyundai with New Mexico plates, I finally figured out what I should have shouted at you as passed me back in no man’s land: you’re a horrible driver who tailgates and then waves his arms when someone goes onto a  pull-off to let you pass and that makes you a real jerk in my book, pal. Go back to New Mexico and wave your arms around there.

In Central America, we take the bus.

Even before we started getting tips from Russian Hill Andy (who actually gave us a handful of nuggets that maybe we’ll share some day when we come out with the In the Big Picture Box Set), our vacation had some direction.  Of course we are not traveling blindly through the vastness of Northern California  We have all of the guidebooks and Web-site information that we (mostly Jen) have amassed over the past few months.  We have sketches of memories from our epic California 1999 trip, which took us from LA to San Francisco to Sonoma Valley to San Diego and back to LA.  And we have recommendations from friends who have traveled and/or lived in this part of the country.  Today was a day that we relied mostly on this last source of information.

A little beach access before reaching the seal colony.

The ribbon of coastline that stretches south from the San Fran/San Jose metropolitan area is wall papered  with state parks, interspersed with farmland (this area produces ¾ of the nation’s Brussel sprouts and a lot of artichokes as well, we’re told).  We might have bypassed all of it to get to our lodge in Big Sur if it weren’t for our friend Trisha, who pointed out one special park along the way.  She told us that Ano Nuevo was worth the visit, and she was right.

Like many of the other parks we passed, it’s right on the Pacific.  It is a former dairy farm where the cow barn is now the visitors’ center, the horse barn has an interpretive movie, and the farmhouse is home to rangers and base for volunteers.

Lanie is almost as big as a newborn seal.

Hiking trails extend from here through fields and along the beach.  All of this, we agreed, would have been enough to warrant a stop, but the real draw for us and the dozens of people we saw along the paths, were the hundreds of elephant seals basking on the shoreline and throngs of California sea lions staking out nearby Ano Nuevo Island.  It’s about a mile and a half (some of it through deep sand) out to the viewing platforms above the marine mammals, and most of the viewing platforms are populated by docents with binoculars who can show and explain the situation in more detail.

Out at the seal beach.

It seems that a few years after the park was established in the early ‘60s, the seals decided to make it their bi-annual jamboree site.  As many as 10,000 seals congregate here at the peak of mating and molting seasons.  At the time of our visit, juvenile seals occupy the beach, but in a few weeks, the adults will start pouring in and the whole place will be covered in seal.  The ones we saw were between two and six years old and many of them were huge and blubbery.  The adults are amazingly large and unbelievably blubbery.

This seal winked at me.

Even though we won’t get to see the colony in full swing, this was a good time to visit.  In a month, when mating season starts, the park limits the number of people out there and the amount of time you can spend gawking.

Trisha knew all about this, and was nice enough to relay this information.  We owe her a big thanks.

Condor or buzzard? For our purposes we’ll call it a condor.

After roaming around the state park (where we also got to see sea otters, the remains of a shipwreck,  a bird that might have been a California condor, and seals jumping out of the water, either in celebration or to avoid great white shark attacks), we headed south in pursuit of another tip from a friend.  A few years back, our pal Jamie had a transformative experience at a taqueria in Santa Cruz.   Given that Santa Cruz coincided with dinnertime  on this driving leg (and, surprisingly, we had yet to sample Mexican food since getting to California) we hunted down the place.

It was a little out of the way; Santa Cruz turns out to be a bit of a sprawling community and we were well past the center of town before we started hitting the right numbers on Water Street.  It was very inconspicuous — a good sign for a truly transformative taqueria, though if we didn’t have the exact street number we would have definitely driven past it.

It was a beautiful day in Santa Cruz.

And it was good!  None of us seem to have been actually transformed as yet.  Nadia is not likely to roam the greater Boston are looking for a sauce to correspond with Taco Moreno’s.  You won’t see Lanie or Zoe pulling up to gas stations in Revere reputed to sell carne asada with a West Coast savor.  But if Jamie ever does find a taqueria that he feels is on par with Tacos Moreno of Water Street in Santa Cruz, we’d be happy to join him for a burrito from time to time.

This was my third time to Alcatraz, and although I seem to really enjoy it and try to pay attention, every time I take the tour again it seems like new information.  It’s possible that I have just naturally forgotten things in the 15 or so years since Jen and I visited during our Pacific Coast Highway tour.  I would say this is probably the case, but I do suspect that maybe they change up the stories a little.  It used to be that one guy maybe escaped but probably drowned.  Now it’s three guys who got out on to the roof and disappeared and nobody knows where they went.  Also, the Marines stormed the building to quell a riot and dropped grenades through a hole in the roof?  I think they have Marvel writers working on the audio tour narrative.  Next time it will be Iron Man locking Capone back into his cell after Scarface drinks ionically charged bathtub gin and mutates into The Big Boss who can control minions and melt steel with his brain.  (The new cell will be made out of Starktanium alloy.)

Anyway, even if they embellish the story a little now and then, it’s a great tour with gravelly-voiced guards right there in your ears and  former convicts chiming in now and then.  The place is physically remarkable in its gravity, being plunked in the middle of a scenic cornucopia.

Where they have definitely made improvements on Alcatraz is in the plants.  Apparently volunteers have been revitalizing the gardens since my last visit.  Hundreds of the specimens planted by guards’ families and inmates alike had survived neglect since the prison closed in the 60s, and these have been brought back into refinement.  Currently on the island there is an art exhibit by a former political prisoner from China and I think at least part of the idea is that beauty in a prison is supposed to be a jarring contrast.  The rejuvenated landscaping along the walkway up to the prison performed this task at least as successfully as the art exhibit did, the various flowering (even in November!) specimens stood out beautifully against the concrete and rusted metal of the prison and fort installations.

