California Travelogue Vol. 1: LA to Santa Barbara

Since I am the only native Californian most of my English friends and family know, for the better part of 14 years they have been asking my advise on what is essentially the exact same West Coast trip:  LA, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Yosemite, Death Valley and the Grand Canyon.  They invariably want to know if they can see it all in two-weeks and I say, "Sure, if you never get out of the car."  Not once, never, ever, have I been listened to and every single time when I ask how the trip was, I get a sheepish answer,  "We didn't see much...we spent so much time driving..."

California is HUGE.  It's nearly twice the size of the entire UK.  Driving from San Francisco to Las Vegas takes a solid 9 hours going the fastest, most boring route; 14 hours if you want to see anything interesting along the way.  Vegas to the Grand Canyon is five-hours each way so if you plan to do it in a day you'll have about 10 minutes to look at the canyon if you don't want to drive back in the dark.  I easily put 3000+ miles on a hire car during my annual three-week trips.  I am totally fine with this because I love driving and I've, you know, seen California a few times before but for first time travellers it's probably a bit much.

Be that as it may, in the spirit of hope over experience I will offer the following guide to my one and true home.

First, have a good long think about how much money you are willing to spend and how much weight you want to gain- now double both figures.  You don't want any nasty surprises later on.

Chop your list down dramatically.  Abandon Vegas and the Grand Canyon and make that a separate trip.  Vegas is awesome in its horridness; the Grand Canyon is overwhelming and can only be appreciated by hiking down into the belly of the beast.  There are no day-hikes in the Grand Canyon, or at least none a sane person would attempt.  It is a vertical mile down to the river and unless you posses Greek god-like leg muscles and the stamina of a pack animal, getting down and back up in a single day is a recreational impossibility.  Claire and I did a half-way trek that saw us descending from the rim just before nine in the morning (three-hours too late according to the pros) and ascending in the mid afternoon.  Coming back up damn near wasted her and even I, a comparatively fit regular gym goer, was wheezing like an old radiator by the time we reached the top.

Vegas is the societal equivalent of watching car accidents for fun.  I have been in casinos and seen them wheel little old ladies up to slot-machines in their push chairs so that they can deposit the last of their monthly Social Security cheque, now converted into nickels and dimes, into the coin slot.  There are no clocks in casinos and they keep the lighting finely tuned to a dim twilight.  Time is measured by the passing of your cash into their hands.  Drinks are free while you are gambling and the streets outside are lined with pawn shops.  There is nothing the town likes more than a drunk on a losing streak willing to hawk his gold teeth for a handful of cash.

Vegas is so over-the-top repugnant that it must be seen once in your life- if only to understand why the rest of the world hates Americans.  Just not on your honeymoon.  Even if you get married there.  Trust me, I learned this from personal experience.

Forgoing Vegas and the Grand Canyon will allow you to concentrate on California awesome. 

Down to business.

Avoid Los Angeles like you would drunk yobbos after a football match.  No one with any sense would build a city like Los Angeles in front of an ocean as lovely as the Pacific.  It is soul destroying, stark and lined with concrete and stucco strip-malls.  It is true indeed that the sun always shines in LA but what it shines on should be immediately covered up and locked away in a disused and rarely visited part of the nearest abandoned salt mine.  If you are forced by airline schedules and ticket prices to fly into and out of LAX, ensure that you have a rental car waiting upon arrival so that you can immediately flee up Hwy. 1 to Santa Monica, Malibu, Ventura and lovely, lovely, Santa Barbara.

If I didn't have family in LA I would never set foot in the place.  Not that you can actually set foot anywhere in LA because everyone drives. Everywhere. All the time.  Your feet won't touch pavement during your entire stay. 

Much better to fly in and out of San Francisco.  SFO is a well designed, efficient airport that has convenient public transport links and rental car returns.  LAX is what airports would look like if the Russians had won the Cold War.

If you insist on spending time in LA you could visit...no, never mind.  I can't even bring myself to write anything.  It is simply too depressing. You're on your own.

Assuming you have picked up your car from the rental lots at the airport (there are shuttle buses because, you know, walking isn't a thing) head north up the 405 freeway (all motorways are numbered) for about 10 miles until you get to the interchange with the 10.  Take the 10 West to Santa Monica.  If you take the 10 East you will go back into LA and honestly, no one wants that do they?

After about five miles the 10 West turns into US Hwy 1 North.  Hwy 1 will be your best friend for the duration of your journey and this narrative. It snakes up the state, mostly hugging the coast and will provide you with some of the most mind-stunningly beautiful vistas to be found anywhere.

Continuing on the 10 you'll go through a little tunnel and suddenly be confronted with the beach at Santa Monica, don't be sucked in, there is better to come.  Santa Monica gives way to Malibu and then Zuma.  In between rows of overpriced beach front shacks you will be able to see sand, sun and surf.  Past Malibu the traffic thins out and it will be tempting to roll down the windows, or the top, and listen to the Beach Boys.  Give in to this.  It's OK.  I'll wait.

Feeling better now?  Of course you are, you're in California- hell yes!

You'll follow the beaches up Hwy 1 for about 90 minutes before it joins up with its big brother, US Interstate 101, the Ventura Freeway (Americans name their freeways.)  Get on the 101 North and in 40 minutes or so you will enter the gates of paradise, better known as Santa Barbara.

Santa Barbara California, my home town, out there on the edge of the Pacific.  I spent 26 years trying to get out of Santa Barbara and nearly every second of every day since leaving trying to get back. But that's a story best saved for another time. 

You'll need a place to stay and believe me, it will cost you.  There are plenty of B&Bs in Santa Barbara and they're all around the £100-150 per night mark.  I've stayed at The Cheshire Cat Inn and The Eagle Inn and liked them both.  There is no shortage of hotels by the beach that vary in both quality and price.  We've stayed at The Harbor View Inn several times and they are great, if a little pricey, however they sometimes run off-season deals.

Santa Barbara has some of the best seafood anywhere.  It also is home to great Mexican joints where you'll be able to taste all of the flavours of south of the boarder cuisine without the amoebic dysentery.

For fish you can do no better than Brophy Brothers.  They overlook the yacht harbour, accept no reservations and are always packed.  The Shoreline Beach Cafe is one of the few places that you can actually eat on the beach.  Their food is great and not crazy expensive.

Perhaps our favourite restaurant in Santa Barbara is Chuck's of Hawaii and we go there at least once on each visit.  Claire says their steaks are the best she has ever had and their salmon is nothing short of perfect.  Make sure you get the rice as it is stunningly good.  When you go to the salad bar cover your greens with the best blue cheese dressing I have ever had- and I know me some blue cheese.

For pizza go to Taffy's (make it a thin crust), for lunch go to Sojourner Cafe - mostly vegetarian and some of the tastiest food I have ever had. Order a "Cafe Sojourner" for a multi-layered coffee extravaganza. 2017 update: it appears that Sojourner is now CLOSED!  I am gutted.

Your poor English taste buds have never experienced the thrill of proper Mexican food so grab some napkins, a bi-lingual dictionary and follow me.

Some of the best Mexican food anywhere can be found at La Super Rica, a 1950s style stucco monstrosity in the heart of Santa Barbara's seriously Hispanic district.  The queues at this place are around the block at lunch time and it has all the ambiance of a disused munitions bunker but dear lord they can cook up a mean taco.

If you want to actually sit down while you are eating, try The Rose Cafe.  My dad moved to Santa Barbara in 1947, the same year The Rose Cafe opened and while they have both aged well, The Rose makes better chicken enchiladas.  For a slightly more up-scale eatery, La Playa Azul Cafe is hard to beat.  If it's a warm enough evening take a table outside.  I recommend the two-chicken taco combination with rice and beans.  And corn chips.  Lots and lots of corn chips.

