Day 30: Go Big AND Go Home: Los Angeles, CA to Woodside, CA

Outline: Los Angeles, CA to Woodside, CA (via Pacific Coast Highway)

An epic roadtrip deserves an equally epic ending, so I decided to skip all three of the routes suggested by Google to get from LA to the Bay: I-5 (Central Valley), CA-99 (even more Central Valley), and US-101 (coast mountains). Instead, I opted to drive along the coast on CA-1 (with small stretches inland where the road wouldn't allow ocean views). It's a much longer and slower path, but definitely much more scenic.

After getting gas and a couple breakfast sandwiches for the road, I started out by taking 10-W until it hit 1, going north into Malibu. This section of road had a few cars on it, but also some nice views of the coastline - and you're really right on top of the ocean on this highway:

(This isn't even really the best picture, it was just the first one I found. The big black thing in the bottom right is my windshield wiper.)

The view was nice, but the weather wasn't stellar for most of the morning drive along the coast - it stayed mostly overcast and occasionally foggy. When I made my way along one of the inland segments, though, near Lompoc and Vandenberg AFB, the weather cleared up, giving me a great view of the rolling coastal hills:

(It's kinda like the last one, except instead of ocean to the left, there's more hill)

I stopped for gas and lunch in Cayucos, just past Morro Bay, and ate at Duckie's Chowder House:

 

The combination plate of fried seafood and fries (paired with an icy lemonade) was pretty good. The fried fish was the standout here; and on the opposite end, I'm pretty sure oysters just aren't my thing. Couldn't argue with the setting in which to eat, though:

(The day was even nicer than this lame phone-camera picture indicates).

After Cayucos, I made a straight course up CA-1 towards the Bay Area. The segment north of San Simeon is one that I had driven before (though not in my car - which is why I had to do it again), and it turns out that it's definitely the more-fun half. Where the drive on 1 in the south tends to be a bit faster and less windy, the drive north of Hearst Castle is slow and full of twists and turns. This does, of course, pose some hazards - and I don't mean spinning out or driving off a cliff. No, I mean the hazard of beginning to enjoy your drive, and then getting caught behind...

The world's biggest, slowest, yellowest van. That just won't get out of your way. This van did eventually move out, but the scenario repeated itself a few more times until, somewhere around Big Sur, I found myself trapped in a long line of cars all stuck behind a couple slowpokes. The line was long enough that getting to pass the occasional car did nothing, so I sat back and enjoyed the scenery, until it got dark. At that point, the drive just turned frustrating, and given 8:30pm dinner reservations, in Santa Cruz I abandoned my original plan (CA-1 to CA-92 to I-280), and just took 17 to 85 north to 280 to get back:

Made it home, ending the trip and concluding 3 weeks of driving, at around 7:30pm on October 11, 2009, for a grand total of 6,109.2 miles from leaving Canton.

Day 29: Los Angeles, CA

Outline: Disneyland!

I was supposed to drive across town to the east side to meet up with Michael, AD, and Jimmy at the latter's apartment in the morning. Jimmy was on call at the hospital, but expected to be out after not too long. Got there around 9:30...and waited past 10. Eventually we realized that I could probably make room for 3 people in the RX-8, so after some creative shuffling of stuff in the car, three of us departed for Disneyland, leaving Jimmy to come later once he got off work.

Once there...well, we waited in line, rode rides, and ate food. So this post will mostly just be pictures.

We were only a little bit late. Some people may have arrived before us.

Jimmy was being ultra-classy with Mr. Potato Head. Mr. Potato Head moved his head just a bit to the right between when I pressed the shutter and when the picture was taken...

I feel like this poster is much more amusing in British/Australian English.

FOR YOUR SAFETY: DO NOT GHOSTRIDE THE MALIBOOMER

 

When it's night, and everyone's tired, but no one wants to commit to taking off, what better to do than sit around and chat on Main Street?

Michael wanted a picture with California.

The Bellarmine crew.

