California Road Trip, April 22 - May 8, 2010

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This trip was supposed to be a Mediterranean rail tour, starting in Madrid and traveling through Barcelona, Marseilles, Nice, Milan and finishing in Rome. But the volcanic eruption in Iceland and the ensuing ash cloud canceled our connecting flight to Madrid through Brussels. So, we decided to do a California road trip instead.

We flew into LA, rented a car, and stayed at the Beverley Hills Crown Plaza for 3 nights. I was a bit trepidatious about driving in LA, as I hadn't driven in a while and had heard awful things about LA traffic. But actually, the streets are so wide and there is so much parking everywhere that it really was a breeze. Even the expressways during rush hour weren't too bad thanks to the carpool lanes (not something I would want to do everyday, mind you!)

Being a pedestrian in LA, on the other hand, is a nightmare. We knew this, but nonetheless we started our exploration of the city the way we always do - on foot. We were hungry, and our hotel wasn't too far from a deli we had heard was good. After eating, we continued to walk all over Beverley Hills and West Hollywood, strolling along famous boulevards like Rodeo, Sunset and Santa Monica. We would occasionally come across a stretch of cool shops, but everything is generally so spread out in LA you can't possibly visit everything worth seeing on foot - or via transit for that matter.... unless you want to wait a very long time.

After the first day of walking, we decided to start driving everywhere. We drove downtown, parked, and walked along Broadway and through little Japan and Chinatown. I think we probably should have stayed at a hotel closer to downtown so that we would have been closer to nightlife appropriate to our tastes, and I could have had a few drinks without worrying about driving home. One night we went to the infamous Viper Room to hear some live music. We were hoping to catch a bus from our hotel, but ended up walking over an hour up Beverly Dr and down Sunset through this super posh neighbourhood where we didn't pass a single other pedestrian. An empty bus rushed past us at one point on Sunset, too bad we didn't see it coming quick enough to run to a stop.

At the Viper Room, the first band we saw was very 80's heavy metal - these were old guys, but they sure rocked. The next band was a HUGE disappointment - one of those lame emo bands with songs that make you want to kill yourself. Would have left if we hadn't paid $15 cover. The last band was a marked improvement - something the singer said that totally depicts LA: "I want to thank you all for coming out tonight, for driving here, and paying for parking and drinks." Yes, I'm sure we were the only ones who walked there, and later saw a few drunk girls leave and drive away confirming that many really were drinking and driving. This is why it is not a good idea to build a city where people are forced to drive to get to the nightlife. To get home, we took a cab, which took us a different and seemingly much faster way back to our hotel, so maybe it wouldn't have taken us an hour to walk if we'd have taken the proper route.

Another time getting home late, we did manage to take a bus which dropped us not too far from the hotel. We took the subway at one point too, but it doesn't cover a very large area and only comes every 20 minutes when we were waiting for it around 9:30pm. 20 minutes! That's absurd. It was full of people too, and I overheard others complaining about the infrequent service.

In my opinion, LA is not a real city. To quote someone else, it is more like a bunch of suburbs in search of a city. Nonetheless, there are some really cool shops, including good vintage stores, and the ridiculously tall palm trees lining the ridiculously wide roads are lovely when your driving. There's a lot of great museums too, none of which we went to. We did go to the LaBrea Tarpits early Sunday morning, that was a highlight.

We spent a day in Santa Monica. The beach there is beautiful, though it wasn't warm enough to swim. We wandered down the pedestrianized 3rd St. which seemed like heaven compared to the rest of the car-centric city. Lots of really good buskers on this street. Later we rented bikes and rode along the waterfront to Venice Beach, which has a cool hippy-stoner vibe if your into that. Also a massive skateboard park.

Done with LA, we drove to Joshua Tree. We wanted to stay the night in Indio and then head down to the Saltan Sea (one of the few places we figured it'd be warm enough to swim), but we couldn't find any motels in Indio despite driving around town a while. Just massive parking lots and big box stores everywhere, what a disgusting mess. So we drove onto Palm Springs, and not wanting to backtrack back through all that crappiness for the Saltan Sea, we decided to head straight to San Diego. But not before doing the only cool thing in Palm Springs - the cable car up the mountains! We don't play golf, so Palm Springs really had no other interest for us. We did notice there's lots of gay people there, so perhaps there's a scene of some sort that consists of something besides seniors who like golf. Whose bright idea was it to build giant golf courses in the dessert, anyway?