Santa Barbara is home to three types of people- retired, homeless and college students.  The University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) is the town's largest employer and in the 1960s the area around the campus held the world record for the highest population density on the planet.  Because of this never ending supply of fit young things Santa Barbara has a pretty lively club scene.  Most weekends the clubs and bars along the lower part of State Street (the main drag) are hopping.  It is well worth noting that a night out in the city centre of Bristol and a night out in Santa Barbara are two very different experiences.  The latter involves far less vomiting, public urination and shameful taxi rides home from the police station the following day.

If you get homesick there is even a quasi-English pub called Old Kings Road where you can get a pint of Guinness but the football on TV is strictly of the American variety.

While recovering from your hangovers make sure to grab a cup of the best coffee in town at The Santa Barbara Roasting Company.  Follow that with a good old greasy spoon breakfast at The Farmer Boy.  Set aside your notions about breakfast being a meal comprised of three kinds of rubbery pork-like substance, beans, cold, un-buttered toast and runny eggs cooked in so much fat that they slide around the plate unassisted.  You're about to have your first proper American breakfast and you're going to need a bit of coaching.  Here goes...

The waitress will assume you to know what you want before you look at the menu.  Don't waffle.  If you ask her to come back you will never see her again.  She is a professional and expects you to be the same.  Go in knowing what you want and how to order it.  Don't get fancy, stick with the basics: two eggs, crispy bacon, hash browns, wheat (not "brown") toast, orange juice and coffee.  Say "yes please" when asked if you want ketchup and Tabasco- even if you don't what to do with it, it's better to have it sitting on the table unused than to be without it completely as people will stare.

In the US there is no such thing as brown sauce so don't even ask.  If you bring your own in little packets nicked from a motorway service stop and pour it on your eggs they will take them away from you and bring you back "clean" ones.  Put the ketchup and Tabasco sauce on your hash browns.

Bacon is thin, streaky and the best in the known universe.  I'm not sure what they make "bacon" out of in England but my best guess is abandoned truck tyres.

Knowing how to order eggs is vital.  After 15 years, Claire still gets it wrong and brings shame to my entire family.  In the UK there are three types of eggs: scrambled, poached and fried (runny).  In the US there are the following:

      Scrambled

      Scrambled with bits in them (ham, onions, peppers)

      Sunny side up (closest you will get to an English fried egg)

      Poached (almost never ordered)

      Once over (flipped so that the top is not runny but the yolk doesn't go hard)

      Over medium (flipped and cooked until the yolk is partially hard)

Lastly, there is over-well (sometimes called "over firm".  A Frisbee. The yolk is a hard, yellow mass surrounded by rubberised white- this is how Claire likes them but I love her anyway.

Omelets are a whole 'nother story.  All American omelets are three-egg affairs bulging with anything the chef has handy: avocados, olives, mushrooms, prawns and wedges of melted yellow cheese.

If you decide to be adventurous and order pancakes, know that they are normally at least an inch thick and that a "short stack" could feed a Somali family for a week.  NO ONE puts sugar or lemon on pancakes in the US.  Butter and maple syrup is the norm, although blueberry syrup is an acceptable substitution.

American coffee, like American beer, is watery and uninspiring.  They try and make up for this by giving you free refills (of coffee, not beer) but each cup makes you hate yourself a little more.

For years I wondered why Claire seemed to have such difficulty ordering at restaurants in the States.  Her timing seemed off and often times the server and her would end up staring blankly at each other until I intervened.  At first I thought it was a problem with her accent but then I realized that the entire ordering process in the US and UK are fundamentally different.  In the UK, and indeed most of Europe, the customer expects the waiter to give them a list of choices.  In the US the server waits for the customer to say how he or she wants something done.  Claire would ask for toast and the waitress would stand there waiting for her to say what type of toast and Claire would be waiting to hear what types they had.  Don't let this happen to you.

Two other things.  First, it is considered polite for the waiter to bring your bill before you ask for it.  In fact, if you have to ask for the bill most waiters will feel that you want to rush out because the food or service has been poor.  Second, unless the waiter or waitress has personally murdered your entire family, it is expected that you tip at least 15%- it is rarely automatically added to the bill.

Now that you have been fed and watered, it's time to see some sights.  Simply walking around Santa Barbara is delightful.  Apart from the omnipresent homeless population and their trusty shopping trolleys, the urban landscape is charming.  There are planning regulations in Santa Barbara that dictate that homes and business must follow strict style guidelines- these tend toward old-world Spanish with red tile roofs and whitewashed walls.

Take a walk from The Arlington Theatre down State St. all the way to Stearns Wharf and back the other side.  It will take you a couple of hours at least but if you get tired there are little white electric buses that run up and down the route.  They used to be free but now I think they cost .50 cents.  The shops and restaurants along State Street run the gambit from up-scale chain stores to mom-and-pop craft shops.  From the 600 block down to the freeway is the club zone.  State St. passes under the freeway and ends at the wharf.

Parking in Santa Barbara is generally pretty easy to find.  There are several down-town lots and the first 75 minutes is free; the hourly rate after 75 minutes is ridiculously low.  Street parking is also generally plentiful except on weekends but be careful- for three blocks on either side of State Street you have to move your car every 75 minutes or get a ticket.  Don't try and get away with simply rolling a few feet forward- you have to move to a different block.  The parking enforcers in Santa Barbara ooze from the same mould as their brethren across the world; they eat their young and give no quarter.

Do not miss the Santa Barbara Court House and make sure to take the lift to the top of the tower- it's a great view of the city.

The pride of Santa Barbara is the mission.  It was built in 1786 by the Spanish- or I should say by American Indians enslaved by the Spanish and is the best preserved and most beautiful of all the missions in California.  I know this because I did a report on it in 5th grade.  Europe is overrun with centuries old majestic cathedrals bejewelled with stained glass windows reaching skyward toward almighty God.  Santa Barbara's more humble offering leans more toward the provincial but they did the best with the materials at hand.

Past the mission and into the foothills, not far from where I grew up, is the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden.  If you are anything like me you probably think of public gardens as havens for crotchety blue-haired OAPs and sexual deviants.  However, the SB Botanic Gardens are actually pretty cool.  It is less a formal garden and more a well maintained run of hiking trails through a canyon.  I honestly love the place and took Claire there on our first trip to California.  The little creek that runs along the bottom of the canyon is nothing short of terminally charming.

Have an expensive drink in the bar at The Biltmore and then walk along Butterfly Beach just outside.  Timing is essential as you want to set down your glass and be on the beach about 30 minutes before the sun dips below the horizon.  You will thank me for this later.

As you look out over the Pacific Ocean in Santa Barbara you probably will notice the Channel Islands.  These are the tops of an ancient mountain range that was cut off when the sea level rose (another report in 5th grade).  For years the Channel Islands were privately owned and used by cattle ranchers.  There are species of plants and animals out there that live nowhere else in the world.  There are also a host of archaeological sites where they have found complete mammoth skeletons and fire pits where said mammoths were barbecued by early California residents.  I have been out to the islands, been diving off the islands but never set foot on the islands.  Access was strictly prohibited for years but they have now made them national parks so it is possible to visit them with a guide.  If you would like to do something in Santa Barbara that I never managed to do, take a trip to the Channel Islands.

It's is almost midnight and we're not even out of Santa Barbara.  I think you are going to get this in instalments.  The next chapter will be Santa Barbara north to Big Sur and Carmel.

Author's Note:  I wrote these California travel guides to my niece and her husband when they were planning their honeymoon.   I'd like to expand on the three chapters I wrote for them and do an entire series covering San Diego to the Oregon border.  If there are any publishing agents willing to sponsor this project please don't hesitate in the slightest to get in touch.

California Travelogue Vol. 2: Santa Barbara to San Luis Obispo

Santa Barbara is so fundamentally fabulous that the thought of leaving, ever, may fill you with despair.  Yet for the good of the honeymoon it is time to press on.