Tomorrow: Los Angeles, CA to Woodside, CA

Day 28: San Diego, CA to Los Angeles, CA

Outline: San Diego, CA to Los Angeles, CA

Last night was an impromptu ex-HKNer meetup for dinner at Rock Bottom near UCSD, after which a few of us watched Zombieland. Verdict: best video-game movie ever made. Since I had only a short, 130mi drive today, I took it easy, getting up late, and getting lunch before heading up to LA. Alex and I got carne asada burritos at El Cotixan:

 

Alex is unsure how to deal with his log of steak and guac.

The burritos were basically carne asada tacos, writ large. Needless to say, they were awesome. After lunch (and another quick soda to fight off the intense food coma, I hit the road for LA around 230. Surprisingly, traffic wasn't horrifying - I neatly split the Google predictions and took about 3 hours to get there. The 40ish mph average had a high variance, though - traffic would come to a standstill at freeway interchanges, and then zoom up to 90 immediately afterwards. Ah, LA.

After getting to LA, I unloaded my stuff at Shiru's place and sat around for a bit. We then went out and promptly sat in traffic on 405 trying to get to USC, where we and my brother Omar couldn't figure out a place to meet. Eventually he found us, and we headed over to Caioti Pizza Cafe in Studio City. The appetizer garlic bread was awesome, and the pizzas were solid. Shiru's buffalo pizza (made with bison) was probably the best of the bunch. We dropped Omar back at school and headed home, but I don't remember much of this because I was solidly asleep in the passenger seat. Too much pizza...

Tomorrow: Disneyland!

Day 27: Tucson, AZ to San Diego, CA

Outline: Tucson, AZ to San Diego, CA (via Saguaro National Park, Pacific Ocean)

The original plan for today was to head out from Tucson across the desert on I-8, stop off in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park in California for an hour or two, and continue on to San Diego. A look at the map showed that that wasn't really reasonable, because...well...San Diego is further from Tucson than I realized; Anza-Borrego would have to go. I found a good substitute, though: Saguaro National Park is located in Tucson.

Surprisingly enough, Saguaro National Park promises saguaro cacti...and it delivers. It's actually split into two parts, one on the west side of Tucson (the Tucson Mountain district) and one on the east (the Rincon Mountain district); I went to the latter. With the hour or so at my disposal, I went on the Cactus Forest loop drive, and walked a mile or so on a trail in that drive. There were plenty of cacti to see on the road itself (and some great mountain vistas) and even more interesting ones just off the road:

Three major types of cactus: saguaro (tall, background center), cholla (short and branchy, foreground left/center), and prickly pear (middle, center-right).

 

I think this one is a big barrel cactus, but I'm not sure. Notice the very dense population of spines.

Close-up of the spines on the barrel cactus. Those hooked spines do not mess around - they're really hard, and pretty sharp at the points, too.

Saguaro cacti begin life growing under "nurse" trees. You can see a few young saguaro under this one.

As you get a bit further along the road, it passes right by the mountains bordering Tucson, and a valley full of saguaro (which is a bit strange to see, but really cool):

I finished up the drive and headed out, but had to take one last picture along the road, of the most strangely-shaped saguaro I've ever seen:

 

 

After the park, I headed out on I-10 to I-8 west. This road is flat, straight, and goes through quite a lot of nothing - all empty desert. Some of that empty desert is protected parkland, which means you get to see some more cacti along the way. One interesting thing is that this stretch of 8 through Arizona is the only interstate I've seen yet that actually allows bicycles (though only on the shoulders), likely because there really aren't any other roads through this area.

Once you cross over into California, the scenery changes somewhat; it's still pretty desert-y until you hit the agricultural regions of the Imperial Valley, and then turns to mountains as you cross over into the San Diego valley. These mountains are one of the more spectacular drives I've done - as you approach from the east, it looks like you're driving over piles of GIANT pebbles, like a titan's quarry.

