Travel Day #22: Hearst & Rt. 1

We were behind schedule all day. The day before, I wasn’t going to bother with the $10 deposit for the bathroom key at the campground, but the key was also needed to access the laundry room, and Mom was keen to do another load. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until close to the office’s closing time of 4:30pm that I realized we’d want to return the key that evening in order to get our $10 back without having to wait until the office opened again in the morning. By the time Mom retrieved the dry laundry and made it to the office, they had closed. They didn’t open again until 9am, and I had wanted to leave at 8:30am. Everyone got a little extra sleep, and we began the day behind schedule to begin with.

After a nice drive on Rt. 1, we arrived at the Hearst Castle National Historic Landmark. The castle itself is a 15 minute bus ride away from the parking lot and visitor center. Access is only by guided/scheduled tours, and all options take an hour or more. The next available tour was at 11:50, which didn’t agree with my original plan for leaving there at noon. We wanted to do the tour, though, so we made ourselves busy. I engaged myself with the exhibits at the visitor center while everyone else went back to the RV to have an early lunch.

Side note: not only is the main swimming pool at the castle empty because of the long-standing drought in that part of California, but the rest rooms at the visitor center are even closed! The only options are the chemical toilets out front (port-a-potties).

Anyway, as I suspected, the ultra-rich William Randolph Hearst’s expansive complex filled with exotic animals and precious artis amazing, and well worth our visit. Besides: I figured arriving at the Golden Gate Bridge closer to sunset instead of around 6pm might actually be a nice effect, anyway.

We had been enjoying Rt. 1 coming along the coast so far, but we didn’t realize that none of it would compare to what we were about to experience. For me, it was 70+ miles on a narrow, no-shoulder road, constantly sawing the steering wheel back and forth around cliff-hugging hairpin turns (walls or edges). We averaged about 20mph when we were actually moving, which was difficult: we wanted to stop at every turnout and take pictures, which was every 4 or 5 turns or so. Even though we managed to keeps the stops to a reasonable number and duration, it was obviously hard to chew through too many miles. Also… any place the road opened up enough to provide shoulders, we had to slow down for parked tourists who were locked out of the State parks on account of the nearby forest fires. Or… the fire service was using the shoulders to park their empty flatbed tractor trailers, which, undoubtedly, had brought fire fighting equipment to the area. So it was a busy road, and a real chore for me to avoid having my mirrors, or any other part of the RV, make any more friends. I saw more double yellow lines out the windshield and left rear mirror, and more single white lines out the passenger mirror, than I saw scenery. Nonetheless, what I did see was amazing and I know Mom and the boys really enjoyed the views. Even though some of the views were encumbered by fog, the fog, in places, actually enhanced the experience. We even saw a few houses between the road and the water, and wondered how they lived there… or WHY they lived there, so far from fresh water, a grocery store, etc. (if it was so often impossible to see out their window).

So it was a really enjoyable ride. Only twice, I think, did I ask for total silence in the RV while I negotiated stretches of steep downgrades + particularly encroaching cliff walls + tight turns. Even the sections that took us through inland farmlands were interesting, and, for some reason, the traffic jams that were in those areas didn’t bother us, either. It was just fun to be passing fields of “exotic” groceries like artichokes and kiwis.

Then, suddenly, we were on the other side of the seaside hills, and driving through lush forest… only to burst out just as suddenly into suburban and urban San Francisco. We were excited to be arriving at another iconic destination and see… with our own eyes… live and in person… the Golden Gate Bridge. We followed signs, obeyed stoplights, fought traffic, and, because of the increasing fog and decreasing visibility, watched the GPS bring the bridge closer.  Almost there, we went through a tunnel and expected to see the bridge soon after emerging. However, the fog remained thick. I started to chuckle to myself, and then out loud. When asked what I was laughing about, I told everyone that it was going to be funny, but… I suspected we weren’t actually go to be able to see the bridge! I was right. I could see the shoulder and edge of the road disappear and become the low curb of a bridge – a red bridge. I felt the bump as we dropped off the normal pavement and onto bridge decking. I couldn’t help laughing as I called out “and now we’re on the bridge!”

We saw about 50 feet of the bridge at a time. We didn’t see the bay, and we definitely didn’t see the towers. I almost didn’t even stop at the viewing station at the other side, but I pulled in at the last second just so we could all have a last laugh. I don’t know how we all did it, but, as disappointed as we were, none of us threw any temper tantrums. I guess the Golden Gate Bridge will just have to go on our “next time” list.

By this time, we were probably more than 3 hours behind schedule, projecting to arrive at Cousin Aaron’s after 9pm. He, however, wasn’t going to be home from a client meeting until after 9pm himself, so it worked out just fine. It took me about 10 minutes, and the help of 2 spotters, to get through the tight… and sloped… S turn that is his driveway. I scraped the tail of the RV on the first attempt, and had to back out and adjust the approach angle, or I’d have been stuck there until a tow truck could be called. In the dark, I somehow managed to put first the right side into the bushes without crashing into the stone pillar and keeping the front left corner off the trees… then immediately doing the same with the left side at the next turn without crashing into the stone wall on the front right. I don’t know how I did it, but I will tell you: I absolutely lost sleep the next night playing videos in my mind about how I’d back out through the same path. As if a tight S turn wasn’t enough to worry about… making sure to do it at the exact angle so that different slope angles of the hill curve wouldn’t leave me like an ornamental bridge spanning the low spot in his driveway. I don’t think he… or his two neighbors that share that part of his driveway… would have appreciated that! But I’ll let you in on the secret now: I got out on only the 2^nd try, which was all it took to get in, as well: 2 tries.

We’ve heard that the Pacific Coast Highway is one of the best drives in the country, and we agree!