There are two routes north out of Santa Barbara: San Marcos Pass (Hwy 154) and your old friend US 101.  The Pass offers both panoramic views of Santa Barbara and the opportunity for head-on collusions with other drivers gawking at the scenery.  About 10-11 miles up The Pass you'll see a sign for Painted Cave Road.  Turn right onto the road and go a few miles up into the hills; there you will find an honest-to-goodness cave loaded with petroglyphs created by the Chumash Indians in between being exploited by the Spanish and plotting their bloody revenge. 

There is also a community of Painted Cave best known for inhabitants who like to remain anonymous and off the grid. Jane Fonda used to live there, so did Joe Cocker and if you say "who are they?" I am going to have to slap you, as soon as I can get up out of my chair.  Be a dear and hand me my zimmer frame. 

Continue up Hwy 154; about a mile past the summit take the Stagecoach Road exit to the left.  At the bottom of the valley, undisturbed by sunlight, sits The Cold Springs Tavern. For nearly 130 years (that's a lot to an American) the Cold Springs Tavern has been serving the food and beverage needs of successive generations of ranchers, cowboys and bikers.  Back when I was much cooler than I am now, my buddies in the Santa Barbara Harley Owners Group (HOG) and I would ride up to the tavern on Saturdays so that we could admire each others leather jackets and intimidate the tourists.  The food is great, the atmosphere rustic and they have live rock/country music on the weekends.  If you do happen to stop in on a weekend be warned- it is always packed.  If you just want to go for the experience try a weekday lunch but even then you should call for a reservation.

Heading out from The Cold Springs Tavern you can go back up the way you came or continue along the valley floor- either way will join you back up with The Pass.  As you continue your drive you will pass Cachuma Lake on the right.  Cachuma was formed when they dammed the Santa Ynez River in the 50s and it is the main water supply for Santa Barbara and the surrounding area.  My dad used to be in charge of Cachuma operations and management for the water department and I spent many a muddy afternoon on the banks of the lake failing to catch fish.

Hwy. 154 eventually deposits you back onto US 101. You could just as easily have taken 101 North out of Santa Barbara instead of San Marcos Pass- it's about the same distance.  101 follows the coast and gives a nearly unobstructed ocean view.  There are only two things of any historical interest along that rout: the foundation of an old water tower, all that remains of a WWII German POW camp, and the old Ellwood oil fields, the first place in the continental US that was hit by enemy fire since you damn Brits tried to repatriate us back in 1812.

Settle in for a long stretch.  Your next port-o-call will be San Luis Obispo, proclaimed the "Happiest Place in America" by some hack flogging his book on the Oprah Winfrey Show.  Growing up in Santa Barbara I looked upon my northern neighbours with the same idle disrespect that Londoners feel toward, well, everybody.  The truth is that San Luis is pretty cool by small-town standards now that they finally got a handle on that inbreeding problem.

Apart from a populace who all look suspiciously similar, San Luis Obispo is renown for one thing, The Madonna Inn.  You...must...stop there.  In all the eloquent vagaries of the English language there is no word, no phrase, no utterance, which can adequately describe the over-the-top trailer-park extravagance that is The Madonna Inn.  It is what cubic zirconia is to the Hope Diamond, as utterly tasteless as wearing a tube-top to a wedding.  They have 109 themed rooms, each with its own special charm.  Would you like a special Valentine's Day get away?  The Hearts & Flowers room was made just for you.  Nothing says "class" quite like red velvet sofas.   The tour de force of sensory overload is undoubtedly their Gold Rush Steak House a jaw-dropping explosion of pink and gold extracted directly from The Easter Bunny’s nightmares.  If you want to experience true fear, look at the photos of the Gold Rush Steak House dining room.  You’ll see a picture on a normal day and one done up for Valentine's dinner AND IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO TELL THE DIFFERENCE!  Simply viewing these photos will send a normally healthy person into a diabetic coma.

No trip to the Madonna Inn is complete without a visit to the urinal located in the gent's toilet in the basement of the restaurant.  I won't spoil the surprise. 

For all its stupefying eccentricities The Madonna Inn is redeemed by a staff that are totally in on the joke.  They take pride in the mockery and will laugh and point right along with you.  Whereas if the place was run by earnest and sincere people who honestly thought they were providing the most lavish accommodations anyone could hope for rather than a freakish Disney-esque travesty for the eyeballs, then it would all be a bit sad.  They know that The Madonna Inn is so un-cool that it has become tragically hip. The place laughs at itself before you get a chance to- so go ahead, slide into one of those hot-pink booths, order a banana daiquiri and be part of the joke for a while.  I guarantee that you'll walk out of there with a totally different attitude than when you went it.

I've flown past another self-imposed midnight deadline and we haven't even made it to Big Sur like I promised we would last night.  I hope I can get this done before you actually land in California

California Travelogue Vol. 3: San Simeon to Big Sur and Carmel

(Volumes 1 and 2 are down below)

This is it.  This is the Big One.  The following 90-mile journey is the reason people come to California, or at least it should be.  There is nothing I can say or write, no photo that I could take which would capture the essence of the Big Sur coast; it must be experienced, embraced, inhaled like a lover’s breath.    To me, for me, there is but Big Sur; everywhere else there be monsters.

Mile by mile the road winds tighter, the mountains grow steeper and the views more grand.  You will be overcome with an overwhelming desire to stop at every lay-by, every turnout, every sharp bend, so that you can stare slack-jawed at the awesome grandeur of it all.

 That is, if you actually get to see anything.

Apart from the mind-wrenching beauty, this stretch of Hwy 1 is best known for three things: mud and rockslides that eradicate vast tracts of roadway like sadistic young boys squishing ants, and fog.  Fog like no other.  Fog so thick that I’ve had to open the driver-side door so that I could follow the centre line on the road.  Fog that, at night, gives you visibility somewhere between none and “Holy shit we are all going to die!”  We’re talking about views out the front windscreen like this.  No lie.

Before setting out on Hwy 1 it is imperative that you check the road conditions.  The California Dept. of Transportation helpfully provides a website where you can do this.  You could also ask a local but their view of what a passible road is often differs from what rational individuals would consider safe or sane.  Those “few rocks in the road” for a native driving a 4x4 with wheels the size of the London Eye, could turn out to be chunks of mountainside large enough to engulf a mid-size family saloon.  

Assuming both the weather and the road are clear you are going to want to take pictures, lots and lots of pictures and each and every one of them will be rubbish.  People spend their entire lives marching up and down the Big Sur coast laden with gigantic cameras and tripods and no one has been able to capture THE definitive image of the place.  Even Ansel Adams, arguably the finest landscape photographer who ever looked through a ground glass, when confronted with the enormity of Big Sur said “to hell with it” and pointed his camera at the shrubbery. 

This isn’t to say that there haven’t been great photos taken along the coast, there have been, it’s just that you aren’t going to take any.  This says less about your photographic skills and more about the near impossibility of the task, made worse by the subtle and sudden variations in the light and the uncertainty of the weather. 

Of course I’m probably just bitter because I’ve been going to Big Sur for 30 years and the only thing I have to show from it is an embarrassingly large pile of images that wouldn’t be worthy of a Flikr page devoted to photographs produced by squirrels. 

Keeping all this in mind, let’s set off.

A few miles north of San Simeon, off to the left of the highway, is a long stretch of rocky beach that attracts tourists like hookers to a naval base.  Piedras Blancas (White Stones. The Spanish named them after rocks coved with bird guano) is the dry-land home and rookery to thousands of Elephant Seals.

Because I dropped my marine biology course after realizing that it didn’t interest me in the least, I’ll let these guys fill in the details as to why these enormous bags of fat and stink decided to nest on this particular parcel of sand.

I’m not sure what the seal population will be like in October but when we swing through in January the beach is littered with them.   The cows have given birth and their calves are nursing; the alpha males keep watch over their harems and engage in noisy fights for dominance.  The young nerdy males with glasses and spots bob in the shallows, ignored by the females, like me at a high-school dance.  Unable to mate these males eventually wind up wearing ironic t-shirts and working in IT.