As I crossed into San Diego, I ignored the directions of my GPS, and decided there was one thing I had to do before heading to UCSD to meet with my friends. I just kept going west on 8 until it ended (meaning that today, I drove the entire length of I-8). Then I drove a bit further, until I saw this:

An ocean where the sun sets, not rises. That feels like home.

Tomorrow: San Diego, CA to Los Angeles, CA

Day 26: Roswell, NM to Tucson, AZ

Outline: Roswell, NM to Tucson, AZ (via White Sands National Monument)

The long driving days through the Southwest are really cutting into my sightseeing time, but such is life. Today there were two sightseeing stops along the 480+ mile drive from Roswell to Tucson - the UFO Museum in Roswell, and White Sands National Monument near Alamogordo.

The UFO Museum is located in downtown Roswell, and takes credit (on its early-90s-style website) for sparking the tourist and alien boom in the town. Signs of Roswell's image are pretty clear just by checking out the signs in the area:

 

(Notice, particularly, the alien eyes on the streetlights)

The museum itself is rather small and focuses on the "Roswell Incident" - the purported crash-landing of a flying saucer in Roswell in 1947, and subsequent government cover-up. Most of the exhibits consist of newspaper clippings, printed interviews (conducted by the museum), photographs, and reproductions (of unknown veracity) of secret government documents:

 

There were also a few exhibits on more general alien and UFO phenomena (as opposed to just the Roswell incident), including close encounters, alien implants, and crop circles.  Overall it was an interesting exhibit (though I remain unconvinced), but could certainly have used more interpretive signage, rather than just taking a wall-o-text approach to the exhibits. It also would have been more interesting if they hadn't reproduced the same Army picture of weather balloon debris at least five times in the museum. Still, it's probably the essential Roswell destination.

After leaving Roswell, I headed out towards I-10 on US-70, which passes through the White Sands Missile Range and White Sands National Monument. 70 occasionally closes down temporarily (with a sign advising delays of over an hour) because of missile test firings on the range, which can pass on or over the highway. Luckily, there were no firings today. White Sands National Monument is a huge deposit of white gypsum sand, formed by evaporation from a (mostly) dry lake bed at one end of the monument. Most sand is made of quartz; gypsum sand is rare, and White Sands is the biggest deposit around.

Walking out on the dunes is an interesting experience. They stretch out nearly as far as the eye can see and, once you get past some border areas with vegetation, are very sparsely populated by any visible life:

 

Walk without rhythm and you won't attract the worm.

Not even that far away and the car looks quite small already.

After leaving White Sands, I made a beeline for Tucson. Even with the high speed limits on the desert roads, it took a while to get there - not for an hour or so past sunset. Dinner was Mexican again, because I just can't resist Mexican food in the Southwest.

Tomorrow: Tucson, AZ to San Diego, CA

Day 26: Later

I'm super tired after having driven more than a thousand miles in two days, and even catching up on the last two days of posts was a chore. The Roswell post will have to come later.

Day 25: Dallas, TX to Roswell, NM

Outline: Dallas, TX to Roswell, NM (via Clovis, NM)

There's really not a lot to report here for this one. Today was pretty much an all-out driving day - 560 mi, no sightseeing. I took a slightly indirect route, going up through Lubbock and Clovis, because it meant that all the driving was on divided highway (but not interstate!), which is probably safer than 200 miles on 2-lane roads. Observations:

