Jason Baldwin (.us)

Determined to at least visit City Lights before I left, I packed up the car, checked out of the hotel, and headed north (stop­ping at Bevmo to stock up on more 21st Amendment beer to carry home), only to be met by traf­fic at a dead stop. I knew I was near Candlestick Park, so I thought maybe there was a game today. A quick search on my Blackberry con­firmed that the 49ers played at 4:15. After I passed the exit for the sta­dium, traf­fic improved briefly before crawl­ing to a stop again. Another search con­firmed my fear: the Giants also had a home game at 1PM, so, regret­fully, I took the next exit and turned south. I wasn’t going to waste a day in traf­fic get­ting to a book­store, nor any­thing else down­town, so I set a course for Los Angeles that would take me down the Pacific Coast Highway, via Monterey and Big Sur.

I’d post pho­tos or video or some­thing, but it was more or less five hours of twists, turns, hills to climb up and coast down under an over­cast, foggy sky. I stopped briefly in Santa Cruz, where, mirac­u­lously, the skies had turned shock­ingly blue, but there was so much traf­fic near the beach and the board­walk that I decided to sol­dier on, since I was plan­ning on spend­ing at least a cou­ple of days in L.A., and there would be beaches aplenty to visit.

I stopped again in Monterey, where I debated spend­ing the night, but since it was only 3 in the after­noon, I decided to knock out more of the drive to L.A. and ended up at a Motel 6 in Morro Bay, which could be mis­taken for what I imag­ine a coastal town in north­ern New England to be: foggy and smelling of salt­wa­ter and dead fish.