About 14 years ago the State carved out a car park and built two wooden viewing areas so that hordes of camera toting tourists could gawk at the Elephant Seals while they, in turn, remained completely inert and lifeless.

With the exception of a Justin Bieber photo-shoot, I can’t imagine more cameras pointed at something that doesn’t warrant photographing.  Unless you are lucky enough to catch the males in the act of pummelling each other into a coma, every single photo taken of these things makes them look stone dead.

Claire is, of course, smitten by the creatures so every single year I am forced to pull off, bundle up and walk up and down the paths so that she can continuously ooh and ah at them as they continuously do nothing at all.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t stop and take a look.  To a Brit whose exposure of wildlife consists of sulky cage-bound rabbits, squished pheasants and BBC nature documentaries, being ten feet from a 3000 pound sea monster with a snout like a bag of wet cement and a howl like a flushing toilet passed through a megaphone, the experience must be something close to religious rapture.  As for me, after 20 viewings in as many years, I’d just as soon sit in the car.

Leaving the Elephant Seals and once again heading north along Hwy 1, I’m going to let you just get on with it.  You shouldn’t be reading this, or consulting a map or doing anything other than looking at the view (and driving!).

For several miles the road meanders along only a few yards above the ocean and then at Ragged Point it starts a slow climb up along the side of the coastal mountain range.  As the highway begins to get seriously curvaceous and narrow you might wonder what prompted anyone to build a road so precariously positioned along a cliff-edge.

The answer, as always, was money.  In the 1920s and 30s, land developers, miners and lumber companies wanted to open up (read “exploit”) the Big Sur coast.  They sold the idea as a “coastal defence” project, greased the palms of a few government officials, brought in slave labour in the form of convicts from San Quentin prison and the result is the motorway you are driving on today.  Make sure to thank corruption and forced labour for these spectacular views!

From Ragged Point to Big Sur proper there are only two areas of consolidated human habitation.  Lucia, known for its good lunches, great views and horrible motel and Gorda (fat lady in Spanish) made famous by having the highest petrol prices in the United States.

In order to keep the narrative skipping along, I’m going to pass over a large bit of coast and pick things up again as you are approaching Big Sur.  You’re going to be too busy looking around, stopping and taking (bad) pictures to pay any attention to me anyway.

Do keep an eye out for Limekiln State Park, you’ll want to come back and hike there later.  In fact, Big Sur is all about hiking.  Driving along Hwy 1 is all well and good but in order to really experience the place you’re going to have to abandon your car, set down the Fritos (I told you they were addicting) and hit the trails. 

Unless you stick to the seaside walks, hiking in Big Sur can break you. Simply walking from roadside trail-head to the first switchback could leave you shattered and weeping.  See those mountains to your right?  The paths that lead up through them have the sharpest elevation gain of any trails in the US: 400’ to 4100’ in the space of a few miles.  If you’re up there alone and break a leg it’s game over.  If you are going up with someone, carefully evaluate your relationship and decide whether your bond with them is strong enough so that you would be willing to haul their broken body back down over five miles of boulders and poison oak.  Sure, you could abandon them to go for help but best be back before dark because that’s when the mountain lions come.

I’ve never taken Claire up into the hills.  It’s just too risky.  She’d have me over a cliff and be back in Carmel cruising for a rich husband before my body bounced twice.

You’re going to need at least three full days to even get a taste of Big Sur.  As far as accommodations go, you really only have one option, Deetjen’s.  Sure you could spend crazy money at the Ventana Inn, fantastically crazy money at the Post Ranch Inn, or even camp at Pfeiffer State Park but none of the above are even a quarter as pants-droppingly romantic as Deetjens.

Deetjen’s looks like a ramshackle assortment of poorly constructed shacks propped up against enormous redwoods.  Looks can be deceiving but in this case, looks are spot-on.

Grandpa Deetjen was a cantankerous Norwegian immigrant who settled along the banks of the small river that runs through Big Sur’s Castro Canyon.  In the 1930s he started lashing together reclaimed lumber and bits of tin to form draughty “cabins” to rent to the punters that were making their way along the newly opened Hwy 1.

Gradually he became a better builder, his wife a better manager and by the time he died in 1972 and left the complex to the State of California, the 20 rooms had been transformed from “dilapidated” to “cosy.”

Deetjen’s is still rustic.  There are no phones, TVs, wi-fi hotspots or locks on the doors.  Mobile coverage is non-existent and the bathrooms seem like an afterthought.  The walls are Kleenex thin and they don’t let you burn candles in the rooms for fear of torching the place.

What they do have, what keeps thousands of us coming back year after year, is bucket-loads of charm.  Stepping inside our favourite cabin is like coming home.  The odd slope of the roof, the ill-fitting door, the wonky shower head, I love each as if they were my own, slightly retarded, children.

The place gives you +10 romantic hit points and the only possible way to spend a night at Deetjen’s without getting laid is to be parked there in an ambulance with a sheet pulled over your head.

Due in no small part to this heady romanticism the beds at Deetjen’s have a lot of miles on them.  Yet despite this, or perhaps because of it, they are topped with the most comfortable mattresses and softest sheets in the known universe.  I’m talking about clouds of candy-floss covered with spun unicorn hair.  Insomniacs who don’t respond to heavy medication are prescribed these beds.

The only things better than the beds are the journals that sit next to them.  Almost from the beginning Deetjen’s has been stocking their rooms with hardbound notebooks for the guests to scribble in.  Stacks of notebooks, going back decades, are in each room. Reading them is to take a trip down the rabbit hole of human emotion.  Open any journal at random and within half a dozen pages you’ll experience consciousness expansion through the dilated pupils of drug-addled junkies and enough lust and raw passion to make Anais Nin cough a little and back away in embarrassment.  If these books are to be believed then Deetjen’s has been responsible for more pregnancies than big American back seats and cheap beer.

Of course you’re going to write in these journals, I’ve been doing it for nearly 30 years and Claire for the past twelve.  The desire to have your words become a permanent resident of this place is irresistibly tempting.  Sea air and sex will bring out truthfulness but be warned, I had a colleague at work find the first journal that Claire and I wrote at Deetjen’s and it took me bags of peanut M&Ms to buy her silence.

Deetjen’s has a pretty wide range of rates that vary proportionally by the size of room and whether or not you want to share a bath.  If you can possibly afford it, get a room with a fireplace   I am NOT going to tell you which is our favourite room because didn’t you read the part about the journals?

All that sex is going to make you hungry so here are the top three post-coital restaurants:

Deetjen’s.  Book the restaurant for the day you arrive.  You’ll have had enough driving by that point so that all you will want to do is unpack, shower and go some place nice and easy. Deetjen’s restaurant is every inch as hopelessly romantic as the rooms: candle-lit, creatively adorned with carefully selected items from charity shops, superb food and a resident cat.

The Restaurant at the Ventana Inn..  You’re just going to have to accept the fact that eating here is going to set you back a week’s pay. The Ventana Restaurant is as close to epicurean perfection as this planet can provide.  Claire is beside herself with rage when we visit because she can find no fault with it.  Arrive early, have a drink at the beautiful driftwood bar; sit beside the fire, allow the attentive service to wash over you like warm pudding.  It doesn’t matter what you order, it will all be fantastic but the scallops are my personal fave and the filet mignon and duck breast are Claire’s.  If you can, make sure you get Richard as your host.  He’s tall with grey hair and quite possibly the best waiter that ever wore an apron.  Tip well, he brings happiness.

The Big Sur Bakery.  Simple, homey, with slightly scatter-brained service (it’s run by the children of folks that spent a little too much time following the Grateful Dead around), get a table by the fire because heat isn’t something they do there.  Setting all that aside the Big Sur Bakery’s food is why we keep going back.  It is a real live bakery so as you would expect their breads and pizza crusts are nothing short of miraculous.  Claire has been known to dump bowl after bowl of their bread into her handbag just to make sure they keep brining more.  They are big on roasts and pizzas.  Take it from me, those sad, misshapen, rubbery things covered in watery red sauce and topped with tinned corn that pass for pizzas in England bear not even a passing resemblance to the circular delights served up by The Big Sur Bakery.  Pro tip: Serrano chillies, a popular pizza topping at The Bakery, ignite the tongue on contact.  The fine print at the bottom of the menu helpfully informs the patron that said peppers are “spicy”.  I am sure I still have intestinal scarring.