1. It rains really, really hard between Dallas and Abilene.
2. West of Abilene (or thereabouts) it clears up really fast as you enter desert landscape - which finally looked like the mental image I have of Texas.
3. There's a really big wind farm all along US-84 going north of I-20, which provides an interesting contrast to the otherwise flat landscape. The town of Levelland, TX is named completely without irony. It's flat out there.
4. Texas Tech football must be really big in Lubbock, because, wow - that city is far from everything.
5. The gas station I stopped at in Clovis was a bad choice. It was, by far, the slowest gas pump I've ever used. I've hit a few bad gas stations along the way (the one in Monticello, NY that didn't auto-shutoff and spilled a quart of gas all over the side of my car comes to mind), and add this one to the list. I think it took somewhere between 10 and 15 minutes to pump 10-ish gallons of gas. Time goes by really slowly when you can actually see the thousandths digit on the gas pump increment.
6. The "Chicken 65" roll at Zyka (an Indian restaurant) in Dallas is really, really good. And it makes a great snack on the road.
7. I hit 30,000 miles on the car today (remember that I hit 25,001 just as I arrived at my cousin's house near Boston).
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
8. God bless New Mexico, for it has restored my faith in Mexican food, after it was shaken by the junk they call by that name in Boston. This is how Mexican should be done, with tasty cheese, chips that don't taste like cardboard, salsa that isn't just Pace, legit enchiladas, and green chile:
   
   
   
   
   

Tomorrow: Roswell, NM to Tucson, AZ

Day 24: Austin, TX to Dallas, TX

Outline: Austin, TX to Dallas, TX

Because I wanted to get into Dallas before the afternoon rush hour started, I didn't have a huge amount of time to sightsee (or sleep!) in Austin in the morning. My one and only destination was the Texas State Capitol:

 

Naturally, because this is Texas, the Capitol building is 10 ft taller than the US Capitol Building. The more you know. Unlike the Feds, Texans are pretty relaxed with their security - no tickets or anything are required to check out the building (a huge plus when crunched for time!). Of course, there are plenty of guards roaming the hallways. One of the more noticeable features upon entering the building is the Texas state seal, which features the seals of the US, the Confederacy, Mexico, France, and Spain:

The inside of the building itself has several historical exhibits, including a restored agricultural museum (that was once used to show off Texas's many agricultural products), and a collection of artifacts from the Texan Independence War. Some of the early flags flown by the Texan rebels (or at least replicas of them) were on display, including this one, which I think is pretty much the best flag ever. It was flown by a town which had been granted a cannon by the Mexican government. The flag was created when the Mexicans wanted to reclaim the cannon, presumably to disarm a potential rebellion:

They didn't manage to get the cannon back.

The attention to detail in the building (besides the rooms that were totally demolished to make way for modern spaces...) was neat - even the door hinges are custom:

Finally, the grounds have a collection of statues. Perhaps the most striking was the  monument to the Confederacy, something you're certainly not likely to find outside the South (and, perhaps, not even in such a form outside Texas, with its rather unrepentant attitude towards Reconstruction):

After leaving Austin, I made the drive up to Dallas. There was nothing particularly interesting or redeeming about this drive - it's 3 hours of ugly interstate highway (I-35); the most that can be said for it is that it is efficient. (On a random note, the highway system in Austin is insanity, with its incredibly dense network of raised and level highways running adjacent to each other and crossing and so-many-levels-head-asplode.) In Dallas, I met up with my aunt at work, and we promptly ran out to see a museum exhibit recommended by her co-workers, the Mustangs of Las Colinas. We didn't really know why they were important, but there was only 45 minutes before closing, so we took off. The museum purportedly closes at 5pm, but at 4:43, it was abandoned, so we just took pictures in front of the sculpture instead:

Turns out the sculpture is the whole point - the museum is about the sculpture, which is apparently the largest equestrian sculpture in the world. Looks cool. After this, we headed home, and got (a really good!) dinner at a Moroccan restaurant named Marrakesh Cafe. Highly recommended - very good food, good prices, and the staff were super friendly.

Tomorrow: Dallas, TX to Roswell, NM

Day 23: New Orleans, LA to Austin, TX

Outline: New Orleans, LA to Austin, TX

Today was primarily a very long driving day - nearly 550 miles. The weather forecast indicated intermittent thunderstorms along essentially the entire length of the drive, but I never heard a single thunderbolt, and for the most part, the weather was good. There was a burst of heavy rain outside Baton Rouge, and another one somewhere past Houston that slowed traffic down below 30mph, but otherwise, it was clear sailing. Since the car is getting such good mileage (over 300mi/tank), I was able to do the drive on a single fillup, in Beaumont, TX (conveniently, almost exactly halfway).

