Denver-Las Vegas — I'd been to Reno and found it thoroughly unpleasant, what my friend Dave would call a "real dump." And, my old buddy Bob ended his life of substance abuse problems by overdosing there. He was a talented musician with an equally if not more talented rich & famous musician brother who had stayed home and practiced while Bob went about getting fucked up. Yep, that's pretty much how it works.
All I knew about Las Vegas was — the story of Bugsy Siegel and his dream of creating a goldmine in the desert, my readings of Hunter Thompson's "Fear and Loathing," the Rat Pack, the Howard Hughes legend, and the glamorous bright-light Vegas bullshit one sees in countless movies.
Going west from Denver, I-70 goes over the pass at the Eisenhower tunnel, elevation 11,000 and some ft. From there it's downhill, across Utah, catch I-15 and south to Nevada across the northwest corner of Arizona. After an overnight at the Sleepy Hollow motel in Green River, where the man at the desk was missing an arm but thankfully not his head, we resigned ourselves to desert conditions there to Las Vegas and on to Los Angeles.
Why Vegas? To visit a friend I'd not yet met who works there as a teacher. On to the Rat Pack city armed with a cooler full of ice and a squirt bottle in the absence of air conditioning. Temperatures hovered in the 110-115-degree range, which might have been bearable until four traffic accidents on the 15 created hours of delay. One of them involved several badly wrecked vehicles and a dead horse. Finally we came in sight of the fabled city and my heart sank. Las Vegas looks and feels just like Reno, only more so. What you see in the movies is carefully shot and edited to show only a tiny area that appears to be a flashy, colorful amusement park. The visit with the old friend left something to be desired, but the house was air-conditioned and provided relief from the unrelenting 110-degree heat.
Highway 15 is not the nice, picturesque two-lane road out of Vegas I'd thought from seeing too many movies. It's a big, multi-lane freeway full of drivers in a hurry and the ever-present big trucks. It was still hot of course, but there was only one accident delay.
When I was a kid, someone told me that when the temperature of the air reaches 98.6 F., "normal" body temp, people tend to become if not murderous, at least very cranky. I wondered about the human psyche at even higher temps, while passing the unusual number of auto wrecks along I-15, and waiting for the road to be cleared. The irritability factor was indeed high but we made it into Los Angeles in relative peace if not comfort. The 30 year-old car had run like a top all the way and I was pretty grateful for that.
Highway 101 — As we prepared to leave for Marin County, my daughter asked — as people in Los Angeles inevitably do — "Are you taking the 5 or the 101?" It was comforting to hear freeways being called "the" such-and-such. It doesn't happen anywhere except southern California. I had driven from Las Vegas to Mount Washington via the 15, to the 210, to the 2. After driving through the globally-warmed, intense desert heat with no AC in the car, I would forsake the lesser mileage of I-5 and take the far more pleasant alternative. I know every inch of highway 101, from its inception at the 134 in L.A. to its twisty loop around the Olympic Peninsula.
If you're lucky in summer — prevailing westerly season — you'll get cooling fog near the ocean.
A few favorite stops along the way north: In Thousand Oaks, just off the Wendy Dr. exit on the right, there's a great little coffee, sandwich and gelato shop, Conejo Coffee. A good little mostly Mexican restaurant, Me and Z's in Arroyo Grande. Good clam chowder (just down the road from Pismo Beach), and everyone gets dessert, a complimentary bit of ice cream. Best tacos ever in King City at La Potranca, south end of town on the main drag.
The real pleasure of Highway 101, once you get past the Valley, Camarillo and Ventura, is the lack of heavy traffic and relative absence of big trucks. Big rig drivers have to make time and the 5 is the shortest way from Southern CA to the Bay Area and all the way to Seattle. In the stretch between Willits and Eureka on 101, it is possible and even likely to sometimes find the road devoid of other vehicles. I miss driving through Cloverdale before the bypass. The north end of town has since been phonied up and is no longer interesting. And I will miss driving through Willits. Freeway travel can become tedious, and going through a town gives one a break.
We pulled off on Avenue of the Giants, a touristy thing, yes, but living in the interior one can no longer take the redwoods for granted. Crescent City, being "not quite California" in my hazy cultural perceptions, is a perfect departure point, and... yes, there's Pelican Bay too, part of my Grand Tour of major prisons along my favored roadway. Reminders that all is not wonderful in the Golden State, but like an old joke about money, "it isn't everything but it beats whatever is in second place."
101 along the Oregon coast is also quite scenic, if one is fascinated with the view. For me it's physical proximity to the ocean that matters more than the visuals. We did take the opportunity to pull off and get our feet in the salt water, no small thing when you're living 1300 miles inland at over 5000 ft. altitude. Heading east from Lincoln City, one drives through fields of wheat and hay, almost immediately once again in the interior. Friends in Portland provided the last tidbit of west coast hospitality and we were off.
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