We did not take the gardens tour (I did not think the kids would be up for an hour of hearing about plants), but we saw plenty of beautiful things that seemed even too exotic for California just in the normal course of walking about.  Here are some pictures:

Mist shrouds the island as we approach.

I think the girls liked it, too, but it was hard to tell.  It is a somber place, even with all the flowers, and the girls didn’t have that much to say afterwards.  The weather added to the gravity of it all.  It was foggy enough that you couldn’t see the island from the mainland, or vice versa. It was very different from the first day here, when the visibility was excellent.  One really felt isolated on that island today, whereas yesterday you could see clearly from half the streets in downtown San Francisco.

San Francisco can be and often is broken down into contingent parts based on ethnic groups.  Chinatown.  Japantown.  North Beach, which is like little Italy.  Broadway, which my friend Kevin told me is dedicated to, well, broads.  The Tenderloin is a section of the city which is where the butchers live.  Or maybe the cattle ranches.   Jen won’t take us there ever since she and Charles got chased by unsavory types, probably butchers, a few years ago.

Another way in which I believe the city can be more accurately segmented is by altitude.  Some people who have been here before may be familiar with the bayside attractions.  These are basically at sea level (though our bike ride yesterday required one major hill to get us up into the Presidio), as are several city blocks that seem largely to be devoted to high rise buildings.

Cycling the flat lands near the Bay. (No we didn’t go across the bridge.)

After that the city itself begins to rise.  And rise and rise.  There are several rings of rising. Chinatown is on one side of the city a ring or two off the bottom level.  Several neighborhood names hint at their altitude: Telegraph Hill, Russian Hill.  Our apartment is in Nob Hill.  We are very near the top of the city.

Driving up here from the airport on Wednesday night/Thursday morning, I noted the climb.  You go up a hill, it flattens out a major intersection, then it climbs again.  This, of course, is what made San Francisco prime setting for 70s movies that involved car chases; or perhaps there was a rule that if you set a movie in San Francisco, there had to be a car chase written into the script.  Because who can deny the extreme please of watching an Impala catch air at the top of a hill and bottom out mightily at the next intersection.  And then, repeat the process because like I said this city is ring after ring of upward mobility.

I mean that upward mobility part. In the taxi to our apartment I noticeed of the climb, but it really caught my attention at the very last section of hill, where the grade increased significantly.  It was hard to believe it was even a road anymore and not an elevator shaft.  For this final block, the cars were parked nose-in.  It would have been too much for the emergency brake to withstand, parking parallel to the street on this block.  I didn’t notice it during that first drive, but Jen says that there isn’t just a sidewalk on that part of Taylor Street.  It’s a stairway.

That kind of barrier definitely keeps the riff-raff out.  At least it prevents the riff-raff with lung problems from making it up here, and those are among the worst kind of riff-raff.   To be clear, there are lots of coughing masses down by Fisherman’s Wharf, but up here near the top the living is good. Take a right out of our door and walk uphill half a block..  This will take you to Jones Street.  There doesn’t seem to be anything higher than that.  And it is perfectly clear of riff-raff.

We sit up here in our apartment like Roman emperors looking down from our sanctuary among the seven hills.  I’m not even the first one to make this connection.  Lanie noted today that the terrain reminded her of the Palatine Hills (yes, the utterance of one freakishly well-travelled seen year old).

Happily walking downhill

And while being loftily imperial is a positive for us overall, I can’t say that I mind the riff-raff as much as some people.  This is a city of very interesting people.  Where San Franciscan altitude really makes an impact is in the area of logistics.  Each morning so far we have happily trotted outwards and downwards toward the touristy parts. It’s a breeze covering the mile or two down to the Ferry Terminal or Alcatraz embarkation port.  On day one as we were descending through Chinatown, I was thinking that it wasn’t going to be fun herding the kids back up to Pleasant Street later in the day.

Enter the cable car, often thought to be an outdated form of transportation kept around for nostalgia’s sake.  Truth is, cable cars climb like Zoe’s friend Shannon, which is to say they climb incredibly well.  Without cable cars, San Franciscans would be skinnier than they already are, except their thighs would be bulging.    Other tourists may ride them from one end of the line to the other.  We – are we really tourists if we’re this clever? –  hop off at the highest elevation possible, and I can survive without having to coat my quadriceps with IcyHot to address my sore muscles.  Cable cars are very useful things here, and it’s all because of the hills.  They are a luxury even the Roman Emperors lacked.

Happily riding the cable car uphill.

Today’s cable car actually got stuck on the last steep grade up the far side of Taylor Street (which is not steep enough to require a sidewalk staircase, but it’s pretty steep).  Even trusty cable cars have trouble climbing sometimes.  It may have been that the car was overloaded with people, but probably it was because of the enormous amount of sourdough bread we were carrying (the reason for this is a somewhat long story).  Everyone was asked to get off and walk up to the next corner.  We were close to the top, so we just walked the extra block up to Jones Street, pleased with our quick mastery of San Francisco public transportation.   From Jones Street, everything is downhill, including our apartment. We’ll rest up tonight – and likely eat some bread – then head off tomorrow downhill towards another day of adventure.

Make way for the emperors.