What to do

Because your time is limited and there is so much to see you are going to have to plan this bit in advance.  If you don’t own matching pairs of travel binoculars buy some before you get to Big Sur.  Binoculars might sound like something parents and other ancient types keep in the glove box of their cars but if you don’t want to find yourself standing on a hillside in Big Sur unsure if the tiny speck in the water is an otter or a lump of kelp you will thank your weird old uncle Mark that he made you get a pair.

As I mentioned above, there are no shortage of hiking trails and beaches in and around Big Sur.  Check in with the rangers at Big Sur Station before setting off.  You can also pick up trail guides, maps and “I heart Big Sur” t-shirts.

Note: California is broke so a lot of state parks and beaches that used to be free now charge a fee and those that already had fees doubled them.  While it is sometimes possible to park outside the entrance and walk in you will be cheating my people out of badly needed revenue used to maintain the parks and pay for all those fences keeping you off the best beaches.  If your conscience prevents you from skiving off without paying, it is best to keep a fistful of $1, $5 and $10 bills handy to feed into the self-pay slots.  They can no longer afford for rangers to collect your money so it’s all on the honour system.  Yeah, that’s working out well…

South of the ranger station

Less than a mile south of the ranger station, on the opposite side of the highway, is a turn-off for Sycamore Canyon Road. About an hour before sunset follow this down to Pfeiffer Beach, bundle up like it’s a summer’s day in Brighton and follow the sandy path to the ocean.  Waves have carved out two large openings in the giant rocks just along the surf line and if you’ve got your timing right you’ll see the sun go down framed by a doorway of light and colour.

An easy win is the McWay Waterfall Trail.  It requires almost no effort and provides instant gratification by way of a lovely waterfall and the ruins of a house that quite possibly had the best views ever recorded.  The waterfall beach (no, you can’t get down to it) is only lit properly in the afternoon.  If you go earlier the beach will be in shadows, your photos will make a mockery of the photographic arts and you will leave shamed and disappointed.

Further south is Limekiln Trail (remember this from the drive up?).  It only reopened last year after a devastating fire so I am not sure if all the vegetation has grown back.  Limekiln has actual limekilns, four of them, rising out of the forest like inverted ICBM silos.  There is also a 100’ waterfall and walking to the beach under the bridge provides a good chance to feel very, very small.

North of the ranger station

About six miles north of the ranger station is Andrew Molera State Park.  You can either pay $10 to park in their car park or pretend you’re a local and use the lay-by.  Your route through the park will be dependent on the time of year and your tolerance for getting wet.  During the winter months, when the river is high and the trout are migrating, they take down the bridge that leads to the bluffs trail.  Since Claire and I only go there in January we have never actually seen the bridge up so I have no way of verifying if it even exists.  Assuming the bridge is not mythical and your timing is right, crossing the river and taking the nine-mile loop trial is supposed to offer some of the most pleasant walking and best views along the entire Big Sur coast.

If the bridge is down you have two options, one, wade through waist-deep water that probably only thawed yesterday or take the Creamery Meadow trail that runs along the river, through the camp ground and down to the ocean.  Having a genetic intolerance for hypothermia, I have always chosen walking over wading.

Roughly 1.5 miles from the car park the Creamery Meadow trail forks; with one path going straight ahead to a pebbly beach and another off to the right that takes you up to the bluffs.  Both are worthwhile although the bluffs trail offers much better views and a chance to scramble down a cliff face onto a secluded beach where it is entirely possible to become trapped by the tide, swept out to sea and never heard from again.

Assuming you make it back, just up the road from Andrew Molera is the Point Sur Lightstation.  In the spirit of full disclosure I feel it only right and proper to admit that I am a lighthouse boffin.  The way that Claire gazes fondly on Elephant Seals and anything with legs and fur is how I look at lighthouses. The low lonesome sound of a foghorn makes my eyes roll back and toes curl. If the job were offered, I would be a lighthouse keeper without thinking twice or blinking once.  Of course I would have to grow a luxurious beard.  Claire might object at first but seeing how well this fellow combined facial hair and felines I know she would come around.

They only run lighthouse tours on Saturday, Sunday and Wednesday so if you are unwilling to schedule your visit around their opening times you may have to admire it from afar.  The tour is a little bit of awesome and the guides are lighthouse geeks like me.  Wear every stitch of clothing you have because out on that rock the wind never stops blowing.  On the plus side they serve hot coco in the gift shop.

If you are feeling a bit too cut off from the outside world you’ll be happy to know that hidden inside the great white wooden water tower that dominates the lighthouse grounds is a cellular transmitter.  A mobile provider donated a huge wad of cash to the lighthouse restoration society so that they could rebuild the crumbling water tower. The catch was that said tower had to contain the only cell site along that part of the coast.  Win-win.

The last stop on this leg of our journey is Point Lobos State Nature Reserve.  About 20 miles north of Big Sur it’s far enough away from your base that you’ll need to dedicate most of a day to it.  If you get started early enough you could watch wildlife at Pt. Lobos and then drive into Carmel to watch rich people.  It’s a bit of a mental gear-shift especially after a few days living amongst coastal redwoods and hippies. 

Pt. Lobos cannot be missed.  There is no cheating here, you have to pay the fee, $10, and drive in.  Get the map from the ranger and head immediately to Bird Island.  Follow the trail from the car park up over the bluffs and around the point, you can’t actually get onto Bird Island but it’s only about 150 yards away.  You don’t care about the birds anyway, what you are looking for are otters.

California Sea Otters were hunted to the point of near extinction to make hats for rich European idiots.  In fact, by 1930 it was thought that they were extinct until a small group of them were found living under the Bixby Creek Bridge in Big Sur.  Encouraged to breed using Marvin Gay music and mood lighting, the otter population began a long comeback.  Today there are still only about 2500 of them, all living between Carmel and San Simeon which, to be fair, is where I would live if I could.  Because of environmental pollution killing off their food sources, the otter population has been falling over the past few years.  Pt. Lobos is one of the few places that, barring very bad luck or lack of binoculars, you are almost always able to find some otters.

Scan the kelp beds just offshore and look for whiskers.  Otters like to lie on their backs wrapped up in kelp and it makes them hard to spot.  Look for a log with bits that stick up at each end, that’s an otter.  You can sometimes see two or more otters floating together holding paws.  This is almost terminally cute and could prove fatal to anyone who just suffered the loss of a pet or has recently been dumped by a lover. 

Follow the trail north from Bird Rock to China Cove and up to Sea Lion Point.  It’s only about a mile and a half but it could easily take you an entire day.  Now that you know what you are looking for, you are going to be spotting otters everywhere.  Unfortunately only about 10% of what you think are otters are actually otters.  You will learn to loath kelp and driftwood. 

October is the beginning of the southern migration of Grey whales from Alaska to Mexico.  Humpbacks are also active this time of year.  Both can be seen from the shore- look for spouts from blow-holes, curved backs and, if you are incredibly lucky, tails.

At Sea Lion Point car park there is a hut where you can pet an otter pelt.  One stroke and you will understand why people kept stealing their fur.  Make sure to talk to the volunteer manning the hut, they always seem lonely.

This has been a long slog and we’re almost done.  There is only one more place I want to mention before signing off for the day.  It’s slightly outside the scope of today’s narrative but I wanted to make sure it became part of your game plan.

Monterey California has always played Garfunkle to Carmel’s Simon.  A pleasant enough place but somehow lacking that ineffable spark that makes for a genuine superstar. 