The first order of business in Austin after dropping stuff off at the hotel was dinner. Having tried the best of Memphis barbecue, I thought it only fair to let Texas compete (Texas: where the barbecue goes "moo", not "oink"). Stop 1 of the evening: Rudy's Country Store and Bar-B-Q. Order: 1/2 lb extra-moist beef brisket, 1/2 chicken, 1 small side of cole slaw, and 1 small side of cream corn; six slices of white bread came with the order:

Even dinner's bigger in Texas

The chicken wasn't quite as good as Tom's in Memphis, but it was still excellent - juicy and tasty. The only complaint was that the spices were mostly retained on the skin, rather than being present the whole way through. The brisket was phenomenal, though, especially when paired with Rudy's "BBQ Sause" [sic]. The cole slaw was pretty generic (reminded me of KFC, actually), but the cream corn was spectacular. Probably the best side dish I've had with barbecue. This place was totally worth it.

After dinner, I went to explore downtown to investigate Austin's fabled music scene. I didn't really know quite what to expect, and what I got was 6th Street, where almost every bar and club had a live band playing for the audience. To start things off I stepped into Emo's, a club which (the Internets tell me) normally skews towards alternative and punk. I think tonight was metal night, though, and no objections:

I got there too late for the first band of the night, but I stuck around for #2 and 3. I haven't the slightest idea what their names were, because the mix was definitely set to minimize vocals and turn the guitars up as loud as possible. Good stuff. The music was good, the music was loud, and the showmanship was solid too, with the latter drummer occasionally kicking a cymbal because he'd run out of hands, and the backup guitarist and bassist machinegunning their way through songs.

You'd think that by now I'd have learned not to go to a rock show without earplugs, but no. I ended up skipping the headliner band because my ears were in pain (despite the ersatz paper earplugs I fashioned from scraps in my wallet). On my way back to the car I stopped by another bar on 6th because of the great blues coming from out the door:

After soothing my ears with the blues for a half hour, I decided to call it a night.

Tomorrow: Austin, TX to Dallas, TX

Day 22: New Orleans, LA

Outline: touring around New Orleans. No map for you!

 We started the morning with breakfast at home; in retrospect, sort of a pointless idea given what was to come. Our morning destination was the French Quarter of New Orleans, with the first stop being Cafe Du Monde for some cafe au lait and beignets:

9 delicious pieces of fried dough with powdered sugar, and some coffee to keep me awake.

I "only" ate 5 of them, the rest went to my cousin.

After getting our daily allowance of doughnuts, we continued the tour through the French Quarter stopping at the city cathedral:

(My cousin Azim, who ate the other 4 beignets, on the right)

The cathedral has some pretty awesome architecture and artwork inside, but my vote for most impressive goes to the stained-glass windows lining either side wall of the building. I took the opportunity to try taking some HDR photos of the windows. I don't think they turned out especially awesome, but it's a first attempt. I'll have to play with the tonemapping some more later:

 

After the cathedral, we continued through the French Quarter, walking down the infamous Bourbon St towards lunch at the Red Fish Grill. Bourbon is gloriously sketchy even during the day, but I don't have any particularly interesting photos of it. Sorry. After a sweltering walk (it's October, seriously, why so hot?), we arrived at the restaurant for lunch:

BBQ oyster appetizer (delicious!)

Shrimp poboy sandwich with alligator sausage gumbo

I thought the main course sandwich was pretty good, but I was informed that by the standards of the restaurant, it was actually terrible. Guess I'll have to refine my poboy tastebuds next time I'm down there. The combination of three meals in three hours and the hot day served to put everyone to sleep, so we cut the tour short and went back home for a nap. In the evening, we went out to dinner at the Harrah's buffet downtown (good food, but so much...), after which Azim and I watched the Cal-USC game...for about 15 minutes, before becoming completely disgusted with it.

Tomorrow: New Orleans, LA to Austin, TX