Hi Gram!

You know you’re in love when you spend valentine’s day eating garlic and counting how many bridges we crossed. We woke up on Thursday morning, left King City, and headed up the 101 toward San Francisco. We saw a sign and took a quick detour to The Garlic Shoppe in Gilroy, CA. Who wouldn’t want to check out the wares at a garlic shoppe, right? We found out that it’s the home of Christopher Farms, the largest garlic producer in the US, maybe the world. There was a bull in a pen next to the parking lot and a goat in the field next to it. Inside, a sweet, local lady told us all about the history and let us sample spicy pickled garlic, mustard, and habanero mustard. She chatted us up about midwesterners, particularly those from Kansas, who never want to travel anywhere. She says that us Chicagoans are a little more open-minded. We found out that she just turned 80, but we both swore that she didn’t look a day over 60. She talked our ears off for a while and we ended up each buying a few jars of treats to bring home.

The rain was falling gently as we ran back to the car, dodging the raindrops so as not to melt, and got back on the highway headed north. We drove back through San Jose & Oakland and Zibby punched me for all the Teslas on the 880. Have I ever told you about the game that we play? When we were each younger, everybody would play a game that went by a lot of different names, such as “punch bug” or “slug bug”. The point of the game was to look out for VW Beetles, and when you saw one, you’d punch your friend in the arm and yell “punch bug!” then point at the car you’d just seen. We modified the game for modern times, and now we play “punch Tesla” – every time we see a car made by Tesla, we punch the other gently in the arm. If we see one when we’re not together, we send a text message with the punch emoji and a picture of the car (if safe). So far, she’s been winning the game by a landslide because there are a lot more of them up by her house in the suburbs of Chicago than by my house in Ottawa. My road trip has allowed me to even the score a little because there are a LOT of them on the west coast in places like Seattle and San Francisco. This day, however, I was focused on the road and she was on her game, seeing one every couple of minutes.  We drove up the interstate alongside the BART tracks that we’d ridden when we took the train into San Francisco, so it was a repeat view from a slightly different angle and that was pretty cool.  We drove over a long, long bridge (still not the Golden Gate Bridge) and north to Hwy 1. Zibby loves crossing bridges almost as much as I love driving through tunnels, so she was fascinated as we crossed so high over the water. North of the bay area, we passed through Point Reyes Station, Tomales, and took a detour to Dillon Beach.  The detour took us about twenty minutes each way through rolling hills and countryside. The rode rose and fell, dipped through some pretty serious puddles, and zigzagged enough to keep us excited.

We saw lots of sheep and beh-beh-baa-baa’s (those are little sheep). The beach itself was kind of cold and damp, and there was a guy in a earth mover pushing sand around and trying to fight against erosion.  Continuing north, we drove around the “Road Closed: Flooded” signs and through the flooded streets past Bodega Bay and up the coast.  Zibby loves pretending like she’s a race car driver whenever she can. In fact, when we were shopping for her most recent car, she wanted a manual transmission so she could shift gears. We switched places at one of the turnouts and she got to drive the curvy coastal highway. She got her workout turning the wheel all the way left, then all the way right, then back and forth as we climbed a hill, then zoomed down and braked for a curve, then accelerate up the other side. We saw some really cool reconstructed (after being washed out) road with a lot of supports and beams holding the road to the side of the hill.  The PCH was closed again up at Point Arena, so we went as far as Gualala then backtracked down to Stewarts Point where we turned east.

We went up and down Stewarts Point-Skaggs Springs Road, a 40+ mile long single-lane and crudely paved road that squiggled like a Parkinson’s patient trying to write “supercalafragilisticexpialadocious”.  I’d taken over driving again by this time, and we both gasped and squealed like school kids as another hairpin turn, steep climb, or rockface-hugging curve came into view. We alternated between amazing views of the CA countryside with vineyards and estate houses, a random one-room schoolhouse, smatterings of houses here and there and finally some beautiful ranches and vineyards as we approached the 101. We were glad to reach the 101 before it got too dark, then did a little night driving along saner roads with shoulders and sweeping curves rather than hairpin, hope-we-don’t-fall-over-the-edge kinds of turns. We drove for a while before finding dinner in Ukiah, then pressed on toward the Avenue of the Giants. We finally pulled off and found what Zibby described as a serial-killer worthy hunting lodge called Motel Garberville in you guessed it, Garberville. We locked the door and checked it twice before settling into bed for the night, excited to see the giant redwood trees the next day.