As recently as the early 70s Monterey was home to an industrial scale fishing industry.  The street that became known as Cannery Row was lined with exactly what you would expect: fish canneries.  Overfishing and cheap imports drove the canneries out of business but not before John Steinbeck immortalized them in his novel, that staple of middle-school English classes, Cannery Row.

Apart from the name, Steinbeck would now find the street completely unrecognisable.  Theme restaurants, galleries selling appalling art and fish-burger bars have replaced the warehouses.  The outcasts and misfits that worked tinning sardines and drank themselves to unconsciousness in waterfront pubs have been replaced by obese Midwestern tourists sporting flaming pink hot pants and wraparound mirrored sunglasses. 

Your reward for navigating your way through the gauntlet of tourist traps will be a visit to the magnificent Monterey Bay Aquarium.

As part of a school outing or family adventure holiday you may have been dragged to an aquarium in Bristol or London.  Suffice it to say that in comparison the aquarium at Monterey Bay makes them look like ill-kept suburban birdbaths.

As I mentioned, marine biology isn’t my strong suit but the Monterey Bay Aquarium is, simply, wow!  The centrepiece exhibit is a 1.2 million gallon, 30’ tall acrylic tank containing an entire undersea environment.  The tank is accessible from three levels and with the exception of the blue glow from sunlight filtering through the water the viewing areas are kept dark.  Without suiting up in diving gear it is the closest you’ll ever get to a walk along the bottom of the sea.

On the side of the tank they post the feeding times so if you enjoy watching fish eat other fish make sure you swing back around.

2000 gallons of seawater per minute are flushed into the exhibits from Monterey Bay and back out again, making the aquarium an actual living part of the outside ecosystem.

If you somehow slept through your entire day at Pt. Lobos and missed sighting otters you’ll get a second chance at the aquarium.  A massive two-story tank houses a rotating stock of otters.  The aquarium takes in foundlings and injured otters and attempts, with somewhat limited success, to reintroduce them into the wild. 

The problem is that otters get very used to being hand-fed by female biology students in tight wetsuits (who wouldn’t?) so when they are ejected back into their biology student free natural habitat the otters suffer separation anxiety.  This in turn leads them to use their well-crafted “fluffy and cute” routine to get close to beach goers and use their four-inch spiked jaws and a tail like a steel cable to bat people away and nick coolers.

Because of this most of the otters you see at the aquarium will be turfed out to other zoos or become permanent residents of Monterey.

While we are on the subject of harmless looking creatures that can seriously mess you up, check out The Jellies Experience, it’s a stunning exhibit that just had a multi-million dollar makeover.  While I don’t believe a jellyfish’s natural habitat is backlit against a royal-blue field, as a visual effect it is mesmerising. 

The first and only time I have ever seen jellyfish in the wild was on holiday in Greece and they creeped me the hell out.  These things have no business even existing let alone being freekin’ immortal.  “Swarms”, “tentacles” and “multiplying” all feature prominently in that article.

Like all of California, the Monterey Bay Aquarium is big so plan accordingly.  Claire and I twice spent the better part of six hours there and we probably still missed things.

One word of warning, before visiting the aquarium set your Annoying Children Buffers to maximum.  No matter what hour of the day, or day of the week, the place is infested with roving bands of feral children all hollering and crying and screeching up and down walkways and mashing their little ice cream coated faces against the tanks.  Because you are basically inside a Plexiglas bubble the echoes of their banshee-like wails will penetrate your eardrums like spikes from a nail gun.   

Next up: San Francisco

The Old Man and the Letter

The men at the bar were old and thin with moustaches that sagged down wrinkled faces.  Their hands, when they grasped their drinks, were lined as the furrows in the earth they tilled and baked to the same colour. When they laughed, as they did now, it was at stories grown familiar by their telling.  The bartender, who was still young enough not to have heard all their lies before, laughed too.  He liked the old men and did not pity them, as others might, their age or their poverty.

One man did not join in the conversations at the bar.  He sat alone behind a small round table covered with stained grease cloth, his wine untouched, the last ember of his cigarette dying in an ashtray.  He held in his hand an envelope, yellow with age, from which he carefully removed and unfolded a letter.  The men at the bar lowered their voices.

“The same letter every night.” Said one of the men sadly.

            “I wonder what it says?” asked the bartender.

            “Why don’t you ask him?”

            “I could not. I only pour his drinks.  You men are his friends, he would not take offence if one of you were to ask him.”

            “He has not been our friend for years; he barely even speaks to us now.”

            “Perhaps you insulted him in some way?”

            “No, that is not the reason, that letter is the reason.”

The man at the table folded the letter neatly along well-worn creases and slid it back into the envelope.  He sat, for a while, staring at the door with the look of a man who had accepted a fact without understanding it.  He rolled a cigarette, lit it and watched the smoke weave its way to the ceiling.

            “Do you remember when he received it?” One of the old men asked.

            “Fifteen years ago at least.”

            “Maybe it is from his wife or his son?”

            “They were both dead by then.”

            “A mistress?”

            “He hardly looks the type to have had one.”

            “The years change a man.  Look at me, I used to have great muscles.”

            “And hair!”

They laughed at this and, spell broken, turned back to their drinks.

The evening grew late and the old men began to leave.  They gathered their coats, paid their tabs and walked, somewhat unsteadily, toward their homes.  At last only the bartender and the man at the table remained.

            “I would like to close up now”  the bartender said.

            “Of course,” said the man, as if awaking from a dream. “How many?”

            “Two glasses.”

The old man stood and went to the bar.  He took a few coins from a leather change purse and set them on the counter.

            “Is that enough?” he asked.

            “Yes.”

The bartender slid the money into a small tin box.

 “You spoke about my letter tonight?”

“We speak about it every night.”

“And what do you say?”

“We imagine it to be filled with intrigue and heartache.”

“Maybe at one time but now, now it is only faint words on yellow paper.”

“Perhaps you should tell them?”

“Perhaps I would if they asked.”

“They are your friends and feel the letter drove you away.”

The old man thought about this for a while.

“No,” he said at last,  “I did that.”

He put on his black coat and grey felt hat, taking time to adjust it on his head.  The two men shook hands.  The old man took the letter out of his pocket and placed it on the bar.  The bartender’s eyes grew wide and he moved a step backwards.

With a faint smile the old man said, “It is too late for me to make new friends so it would be best if I return to my old ones.”  He turned away and walked to the door.

“What am I to do with it?” asked the bartender. 

The old man stopped. “Whatever you feel is right” he answered without looking back.  He stood very still and listened.  For a long time he heard nothing at all except for his own heart in his ears.  The room was cold now and his breath hung in the air.  A lifetime passed before he heard: a match was struck and flames caught paper.  He turned his collar up and walked out into the night.

How did this happen?

I live in London. London is not my home. Home is 6000 miles west of here along the coast of California. For someone who grew up with surfing, skateboarding and sunburns, the ice-water beaches, leaden grey skies and endless rows of concrete parking structures of Mother England are, if not hell, a reasonable approximation.

In the summer of 2000 I abandoned friends, family, Mexican food, sandy beaches, warm summers, mild winters, decent book stores, 24 hour anything, objective journalism, non-smoking offices, outdoor activities, tans, shorts, cheap petrol, rock radio stations, baseball and my cat in order to move with my girlfriend, to London. She had been accepted to graduate school at Oxford and I managed to wrangle a transfer within my company.

We arrived in the midst of what I was later to find out was an unprecedented heat wave; my California surfer-dude shorts and t-shirts seemed comfortably appropriate. We found a ridiculously over-priced flat overlooking the rail road tacks in what I was told was a pretty swish neighbourhood, bought a bunch of semi-disposable Scandinavian furniture, fucked a few times and talked about what colour cat we wanted. Life was good. I was happy, in love and thinking, “This will work, this is good, I could really get to like it here.” What an idiot.

