Day 9: PCH

Erica and I drove the PCH from San Diego to Sonoma County on our honeymoon.  This trip, we went the other way--from way up in the north down to the Bay.  We didn't manage to get in the little blip of about 5 miles north of Crescent City into Oregon, nor the little blip from Bolinas, where we ended the day, to Muir Beach, just north of Frisco (the locals love it when you call it that).  But we've now covered 99% of that magnificent stretch of tarmac, so that's gotta be worth something.

We were worried that today was going to be a bad day for James because it involved so much driving time.  We needn't have.  He was a grand champion sleeper in the car today, possibly because of his amazing genes, possibly because the road was as serpentine as they come, and driving on it felt like rocking to him. (I wanted to write "the road was windy", as in, it winded a lot.  Like a clock that one winds.  Not "windy."  Like a lot of wind blowing around.  Roads don't blow wind, of course, but it's hard to dislodge the homograph "windy" from one's mind when writing "windy" because "windy" is a much more commonly encountered word. You follow me?)

We made it almost two hours before he stirred, all the way from Ft. Bragg to the tiny art colony of Jenner.  We stopped, stretched, and had the best clam chowder I've ever tasted at a little roadside stand run by extremely crunchy hippies.  James loved the view from the back porch of the Russian River meeting the Pacific Ocean:

Cool handmade hat courtesy of Mary Ernesti

The drive south of Jenner was beautiful.  We woke a sleepy James to take a series of pictures, the best one of which is this:

At Sonoma State Beach

But I'm also kind of partial to this one, too:

We cruised into Point Reyes Station around 2:30 and met up with John and Kaity Hunt for some cheese tasting at an artisanal/organic/local/etc. creamery. Incidentally, the town of Pt. Reyes Station sits at the foot of Tamales Bay, a long finger of water that separates the Pt. Reyes Peninsula from Marin County. The Bay itself sits atop a submerged portion of the San Andreas Fault, meaning that the land on the other side of the Bay is one of the very few pieces of our continent that are not part of the North American Techtonic Plate. Is it xenophobic to find that weird?

The mountain in the background is not one of us.

After Pt. Reyes, we headed to the small surfing hamlet of Bolinas, which is famous for not wanting visitors. So much so, in fact, that the New York Times has done no less than two separate travel features on its notorious misanthropy in the last decade, and every guide book mentions how the locals tear down road signs pointing to their town. Bolinas itself was quite packed today with tourists. We walked along its dark sand beach for awhile watching surfers in the frigid waves, and then headed into town for a beer and some fresh calamari.

With the Hunts at cold and windy Bolinas Beach

Kudos to baby James, who has now visited both American oceans before turning five months!

We left John and Kaity in Bolinas and headed to our hotel in pleasant Novato for our trip's last evening. James, who had refused to sleep the whole afternoon, dropped off to dreamland almost immediately after we took off.  Tomorrow it's back home and back to the grind.  But it's not tomorrow yet, so we'll hang on to vacation as long as we can.

Thorn: Nearing the end of vacation.

Rose: The Hunts, PCH views

Bud: The Golden Gate bridge tomorrow--I'm always a sucker.

Car Miles: 190.5

Total Miles: 3141