San Diego was nice. The airport is very close to the city, so if planes flying very low overhead freaks you out, avoid San Diego. However, if you like awesome vintage shopping, there's no better place as far as I can tell. Two of the very best vintage stores I have ever been to are located directly across the street from each other on Broadway in the Hillcrest neighbourhood - they are buy/sell/trade, and I could have spent hours in these places if they weren't closing and I didn't have limited luggage and closet space. One could probably spend a good 2 or 3 days exploring all the museums in Balboa Park - the architecture and gardens there are absolutely stunning. On the downside, I have never in my life seen so many people sleeping on the streets in one place. On our walk home from a reggae show, the sleeping blankets filled with people were literally lined up along the street. Homelessness is really bad here in Toronto, but I have never seen anything like what I saw in SD.

On our drive north along the coast out of San Diego, we stopped at a bay where lots seals hang out. We also briefly stopped in a few small beach towns.

We stopped in Malibu for the night on our way further north along the coast. We went to this restaurant at Paradise Cove where the serving sizes are ridiculously huge. I expect that in most places in the US, but didn't really think Malibu would be the same. The next morning we drove by the beautiful but empty beaches (Zuma is apparently one of the best) as it was too windy. Instead we stopped at a winery in Oxnard, where it was recommended we check out the wineries in a small town called Oliveros. Very charming. We even did some olive oil tasting.

Back on the Pacific Coast Highway later in the day, we tried to go to Hearst Castle but it was closed by the time we got there, just after 5pm. You can't drive up close to get a decent picture of it, you have to take one of the bus tours up. Not far from Hearst Castle right along the highway is a spot where you can view hundreds of Elephant Seals, up close and personal.

Next stop was Monterrey, a very nice tourist town featuring the infamous Cannery Row. You can watch the seals play and bask on rocks in the sun while walking along the waterfront pedestrian/bike lane. Lots of good seafood restaurants at fisherman's wharf, where many give free samples of their clam chowder so you can decide who has the best. All the samples did a pretty good job of satisfying our hunger for a few hours, at least until after we had gone to the Steinbeck museum in Salinas. We ate at a brewery just down the street from the museum. Good stuff.

We had planned on spending the next night in Fresno, but the place was such a dump and the Holiday Inn we stopped at wanted more than $100, which was our limit for each night. So we just kept driving towards Sequoia, where we eventually found a motel in the mountains. The next morning, we got up early and headed further into the park in hopes of seeing the giant Sequoias, but as we got higher up the mountains the roads became more snow covered. We kept driving for a while, but eventually all the signs saying that chains on your tires were mandatory freaked me out, so we decided to just turn back rather than pay the park entrance fee. Unfortunately, you have to go all the way back to Fresno to get to Yosemite. Luckily, it was all highway, so we didn't have to drive through the actual town again.

Yosemite was absolutely spectacular. Except for when we saw an SUV in front of us hit and kill a squirrel, and watched it twitch and die... that was so sad i nearly cried. Later on, I used my fantastic quick instincts to brake hard and avoid killing another one that dashed right in front of and under our car. It was very close. I thought I hit it until we saw it scurry away. Silly squirrels. I had to slam on the brakes again later in the trip to avoid hitting a deer, but that wasn't nearly so close - they are big and easier to spot on the side of the road than little squirrels.

Spent the night in Oakdale, then visited two wineries in Lodi, including Robert Mondavi's Woodbridge. The only real reason we went to Lodi was because of the CCR song ("stuck in Lodi again..."), but when we came across a map of all the region's wineries, that was an added bonus.

Sacramento was next. Old Sacramento is a bit of a tourist trap, but very cool nonetheless because it's all old Western style, complete with wooden sidewalks, horse carriages, and saloons. Also, a candy store where you help yourself to free samples! At night on our way to a Thai restaurant, we were invited to a "post punk" show (whatever that means) at a little cafe. Sacramento has quite the little "post punk" scene it appears. The bands were awesome, and I particularly liked seeing so many women musicians - 3 in one night! On drums, bass, AND guitar! Pretty sad that in 2010, it's still a rarity to see women rocking out in bands. It really shouldn't excite me so much. The one annoying thing about this show was the best band was from San Francisco, and while they were on, the cafe completely emptied out. Everyone there, besides us, were apparently friends of the two local bands playing that night, and nobody seemed too interested in seeing the SF band. They all chose to hang out outside instead! They only came back in when they finished and their next friend's band started. I don't know what that was all about, but if I was that SF band, I would never return to Sacramento again.