A month later my girlfriend dumped me; leaving me with a six-month lease on an apartment that I couldn’t afford and a dawning realization that not only did I not know a soul in the entire country but also that the only social activities available involved getting monstrously drunk and throwing up a lot. Fleeing was not an option. All my stuff was somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, impossible to divert for at least a month and the terms of my work contract stipulated that I had to stick it out for a year or else pay the company back for dragging my sorry ass to England.

I was fucked and I knew it. By November, when the freezing rain set in, I was wearing four layers of t-shirts under an old biker jacket because I was too poverty stricken to buy any proper clothes. I had no friends, no telephone, no TV or radio and ended up spending 16 hours a day at work just so I would have people to talk to. The only memory I have of my 35th birthday is sitting on my floor and crying.

My parents came to visit me for Thanksgiving that year. They smuggled a turkey over in their luggage because I was unsure whether we could buy one in the local store. My oven refused to light and we were forced to grill the wretched bird under the broiler: it came out looking like a lump of charcoal with legs.

Increasingly desperate and pathetic attempts to reunite with my ex-girlfriend failed predictably. I was replaced by someone younger, smarter and better-looking 24 hours after she set foot on campus. But hey, it’s been 13 years now and I’ve moved on. I’ve accepted her decision and I’m sure that if I saw her today lying on the ground engulfed by flames that I could find it in my heart to piss on her- if I didn’t have to cross the street first.

Those first few months pretty much set the stage for everything that has followed. So if anything I write sounds a bit jaded, you can at least see that my bitterness has a solid grounding in betrayal, isolation and despair.

Wanting vs. Having

Picture if you will, a small, hip, veggie café in California, the exact location must remain a closely guarded secret so as to protect the identity of one of the participants.  It’s just after sunset; the air is warm and people with tans are mulling around trying to look rich.  It was a good thing that I got there early because the place was heaving.  Packed full of, well, people just like me: reasonably affluent educated liberals with meat aversions.  I put my name on the list and wandered back outside to wait.

I’m a pretty patient guy.  I don’t mind queues at grocery stores or movie theatres and, if I set my mind to it, I can do some pretty serious daydreaming.  The one thing I am absolutely no good at is nervous anticipation.

I had my trusty Yashica T4 with me so I snapped a few photos even though I knew the light was bad.  I watched a guy use his dog as bait to catch attractive strangers and finally I sat down at an iron table and pretended to read e-mails I had already read on my Blackberry.  How did we ever look busy in public before Blackberries?

She saw me first and stood slightly outside my peripheral vision.  It took me a moment to realize she was there and a moment longer to compose myself enough to say anything at all.  I believe my first words were, “Ohmyfuckinggodit’syou!”

She sat down across from me.  We looked at each other for a moment and I was relived to see that her smile was as large and goofy looking as mine.

“Well…”  I said.

“Yep…”  she said.

She stood up.  “Come here!” she demanded, spreading her arms wide.

I threw myself at her with such force that she had to take a step back to keep from crashing down onto the sidewalk.  I held her so hard I thought I could feel her ribs buckling.  I picked her up, she was light as a butterfly wing; her legs curled up behind her.  We were laughing with a pure, hysterical, manic laughter that almost but not quite descended to tears.  All the while we were both saying, over and over again, “I can’t believe it’s you!”

We were still giggling after we had untangled ourselves and sat down.  We each took a deep breath and then, apropos of nothing, she said, “You always show up at just the right time, I’m getting a divorce.”

I don’t know what I was expecting her to say but it sure wasn’t that.  If it had been anyone else I might have thought she was simply yanking my chain, testing to see what kind of reaction this news would evoke.  But not her, she was serious as a heart attack.  What I said next was vastly different than what I was thinking.

I said, “Oh no!  That’s awful!  What happened?  I thought you guys were great for each other?”

I was thinking:  “Holly fucking shit, that is the best news anyone could have told me in this or any other lifetime, let’s find a hotel so we can fuck like weasels!”

Let me tell you a little bit about the person sitting there at the table with me.  We’ll call her Emily because I like the name and it in some ways seems to suit her. 

“Emily” and I have known each other for fifteen years.  I was working at a mail-order camera store when she was hired to be our receptionist.  When I walked in and saw her standing there (isn’t that a Beatles song?) I suddenly understood all those tired clichés about love at first sight.  She was, at the time, newly married and newly pregnant, oddly enough, in that order.  I was married too: three years into what would turn out to be a six-year saga of fucking, fighting and insanity.

It took us about ten seconds after we first made eye contact to realize that both our marriages and indeed every other relationship up to that point had been, for each of us, a grand waste of time and that, standing before us now was the person we were to destined to be with.

Of course it didn’t work out that way.  We both, temporarily, stayed married, she had a daughter and then another.  After my divorce I bounced from one woman to another until I finally landed in England and, well, you know the rest.

Emily and I drifted apart and lost touch.  It wasn’t until I was planning one of my excursions to California that I decided to track her down.  It took a fair bit of detective work but I finally found a cousin on her husband’s side who forwarded her a message from me.  Three months and about a thousand e-mails later I was having dinner with her in what, as it turned out, was her favourite restaurant as well as mine.

I hadn’t seen Emily in ten years and we talked as if there had been no pause in the conversation.  We completed each other’s sentences, we spontaneously burst into song, we laughed way too loud and when we paused to catch our breath, we stared at each other in slack jawed amazement.

I held her hand.  Her fingers were thin and delicate and she kept her nails clipped short; she still wore her wedding ring and it gave me a slight twinge when I felt it.  I closed my fingers around hers and allowed my thoughts to drift a bit:  She was sitting on a porch somewhere overlooking the sea; holding a cup of coffee and smiling into the sun.  Cats, dogs and kids running inside and out; I’m cooking breakfast because that is the one meal I can do without causing too much damage to our health or the global environment.  I can see her there, in profile, the outline of her face silhouetted against blue sky, red hair soft as spun silk turning to fleece in the light of a new day.

“Uh, hello?” she said, jolting me back to the moment.

“Sorry, I was just fast forwarding.”

I kissed her hand.

“Very British.” She said.

“No, very French.”

She recited the French Taunter skit from Holly Grail word for word.

This caused me to double over in laughter and when I straightened up she was looking at me in a way that made me think that she was about to make a weighty proclamation, which, as it turns out she was.

“You know,” she began “I really love you.”

My Han Solo moment, at last!

“I know,” I said.

We left the restaurant and headed up the street to Boarders Books.  After taking a step or two she slid her arm around my waist and I put mine around her shoulder.  That just didn’t seem right for some reason so after a moment, my left arm was around her hips and I was blind drunk with joy.  We walked that way for two blocks, chatting about things I can’t remember.  I think I said something about the stars.

As were crossing the street, arms now rapped around each other (holding hands didn’t provide the full body contact we required) a mini van pulled up and asked for directions to the freeway.  After we told them the best route the guy in the passenger seat gave us a knowing smile and said, “Enjoy the rest of your walk.”  I assured him we would.

We stayed in Boarders until they kicked us out and left with two armloads of books.  We’d spent the evening discovering, not to our surprise, that our taste in everything from evolutionary theory and quantum mechanics to pulp sci-fi and art magazines was, without a single exception, identical.

It was a slow and silent walk to her car.

We stood next to her battered black Saab, bathed in the amber glow of a streetlight and held each other for a long time.  We knew it ended there.  She would open her car door and return to her kids, dog and the horror of a soon to be ex-husband who had yet to move out.  In one week’s time I would board a plane for England and a job that paid me too much to leave.

“Our timing, as always, sucks.” She said, 

 “Maybe in another lifetime I’ll get to be Arthur to your Fenchurch?”

“I’d like that.”  She said and kissed me very softly.

Another long hug.

She threw her bag of books into the back seat; much to my disappointment, her car started.  Many things failed to happen at that point: I failed to stop her from driving off, I failed to decide that, sod it all, I was going to be with this woman no matter what and both of us failed utterly and completely to follow through on anything that happened that night.

I went back to England.

She got a divorce.

She found another man.

And the e-mails stopped.

