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Bean
Fields
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 California is a big state,
a thousand kilometers from top to bottom, holding some ten or more percent of
the nation’s population. I don’t know
the current standing but California
would be somewhere in the world’s top ten nations in terms of GNP if it were
a country instead of just a state.
One passes through quite a lot of terrain going from the Los Angeles
basin to the redwoods of Santa Cruz. First there are the growing fields around Ventura and Oxnard, full of stooped over
Mexican labor. I didn’t snap one of
those, just one of the fields with its poles receding into the horizon.
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Soft
Rounded Hills
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 After
Santa Barbara, the coast road, California One, turns inland, through Goleta and
Santa Rosa, continuing for about a hundred miles before one gets to San Luis
Obispo, where Cal One and 101 run congruently. This part of inland California is filled
with soft, rounded, breast-like hills, always covered by a yellowish grass
that looks like down from a distance.
I’ve driven up many times of year and never seen them anything but
that golden brown.
The hills continue for many miles north of San Luis,
about all the way to King City,
but I’ll leave them for the southbound trip.
On the northbound trip, I always take the coastal route that starts at
San Luis and takes me past Esalen and Big Sur,
before spilling me into Monterrey. Among other things, the geometry of
hair-pin turns and a west-facing coast means northbound is the most advantageous
for one of my MG’s main resources: tight
turns. One can get stuck by little old
ladies bent on sight-seeing and really bogged down.
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Flat
Tire Cove
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 It’s
a fun drive for an MG and I’ve made it in many of ‘em,
including an MGTD, an MGA, and many MGBs over the
decades I’ve known Mark. If one were a
sane MG driver – well, if one were sane one wouldn’t drive an MG in the first
place, but if you were, you probably wouldn’t drive an MG with élan. But that curvy, hair-pin filled road with
its spectacular view just makes one of those low-slung British imports want
to go fast. (If for no other reason
that the cool climate falls much closer to the range in England
where it was built.)
So I’d say I was pretty lucky to get the blowout you saw
at the top of the page on a nice, calm straight-away rather than on, say, one
of those tight turns where I’m pressing the road-hugging limits of my
four-on-the-floor. A nice sized hole
on the side, big enough to put my thumb through, and a catastrophic loss of
air, not the slow sizzle of a nail.
And I was lucky to find not only a couple of touring RVs nearby with a
small jack – the jack that comes with an MG is useless after a few years -- but
a chap who had owned an MGB himself and actually spotted the year of
the model at about 80 yards. (MGs look substantially the same for decades, let
alone years, at a time. He spotted the
year they changed from all-chrome to rubber-protected bumper uprights.)
And if I hadn’t had the blowout where I did, I would
never have noticed this lovely little waterfalled
(middle left) cove on the other side of the street. I felt so good about it all that when I’d
gotten the tire changed I chose to drive a few miles with the emergency brake
on.
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Freedom!
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 This
isn’t the best picture in the world, but it was taken by holding the camera
above the windshield and hoping for the best.
I’ve always loved this sign, not only a signal that I’ve reached the hamlet
of Freedom, about an hour from Mark’s house, but also a Sign from (my
personal) God.
Airports themselves aren’t as much fun as they used to
be, what with having to nearly strip to get from the airport door to the
aircraft door, but I still always feel somehow freer when I’m on the road to
the airport.
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Judy
and Mark
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 Mark
and Judy live in the hills above Santa Cruz
in Felton and Scotts [sic, no apostrophe] Valley respectively. Both have houses set in the woods. Judy’s house and garden are Apollonian:
groomed, well tended, with a rock pool and a stream that runs by pump. Mark’s is Dionysian, wild and unkempt, with
a natural creek that snakes past Grotto Gottlieb, the place he’s carved out
of the shrubs and trees that cascade from his house perched on the
hillside. Only if you stand in one
particular spot on the deck that runs along the back of his house can you see
even a corner of another house, far across the ravine. For all you’d know, you might be miles from
anyone.
Rather than put the pix from their territory here, I’ll
let those who want to see them click here
instead.
