School's out for summer
It’s a tough time to graduate
You spend SoCal summers at the beach. In NorCal, you go to the coast. At the beach you lay on the sand covered in lotions and potions and get brown. Coppertone Brown. You body surf, and when you’re done getting rolled by the mighty Pacific, you stumble your bleary eyed, surf-rashed ass, to an enclave of sandy towels, where you inhale bags of nacho cheese Doritos1 washed down with coke.
It’s different up north. At the coast you bundle up and fight through the drizzle, climb rocks and search for tide pools. Summer is the cloudiest season. If the sun breaks through, time freezes.
Up here, coffee and chowder beat Coke and Nachos.
Sometimes when I was a kid in LA in the summer, my big sister, whose skin got browner by the day, would let me tag along, and I’d roll down the 10 with her friends to Santa Monica. The 10, AKA the Santa Monica Freeway, stretches clear across LA from downtown, through the basin, to the beach. It’s a ten lane wall of cars that whittles down to four as you approach Venice. Just beyond the Lincoln exit, you pass through the McClure Tunnel and the Pacific Ocean majestically appears, filling your vision.
Now you’re on Highway 1, the Pacific Coast Highway.
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On our last van trip — seems like forever ago — we went to the Desert.
Driving back from Arizona, I got an email that a local High School was looking for a CS teacher. I stared at that email a long while and I ended up taking the gig. It was fun, but it meant hanging up the van keys for a lot of months.
Since school ended, Alice Cooper’s ‘Schools Out’ has been playing in my brain. I haven’t felt it since I had summers and that’s a long time ago. So, in our first trip back in The Amazing Spider-Van, we went west to the beach coast.
River Road is two lanes from the beginning, and it takes you from Santa Rosa clear across Sonoma County to the Ocean. While the drive takes about a hour, just like getting to the beach in LA, rather than ten lanes of cars cutting a swath through the city, it winds through the county. First, through broad open fields of vineyards. Then, it dips down into redwoods to follow the Russian River through the small towns of Rio Nido (Rivers Nest) and Monte Rio (River Mountain).
The Bohemian Grove, summer escape for wealthy power brokers, lurks in the hills above Monte Rio.
Guerneville is the bigger river town, adjacent to the Armstrong Redwoods and once you make it through there, the terrain opens up again, and you catch sight of the River making the trip to the coast with you. Just past Duncans Mills and then — much like the McClure Tunnel — you round a bend to join up with Highway 1 and the very same great Pacific stretches out before you.
Jenner’s Cafe Aquatica sits where the Russian River meets the Pacific.
Jenner is 500 Miles north of Santa Monica on Highway 1. The 1 ends just north of here, turning into the 101 in Leggett, at the edge of Mendocino county. This trip is a warmup for vanlife summer starting with a longer ride to Oregon next week.
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The last time we camped at this spot it ended badly. On our last night, running low on food, we went into town for dinner and ate big plates of pasta. Mine had spicy sausage. So good and too much. At 2AM a terrifying, unrelenting, scream came from underneath the bed. The CO2 Alarm. We skulked home at 3AM, unable to turn it off.
After consulting with the experts, consensus was our digestion was to blame. Don’t eat pasta with spicy sausage and sleep in a can.
Not this time. After a year of trips I know all the ins and outs of The Amazing Spider-Van.
This trip we slept like babes.
We hit the hills:
We hit the beach:
Salmon Beach faces the full might of the Pacific and it is loud and it is windy. The sand is hot, while the air is cold. It overwhelms your every sense.
The seagulls stare it down:
But it’s a lot, and none of us really know where we’re going to be at the end of the summer.
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If you’re graduating into this dizzying world of AI, it’s especially hard to make heads or tails of it. When I graduated, I drank a bunch of wine up in the Berkeley hills, and then stumbled down, red faced, to don my cap and gown, walk across the stage and shake someone’s hand. I moved back to LA. Back in with my parents. It took me awhile to find my footing, and longer to find my groove.
Jasmine Sun once replied to my request for a feature on Substack. She politely told me it’s on the backlog … then left Substack to write about AI. Now she’s immersed in it and has a decided perspective on this:
There’s a space between turning your back on the waves, and letting them overwhelm you. Take this guy — he’s just looking at something else.
What do you call Dorito’s that aren’t yours? NACHO CHEESE.
I fell in love w/the PCH roughly 25 years ago!
Spider-Van is really coming along. Do you think road-tripping is a prominent part of the next few years?