Love Letters

Inside my head there is a letter waiting to be sent to you
Droll
Witty
Urbane
Slightly flirtatious
But it is trapped inside a body that has had precious little rest since, since, well, since as long as I can remember and in my present state, I can’t remember much.

I do remember something
Sitting on the floor with you inventorying kit; making up ridiculous acronyms for the model numbers:
“AIS”
“Always Isolate Seahorses”
“AF”
“Androgynous Flyboys”
Giggling wickedly.

You did see me in San Francisco
You brought your boyfriend
Didn’t you meet him at AA?
I was working at a college and was dead broke
We all had coffee on Union St.
You and I held hands behind his back
And hugged for a bit too long when we said goodbye
So you see, San Francisco reminds me of you too

Midnight in London and the wind is rattling naked branches
I am trying to type one more coherent line, one more word, a letter even
Something
Anything
But the toothpicks that are propping my eyelids open are bending a bit too much for safety
And I keep hitting the wrong keys
But if staying awake is awfully hard
Not writing to you is harder

Way back

In the days of my youth I frolicked in the valleys behind Santa Barbara. My folks had a spread with a couple acres of orange trees interspersed with avocados and even a walnut or two. This was a time without fences or close neighbours and past the borders of our property lay an untamed wilderness simply begging to be explored by a boy and his dog.

At the end of one of the orchards a creek ran up into the hills. On summer days, cloudless, hot days that stretched far into the evening, I would pack a rucksack full of previsions and Rocky (the World's Best Dog) and I would set off to find the mouth of the river. We never took along any water because what was that stuff running over the rocks? If it was good enough for Rocky to drink, it was good enough for me. In retrospect I undoubtedly escaped injury or death at the hands of dysentery microbes only because they were too shocked by my stupidity to actually destroy my bowels.

150 yards upstream (which seems like 150 miles when you are 10 and slogging your way through dense underbrush) there was a small clearing that looked out over our valley. Someone had the good sense to plant a large, flat topped rock square in the middle of the clearing; it was on this rock that my best friend and I would take our midday meal. Half a dozen oranges for me and a goodly handful of dog biscuits for him. We always shared.

I don’t know if you have ever eaten six oranges in a single sitting but by the fourth one your lips feel like they are covered with stinging red fire ants. The trouble is they are so sweet, and so juicy and after hiking up the childhood equivalent of the Amazon you are so hungry that you don’t notice the belt sander being applied to your mouth. That is, until half an hour later when you are face down in muddy creek water trying desperately to wash the burn off only to discover that it won’t come off no matter how hard you scrub with sand.

I remembered all this in my kitchen tonight. Standing there, hot and sticky from my ride home, eating an orange over the sink and having my lips tingle with the memory of so very long ago…

Oh Lucky Man

Le Meridian Hamburg; having peanuts for dinner because I can’t be bothered to wrap one of their bathrobes around my pasty white body long enough to answer the door for room service.   Truth be told, it’s not the peanuts that I’m after; it’s the salt.  The peanuts are simply bite-sized delivery vehicles with good mouth feel.  In an ideal world I’d suck the salt off those babies and spit them out again but the concept sounds a little to risqué for my Victorian sensibilities.

In the past two weeks I have slept in my own bed for a grand total of six fitful hours.  This stopover at home was due to the baffling and impenetrable mechanics of airline pricing which dictated that it was more cost effective to fly me from Copenhagen to London before sending me to Hamburg.  Thus I ended up backtracking 550 miles instead of advancing 300 but I did get to play luggage roulette at Heathrow a couple more times.

I’ve been instructed by a friend of mine to a) write more and b) be more funny.  It seems that my last instalment had her competing for jumping space on a nearby bridge and she felt that, given her current situation of inadvertent celibacy, stories of unrequited love might just cause her to lose her grip.

Truth be told, “inadvertent celibacy” should be changed to “self imposed celibacy” because she has no lack of opportunities.  Her complaint is that the bevies of men queuing to buy her dinner are too young to bother with. 

“They’re just little boys!  Why would I want to go out with a 28 year old?”

“Uh, the sex?” I said.

“I don’t want sex, I want a grownup man and a relationship.”

“Wait, let’s get back to the sex.  I’m a 42-year-old guy and if some twenty-something hottie asked me out I would hesitate only long enough to check the expiration date on the packet of condoms that are slowly crumbling to dust in my night table.”

“You don’t understand”

No, I don’t.  I really, truly, honestly, sincerely, don’t.

I’m not exactly the kind of guy who women, even those of questionable sobriety, make a pass or even cast a passing glance at so the mere thought of someone actually fancying me enough to ask me out to dinner is enough to make my palms sweat.

My friend does not suffer from this malady.  Indeed, she is as brilliant as she is lovely which is to say, amazingly so; with a dry wit delivered faster and more accurately than one of those smart bombs which cause guys in the Pentagon to get stiffies over.  She has a semi-respectable career, owns her own flat and is someone you could bring home to meet the folks without having to explain away any embarrassing twitches or forehead tattoos.

Why she is still on the prowl is a mystery to me and indeed most of the above ground inhabitants of at least four of the major landmasses on this planet.  It’s not that she doesn’t want some willing bloke to take a swim around in her gene pool, it’s just that she is holding out for George Clooney and at last report he only goes for blondes. 

My friend from the Midlands isn’t the only attractive woman of my acquaintance who bemoans her solitary life.  I have the occasional dinner with a woman who, it must be said, was designed by God on one of His better days.  After a drink or two she will invariably launch into a soulful lament about the lack of available men out there.  This after flirting shamelessly with the waiter, guys at the next table, the bouncer and practically every male we encounter over the course of the evening- with the exception, of course, of me.

Does she not realize that she could have her pick of any man within a 150-mile radius of her blast zone?  Married, engaged, long term committed relationship; at the “I” bit in “I do” it doesn’t matter.  Any man not being wheeled along with a sheet pulled over his head would abandon his wife, sell his children into slavery, torch his home and torpedo his career if she said that’s what it took to be with her.  Not simply because she is heart-stoppingly beautiful (she is) or rocket-scientist smart (she is) or that men are fickle, amoral, weasels (we are) but because taken as a whole, women like her are thin on the ground.  Even setting aside the fact that any man alive, straight or gay, would fuck her, we (speaking as the entire male species), in the long run, really do want the whole package.  So yes, it is the sex but it’s not just the sex.  Sometimes.

So why is this particular friend of mine not coupled up?  I personally think that she is spoiled for choice and has lost interest in the game.  Whereas people like me, average looks, poor math skills, have to settle for whoever will settle for us (and oft times fight for the privilege), my lovely friend has had so many offers that she has simply withdrawn into a shell of indifference.  Her knee-jerk reaction to any guy who shows an interest is to tease a bit and then shut him down.  On the rare occasion she hooks up with a bloke, he’ll be just as gorgeous as her and just as emotionally withdrawn.

Not that I’ll be loosing any more hair worrying about how empty it can be for beautiful people to fuck other beautiful people but it does illustrate the theory that no matter what we have, we always want something else.  Even if we are constantly told that what we have is the best thing going.

Why is this relevant to me?  Because my friend from the Midlands, the one who thinks 28 is below the legal age of majority, tells me all the time how lucky I am to be with the woman currently sharing my airspace: to have a relationship which is easy and stable and, even though it’s not the most passionate, possessing tenderness and a large laughter factor. 

She tells me these things and I am caught up short.  Lucky?  Really?  But what about all those times I’m bored and wish that the person lying next to me were reading Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica or Ethics rather than Good Housekeeping?  And you know, a bit more sex wouldn’t go amiss either.  And don’t get me started about how she can’t put anything back into the same place twice and…

But when the lights go out, the night is quiet and I’m in our bed, together again after days of being apart, when her breathing is all I can hear and she is warm and soft and pressed against me- it’s then and, truth be told, a few thousand other times during the course of every single day, when I realize that my friend is right, through no fault of my own and certainly undeservingly so, I am a lucky man.