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Arboretum
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 And so to the test drive
for the camera. Mark had a business
call in Santa Cruz
and I took the opportunity to stop at the Arboretum to try it on
flowers. For those who are interested
in this kind of thing, it’s a Casio EXILIM EX-Z1000, can take pix at three,
five, and ten megapixels, 3X optical zoom, about
$400 at CircuitCity. It also has lots of pretty neat features,
like colored filters included and the ability to make any of your own
pictures serve as settings-templates for subsequent pictures.
Once again, I can’t really think of a good way to put the
multitude of pix here and not either take up lots of territory or make it
look really funny when you resize the screen, so if you want to see more pix
of flowers, click here. They’ll take a while to load.
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Heritage
Homes
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 See
that little blue plaque to the right of the stairs to the porch? That means the Department of the Interior
has got you by the short and curlies. According to Mark, you can let it run to
seed but you can’t remodel without permission. And that’s what you get for owning a really
pretty Victorian-era home. (And why
are there so many gray cars around here?)
For those who want to see more pix from Santa Cruz,
click here.
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Santa Cruz
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 But
for all the heritage houses, this was what in Santa Cruz
made me grin. Check out the street
sign. For the visually challenged, it
reads Squid Row. (For non-Americans,
Skid Row is an idiom meaning where the down-and-outers live, hence – or
perhaps thence -- ‘on the skids.’)
I might as well use the acreage here to note that not
only did I get that lovely blowout but it was pretty clear that my exhaust
pipe had become unstuck from the manifold.
Not to mention that the little baby was behaving oddly, temperature-wise. So among the things Mark and I did on the
way to Santa Cruz was to drop my car off at the mechanic to the tune of $250
for a new thermostat and reattaching my tailpipe . . . plus another $80 for
the new tire. Er
. . . not to mention that the gas alone cost about $125! This ain’t 1960s Kansas anymore, Toto.
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Santa Cruz Denizen
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 By
the way, you don’t normally need ten megapixels . .
. unless you want to make a large poster or blow up a small piece of a
picture. It looked like I was taking the
picture of the building next to the guy – that’s him in the lower left.
Santa
Cruz is a pretty strange town, a throwback Twilight-Zone-cum-Tourist-Town of
charming architecture (some old, some not), old hippies, and cool doods. One thing
I’d gotten wrong about it was that it does allow smoking on the streets – I
thought they’d banned smoking entirely outside your own car (possibly) and
your own home (some exceptions, ask me about a law suit I think I know
about.) No, no, they’ll let you smoke
but not really in the outdoor restaurants.
I mean, I think it might be legal but the café won’t let you. I think Santa Cruz
prides itself as the home of the Nico-Nazi
skinheads.
But not that dude, I think. You gotta love
the hair.
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Mark
in MG in Front of Judy’s House
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 It
was a productive few days: got a new tire, got the thermostat replaced, and
got the exhaust pipe re-attached; listened to the backyard’s silence, drank
beer, ate junk food, and shot the breeze with Mark. And then it was time point ol’ Dobbin’s nose southward and
head back. Like I said, the southbound
drive isn’t really conducive to taking the coastal route, not to mention I’m
sort of test driving those new parts – Dobbin seems to run about 15% hotter
than nearly four decades of MGB experience suggests it should. So it’s Route 101, down through the center
of California’s
Inland Empire
of year-round agriculture.
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Those
Rounded Hills Again
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 Those
lovely hills start almost right away and keep on charming for a couple of
hundred miles this time. I’ve left
Mark’s at seven in the morning and I reach the hills by a bit after eight,
shadows slanting in the early sunlight.
If there are any botanists out there, I’d like to hear
why that ground cover never seems to be green.
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Fog
Rolls into Point Mugu
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 And
good old multi-climated California
has a final mood in store for me as I reach Point Mugu,
a bit less than an hour from my front door.
The fog rolls in with a vengeance – from blistering sunlight in a
tank-top to a chilly fogbank and struggling to get my down vest on again.
But as always, good to be home to my little egosystem.
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