The next day was the free Jewish Heritage Festival at the Capitol, featuring Matisyahu. There's a lot of hype around this guy, who blends traditional Jewish with raggae, rock and hip hop, so we decided to check it out. Wow - wasn't too crazy about the religious stuff, but he has a beautiful voice and did some crazy beat boxing with his mouth!

Sacramento has some nice features: streets with no cars, just light rail tracks; pedestrian zones; a lovely open air mall. But somehow, it all fails, because come nightfall, the city centre lacks people. In fact, there weren't very many people during the day on the weekends either, despite the festival happening not too far away on Sunday. On Saturday night, we were walking along a lovely, but vacant pedestrian street - it was eerie. It seems the problem is that the only people who live downtown are those you wouldn't necessarily want to walk by on a dark night. The place to be is Midtown - we passed lots of packed bars and restaurants there, all of which we were under-dressed for. Sacramento seems to be a city that is really trying to deal with issues of urban decay, but is utterly failing because people are still afraid of downtown despite the infrastructural improvements. No one wants to live there, and no one wants to spend their Saturday night there. That is a failed city because a city IS its downtown - if downtown doesn't work, the city doesn't work.

Sunday evening we drove through Napa and Sanoma to Santa Ana in search of a cheap motel. Although we both love doing wine tours, we decided to avoid Napa because we heard several people on our trip complain it's become too expensive and elitist. $25 for a tasting?? No thanks, not for this girl used to free tastings in Niagara. We hit up a few wineries in the Russian River Valley instead. One that had been recommended to us is called Iron Horse - they have good sparkling wines, an outdoor tasting area, and a fantastic view of the surrounding vineyards. Best of all, they waive the tasting fee if you buy something, the norm in Niagara but seemingly rare in California.

We ventured away from the warmth of wine country back to the coast, where once again it was cold and windy, but at least there was plenty of sun. We stayed at a nice hotel in Bodega Bay and ate seafood at a waterfront, where we spotted a seal a few times. Watched the sun set with our wine on our hotel balcony, which had a great view of the bay and a steaming hot tub. Wanted to go in it so bad, but it was too cold and I knew getting to it and getting out would be too brutal.

Next we spent a day and night in Berkeley. Walked along University St., chilled in a great cafe on Telegraph and found an awesome craft brewery on Shattuck. Strolled through the campus as well. Berkeley seems like a very nice place to live and hang out. Next day we headed to Oakland. Oakland has some very nice parts - the whole area surrounding Lake Merritt, the pedestrian zone in the city centre, a great brewery we found, China Town. Jack London Square also seems very nice, except that it was empty when we visited on a weekday. When we tried walking down International to find the best Vietnamese pho and taco trucks we had read about, we quickly realized we were in the wrong part of town. Perhaps we should have drove, as maybe what we were looking for was further along the street. But the part just past Lake Merritt, there didn't seem to be anything, and we got the feeling that we had better turn around. At night, the downtown streets are pretty abandoned. It seems Oakland suffers from the same problem as Sacramento - no one seems to actually live in the city, I guess they just work there.

We ended our trip in San Fransisco. Since we had already been to SF and did all the touristy sightseeing stuff, our 2 nights there allowed us to just hang out and really appreciate the city. We stayed near Union Square, which was a much better location than Fisherman's Wharf where we stayed last time. In Sacramento we had come across a guide to all the best Happy Hours in SF. This allowed us to discover the joy of several $2 beers at various destinations, $1 tacos, and free Japanese food! We took in an unimpressive live show of some local bands, but also came upon my favourite brewery EVER called The Thirsty Bear. Not only is their name cool, their logo is cool, AND they have vanilla beer! It tastes amazing! I wish I could drink it all the time. We also ate at a really delicious place in China Town called House of Nanking. We were able to eat a vegetarian meal there, which is usually very difficult at chinese restaurants. We also had flower blossom tea - yum!

My only complaint about SF is having to walk up steep hills and the crappy BART system. SO expensive to get from the airport to downtown. People say SF has a great transit system, and I agree their network of streetcars and cable cars are great, but the BART leaves much to be desired.

My favourite things about California is all the delicious, cheap Mexican food and getting carded almost every time I order a drink. Makes me feel so young that I can still pass as possibly not "legal"! All the sun is another bonus, not to mention the wine and cheap beer. You can't get $2 coronas in Toronto, that's for damn sure.

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Photos

L. Ron Hubbard Gallery
There's a ridiculous amount of L. Ron Hubbard stuff in LA

Olvera St, LA
Mexican street market