#8 Route 1 road trip
Steve McQueen, Bullitt (1968)
New year’s eve-eve and my last day in the city for now. Yesterday, being a Sunday, I was unable to call the car rental place to see if they had anything more exciting than the family saloon I had already reserved. I was due to collect it at midday, so after breakfast I gave them a call, and they told me they did have a convertible Mustang which had just come back in that morning. I told them that would do nicely, and they agreed to get it washed and ready for 12pm as planned. This was the closest I would get to being Steve McQueen in Bullitt, for now at least.
With a few hours to kill, I had a box that needed to be ticked, in the form of taking a ride on one of the cable cars. I had studied them closely at the Cable Car Museum a couple of days ago, but as they passed right by the hotel, and I was unsure where future plans would take me, I hopped on a car and took the short ride down to the bottom of California street and back up again. The car was manned by a driver and a conductor, and whilst the conductor is primarily responsible for collecting fares, he or she is also responsible for manning the brakes on the downhill sections to prevent the car flying off down the hill. Technically my trip down and back again was two separate fares, but a generous tip to the conductor when I boarded was enough to ensure my return passage, which I was grateful for. I was able to sit right up by the grip and observe how the driver manipulates the complicated array of levers in order to control the car, which was great fun with my legs hanging out of the side of the car into open traffic as the car rattled its way down the steep inclines.
Back at the hotel, checked out and cab hailed, I was heading back across the Golden Gate Bridge for the third time, this time past the rest area which had been an earlier destination, and onwards to a small town called Mill Valley where my branch of Enterprise Rent-a-Car was located in a part of town called Strawberry Village. Once the formalities were sorted and the obligatory all-around-the-car handover walk was completed I loaded my suitcase into the ‘trunk’ and blindly proceeded to get into the passenger’s seat to start my journey before promptly noticing my error. Under my breath I proclaimed myself to be a ‘tit’, whilst hoping nobody else had noticed. Regrettably, the car was right in front of the window of the rental place. I am sure I wasn’t the first or the last, but I was now obliged to style it out. I did I a fine job of reorganising the glovebox and reviewing the safety addendum in the owner’s manual before deciding my work in the passenger seat was done, and I should probably re-enter the car on the other side, with a confidence that suggested that I had planned that move all along.
I think the last time I had driven on the wrong side was 12 years ago, so I drove around for a while to get my eye in, and to get used to the car. I spotted a shopping mall so pulled up in the car park there, and headed out to get some much-needed sunglasses, which I hadn’t had the foresight to bring with me, and maybe a bite to eat. I picked up a cheap windscreen mount from a kiosk in the mall to enable me to use my phone as a sat nav and picked a route that looked sufficiently scenic to deliver me to the coast at Muir Beach.
Muir Beach Overlook
There was a little car park there, so I pulled up and walked around to get some pictures before jumping back in the car. As the roads climbed sharply back to the top of the cliffs, I pulled in at Muir Beach Overlook, which does exactly what it says on the tin. I walked the clifftop paths for a while before jumping back in the car. The weather was glorious, so it was time to drop the roof of the sports car, don the Ray-Bans and crank up the local radio station playing Foo Fighters on repeat. Whilst fully aware I had just become the stereotype of an insecure single man in his early forties, I didn’t care.
This route is regularly voted one of the ‘bucket list’ best drives in the world, and I was starting to understand why. These were twisty ‘switchback’ roads as they call them, with tight hairpin bends opening into glorious clifftop passes with amazing views as you traverse the valleys and ‘gulches’ which break up the landscape. I had gained enough confidence in the car enough to start giving it the beans as I relaxed into the drive and started to really enjoy myself. If the smell-track and soundtrack of downtown SF was weed smoke and the ringing of the cable cars, then Highway 1 was all about the fresh air blowing in off the ocean and the sound was Learn to Fly, by Seattle’s finest. Psychologists can explain much better than I can, the reasons why shared experiences are so much more enjoyable than the alternative, but this moment could not be a clearer demonstration to me. Despite being a fully paid up member of introverts-R-us and a massive fan of my own company, the only thing that tainted this experience was the fact I was doing it on my own.
The tight and twisty roads demanded my full attention, particularly given the cars now apparent shortcomings. Without drifting into Top Gear territory, despite producing an excellent noise, it was woefully underpowered. The seat position was so high, and the windscreen so low that if you are over 6ft tall, the view ahead on anything steeper than a slight descent is obscured by the sun visor. It also had a habit of downshifting at entirely the wrong point, meaning if you drive like anyone other than Morgan Freeman in Driving Miss Daisy, it would go sideways regularly. Car review over.
My caution was well placed, as by the time I reached my destination this evening, I learned that a car had done exactly what I was trying to avoid, and gone off the cliff edge that very morning, on the very same road.
I needed to fuel the car, so I pulled in at a ‘gas’ station in a small town called Point Reyes Station. Thanks to America’s card payment system being about ten years behind the rest of the world and their stupid requirement to enter your ZIP code to activate the pump, my UK debit cards didn’t work on the self-serve pump and I had to go in to the cashier to prepay for the fuel. I am used to paying £110 to fill the tank on my car back home, so I agreed to pre-pay $150 thinking that would be plenty to fill the tank on this gas-guzzler. My rookie calculations were way off, despite California having the highest fuel prices in the USA it still only cost about $40 to fill up, the equivalent of 35p per Litre.
Humans are visual creatures. In my world, and I suspect yours too, salt and vinegar is green, cheese and onion is blue, prawn cocktail is pink, diesel is black and unleaded is green. Anything contrary to this system would just be perverse. America of course, treads its own path, and makes the diesel pump green and the unleaded one black. Rather than just standardise on the same colours used by pretty much the REST OF THE WORLD, they employ a system whereby you select your desired fuel by name using a button, before picking up the pump. This somewhat mitigates the risk but did lead to me standing for a good minute before my brain disconnected the colour from the words and told me to pick up the other pump.
The ‘stang
Onward I drove, back onto the coast road through evocatively named places like ‘Bivalve’ and ‘Ocean Roar’ before the road turned inland for a few miles as I approached Bodega Bay. I wanted to come back to Bodega Bay, but for now I was just passing through as it was late afternoon and starting the get dark already. Pre-empting potential sunset photographic opportunities, I pulled off the road just north of Bodega Bay in a place called Salmon Creek, (see header image above, and gallery below). I was just in time to catch dusk moving in, and a spectacular sunset before getting back on the road.
Another 45 minutes of nighttime, top-down motoring brought me across the Russian River and to the location of my bed for the night, the Timber Cove Resort, perched on the cliffs in the cove of the same name. In the absence of any light pollution, including car-park lighting it was impossibly dark, and I had to use the light from my phone to navigate to the front of the hotel. It was certainly too dark to admire the view, but I could hear the ocean lapping at the rocks below.
I checked in, enjoyed a nice meal and a glass of Lagavulin 16 in the fireside bar before getting some rest ahead of tomorrow’s adventures.
Gallery
